Dear Baltimore City Health Department
[This is an email which I just sent to the Baltimore City Health Department at bchd2@baltimorecity.gov]
[Update: I forgot to attribute where I heard about the BCHD pages and news report. I read about them on Braden's Corner of the Net. My apologies, Braden. It was late and I was brain-fried from a long day.]
Dear Baltimore City Health Department and associated commissars,
I was recently pointed to your page about transfat and your PDF document about enforcement of the transfat ban. I was also made aware of this news article about the first citations for violations of the transfat ban.
I don’t live in Baltimore. But I am now determined to visit your city. Your beleaguered city, besieged by small, grasping little tyrants. I am going to bring with me some food with the highest transfat content I can find. And I am going to eat it right outside of the Baltimore City Health Department. Yes, I will commit a subversive act by eating a Twinkie or a Ho-Ho. Or maybe both!
And then I will flip you all the bird.
And I say this as a person who is on a diet and working out like mad to lose weight… and doing it successfully. But the idea that little tin-pot dictators in a frackin’ two-bit city government are taking it upon themselves to control the ingredients in what people eat down to the 1/2 a gram level is beyond being a nanny-state. You people need to all be shown the door and go find yourselves some real jobs.
Sincerely… with middle finger extended,
Someone who doesn’t really give a rats @ss about your little transfat ban.
Nice going on the letter to the Baltimore City Health Department, Sean. I wonder if you’ll receive any kind of response from them.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
If by response you mean the jackbooted thugs of the Baltimore City Health Department’s Food Police breaking down my door, confiscating my Twinkies and Ho-Hos (of which, I have none) and carting me off to the secret, underground transfat prison… we’ll see.
If you don’t hear from me, smuggle a file hidden inside a donut to me in the joint.
You are missing the point. No one is stopping anyone from eating trans fats. Everyone can buy all the artery-clogging food they want from any supermarket and eat it.
It’s just that restaurants, bakeries, hot food vendors and others have to use alternatives to margarine and other transfats when they make their food. So, there’s still fat, just not the worst kind. There’s no “police state,” except in your imaginations.
What this means is that people who have little time to go grocery shopping/little access to grocery stores who need to grab a meal on the go don’t have to buy something as unhealthy as they might otherwise. If fewer people are clogging their arteries, that means fewer people will be taken to the emergency room for cardiac arrest, which means that healthcare costs will go down. That is the strategy behind it.
SBD -
A quick fact check is in order — Ho-Hos and Twinkies have no trans fats. Furthermore, as I read it, the Baltimore City trans fat ban does not pertain to pre-packaged foods of this sort. The next time you want to vent about overreaching government, I’d suggest you first take the time to actually read the law and (and in this case the the enforcement policy).
http://www.peertrainer.com/DFcaloriecounterB.aspx?id=35841
I knew I’d get at least a few comments from the “literal net”… where humor goes to die.
I know full well that their ban applies to restaurants, bakeries and so forth. And that it doesn’t apply (yet) to me eating food with transfat, assuming I can get it from somewhere other than a restaurant, bakery, etc. Get a life.
I also don’t care about the actual tranfat content (or lack thereof) in Twinkies or Ho-Hos. They were used as a prop… as a canonical example of junk food. Get a life.
Perhaps you two should become familiar with the verbal and literary device known as hyperbole. Here is what Wikipedia says about hyperbole:
Its that “not meant to be taken literally” part that the “literal net” folks have a real hard time with.
And besides, we’re talkin’ government here. They always start out with something like this… that *only* applies to restaurants and bakeries. Later on, they’ll use it as precedent and say that they need to “close the supermarket loophole”. And they’ll start talking about how nobody should be eating transfats at all. Call it the “camel’s nose” effect or the “thin edge of the wedge” effect or whatever you will. So in addition to being hyperbole my post is about the spirit of the law not the letter. And the spirit of this law, as is the case with so many laws these days, is about overreaching government and nanny-statism. This is not something that government *should* be sticking its ugly, misshapen nose into… and, I’d argue, its not something they really have the authority to stick their ugly, misshapen nose into.
But overreaching nanny-statists count on the fact that not enough people will stand up to stop them… especially when they do it slice by slice. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the restauranteurs and bakers… and I said nothing, for I was not a restauranteur or baker…”