Because You Never Asked

     (10/06. This essay should be read as the last part of the series including “Cigarettes” and “Tobacco: The Big Trick”.)

     I finished the essay “Cigarettes” with the question, “What’s next --- Diet Police confiscating hot fudge sundaes from fat people?” At the time, there was an element of jest in the suggestion, but here we are, a bit more than a decade later, and it can no longer be considered a frivolous statement. In fact, it is now beginning to snuggle up to the concept we call reality.

     While recently in New York City, I stumbled into a news item that caught my attention. The City is considering making it illegal for all food serving businesses to cook with oils using “trans-fatty” something or other. Perhaps emboldened by its prohibition of smoking in all bars and restaurants, a gambit that has been instituted with less problem than expected, such advanced forays into “social engineering” might now seem more feasible.

     Once again, this question of government interference in the mundane machinations of the market and human behavior, rears its bulbous head.

     In the sister essay “Cigarettes”, my negative stance with regard to forbidding smoking in private bars and restaurants was evident. At the time, and given the strong roots dug deeply into our cultural soil by the nicotine habit, I felt it too drastic a move, one that could cause a severe backlash in the nicotine community. Bars, food, alcohol and cigarettes have shared the same terrain for so long, I feared a tobacco rebellion of unstoppable proportions.

     I’m glad to say I was wrong (hey, ok, one time) and life has gone on in a more positive way, more liberated from the smoking environment, just as the law intended. But can we equate the foul drug addiction of smoky filth to what people want to eat?

     Eating, unlike smoking, is not an addiction; it is a biological necessity. You cannot live without food, something millions of us do without tobacco. Virtually nobody would use tobacco if not for its addictive qualities. It serves no purpose in the survival of the human organism. The fact that such a useless substance frequently leads to degenerative sickness, gives it a richly deserved villainous quality, one worth fighting against institutionally.

     It is also relevant to note that the smoking environment is one that directly effects all those in proximity to it. Setting aside such trivialities as barbeque smoke or the fat guy next to you on the plane, whatever one eats has no bearing on the physical being of anyone else.

     And then there is the sheer joy in eating, a sensory wonderland that ranks close to sexual gratification. It could be the only other physical sensation we experience that can even be mentioned in the same breath with erotic ecstasy. There is a hedonistic aspect involved with food that tobacco use cannot come close to claiming. Regardless of the negative health implications associated with some kinds of food, is it enough for government to say “hey, you can’t have this”?

     In much the same way I was hostile to bans on smoking in private bars and restaurants, my initial feeling to the cooking oil ban was quite negative. It seemed to be a governmental stretch beyond all reason, like, “hey, leave us alone already”.

     Not too long ago, for reasons not necessary to explain, I was thrust into a social situation far outside my natural habitat. This experience has made me look upon New York City’s attempts at cooking oil control in a different light.

     For approximately one week, I was subjected to a daily dose of morning and daytime TV. This included the various Get Your Ass Out of Bed America shows that all the major media honchos provide. It then moved on to the daily talk and gossip shows; Oprah, Rosie O’Donnell, Martha Stewart, and a bevy of others whose female hosts were unknown and now forgotten by this writer. These shows cater to a species many of us had put on an “endangered” list, a species whose demise seems to have been greatly exaggerated: the housewife (or something close to it). That‘s right, wives, mothers, people who cook, clean, fret and worry about the kids, while keeping an eye on these estrogenic shows. The studio audiences were virtually 100% female, something rarely seen at wrestle mania and a vivid clue as to who was watching at home. I don’t mean to depress a substantial amount of the women in this country (men too), but we seem to have discovered some kind of feminine mainstream here.

     Now, as one might expect, an integral part of all this programming gave some time to food and its preparation. Women cook, right? I can’t remember one episode of any of these hen house gatherings that did not feature a new recipe prepared on stage with  some celebrity (usually a celebrity who had just released a new movie) hovering over whoever was creating the masterpiece.

     Now, over the last generation or so, the connection between what we eat, how we look, how we age, and sickness in general, has been more closely made. I’d like the reader to think of the tune from the limbo song, and then substitute the words “how fat can you get?” for how low can you go. This should be America’s new theme song. Holy cow, there are a ton (ha, ha) of fat people walking around out there (barely). Kids too! I defy anyone to stand in front of a Wal-Mart for awhile and peruse the human silhouettes walking in and out. In the words of Tom Hanks, America, “we have a problem.”

     After having watched some bits of Martha Stewart for the third or fourth time, I found myself asking, “does this woman ever cook with anything other than beef and other assorted caloric bonanzas?” All over daytime TV, there were gorgeous concoctions of beef, pork and milky, buttery, creamy extravaganzas, lovely culinary temptations, all resulting in the Michelin forms of our masses. Since this experience away from my natural habitat, I’ve paid a bit more attention to television’s eating habits and found this state of affairs quite prevalent all over the cooking dial.

     In other words, mainstream media doesn’t give a bleeping clogged artery for obesity. The food message generally spread throughout commercial TV is contrary to the food message put forth by government agencies and health professionals in general. In much the same way an adolescent challenges good sense with cigarettes, the TV business petulantly thumbs its nose at sensible eating.

     Let’s put 2 and 2 together here. Television is a behemoth commercial endeavor. It makes its money selling air time to other behemoth enterprises wanting to spread its message to the masses (“mass” being the operable word here). The cost of this is such that only the most wealthy enterprises can avail themselves of this far reaching form of communication. When it comes to food, those most directly involved in daytime TV are the mega-companies that stock our supermarkets, names like Nabisco, General Foods, Kraft, and not that many more in the monopolistic trickery of the global economy. The fast food moguls are also involved, but their target group is generally younger, of more color and less social category. Such chain restaurants as Applebee’s, Friday’s, Beef O’Brady’s, Tony Roma’s, Outback and such, are more in this groove, places where mom can get a break from slaving away for “him” and the kids. Less directly involved in daytime boob tubery (and no other form of TV more richly deserves this terminology, for a variety of reasons) are such entities as the various livestock and dairy organizations, as well as the mega-agro industry in general, providers of the grain (mostly corn) used to feed the raw material for almost all of Martha Stewart’s fattening arts. If we put all these food interests together, we see an omnipotent commercial juggernaut that does not make its money selling health. It has a bottomless reserve of resources sufficient enough to both deliver its message and blackmail those not cooperating.

     How do you think this steroidal block of financial muscle would react if all these daytime woman’s shows began pushing a less fatty, less creamy-milky-buttery-gooey diet? How much clout do you think marginally funded governmental agencies and health organizations have when matched against this monster mass of coercive money?

     Seen against this environment of corporate power, government interference can be seen far less as “social engineering”, and much more as the “line of last defense.”

     The terminology of the game has been turned upside down. One hearing the phrase “social engineering” almost always associates it with something governmental. But the stark reality is this: no mechanism of social engineering has ever been mounted that can compare to the commercial propaganda we see and hear 24 hours a day --- on into eternity. It is the most powerful persuasive apparatus ever constructed. At its very best, it is an amoral voice, but it cannot be trusted to always be at its best. It must be policed by an impartial entity. Obviously, making government such an entity is the political task of our day, but it is our most likely hope.

     So I say go for it, New York City. Who else is going to do it?

     Relevant Material: “Human beings only want two things: sex and food, and they want the one they didn’t do last.” Spoken by an old friend from college, Rina.