The “man on the street” interviews in the Capital Times a few days ago discussed the possible ban by the city of Chicago on the use of trans fats in city restaurants. Even in a liberal town like Madison, the overwhelming response of the survey sample was “it’s a stupid idea for the government to tell us what we can eat”. As indeed it is, but I think that’s the wrong way to approach the problem.

At the risk of damaging the libertarian cred of my liberalism, I’m on the side of the busybodies. It’s probably a good idea to restrict the use of artificially created trans fat in our food supply.

A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine argues that “from a nutritional standpoint, the consumption of trans fatty acids results in considerable potential harm but no apparent benefit”, but the problem is not one of bad diet.

It’s not about personal food choices; it’s an issue with the entire national production and distribution system. And although there are alternatives, not everyone lives in a city like Madison, or can afford to shop at Whole Foods and pay $3.99 for an onion. The problem is that companies use things that are sort of like food but aren’t really — namely, artificial trans fatty acids — because it is cheaper for them to do so.

We already expect our government to regulate the concentrations of fecal matter and deadly bacteria in our food, and to restrict the levels of arsenic in our drinking water.

We don’t rely on “the marketplace of information”, or the goodwill of Archer Daniels Midland to keep the food supply safe. Instead, we rely on the regulatory power of the government. This is the appropriate analogy to an artificial trans fat ban, instead of the far-fetched fear of governmental supervision of one’s personal diet.

The purpose of using hydrogenated plant-based fats is to increase shelf life, and decrease the need for refrigeration. It’s also cheaper to create trans fats than it is to produce butter or palm oil, or other traditional liquid oils. In other words, we’re accepting the use of an artificial chemical in our food, because it’s cheaper for big food producers.

When it then turns out that this chemical is linked fairly definitively to heart disease and other significant health problems (the FDA estimates that simply labelling trans fats on packages in the supermarket will save several hundred lives each year), then it’s perhaps worth considering whether or not the benefit that accrues to our big food corporations (who thereby put our family farms and local growers at a competitive disadvantage), is worth the costs to the rest of us.

So how about it, Madison?

Posted by Ben Brothers at 10:10 am, 2 October 2006 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.