Marion Nestle loves being called a nanny statist:
I love nanny-state accusations. Whenever I hear them, I know either that food industry self-interest is involved or that the accuser really doesn’t understand that our food system already is government-regulated as can be. These kinds of actions are just tweaking of existing policy, in this case to promote better health.
This is wrong on both counts. It’s extremely disingenuous to suggest that anyone against new regulations is in bed with the food industry. In many cases it’s just the opposite. The fight over calorie labeling in restaurants is a good example. Large chains were initially against it but now favor having a national standard over dealing with a mix of local statutes. As big businesses they can absorb the fixed costs of regulation more easily than regional chains. Collaboration between big government and big business at the expense of smaller firms is hardly unusual when it comes to food regulation (see NAIS for another instance of this).
Critics of the nanny state aren’t ignorant of the fact that our food supply is already heavily regulated and most would like to see many of these rules disappear. They know there’s a difference between regulations intended to prevent unequivocal harms (no one wants to get salmonella) and regulations intended to eliminate choice on matters for which people may value the trade-offs differently (eating foods cooked in trans fats, consuming more or less salt, patronizing new fast food restaurants rather than banning them). The fact that Nestle appears incapable of recognizing this difference is one reason libertarians are distrustful of giving technocrats like herself control over food policy.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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How do you distinguish between harms that should be regulated/banned and those that should not? Take salmonella vs. trans fats. Both cause harm to the human body. It’s just that trans fats take a lot longer to do so.
So what do you mean by “unequivocal harm”? Do you mean simply harms that result more quickly after the ingestion of “harmful” food? Or do you mean harms that everybody agrees are really, really bad and should be addressed via regulation? If it’s the latter, aren’t you essentially saying that something should be regulated only when you (or libertarians in general) agree it should be regulated? Is that what your standard comes down to?
I’m not really arguing in favor any particular regulation at this point. This is just “food” for thought.
@Ben: I’m not sure there’s a distinction that would work 100% of the time. In those two cases though I think one can be made in that a reasonable person might choose to eat food that contains trans fats (for taste or other reasons) while it’s hard to imagine any reasonable person choosing to eat food they know is tainted by salmonella. It’s not so much about the relative badness of the two things as the fact that one has some redeeming qualities and the other doesn’t. Another way of saying this is that one is added to foods intentionally and the other is a contamination everyone involved tries to avoid.
Harder cases are those where we all agree that something is bad (e. Coli) but have different risk tolerances for consuming it. So with milk and cheese requiring pasteurization is completely sensible for the mass market but restricts the freedom of people who want raw milk and fancy cheeses. In these sorts of situations we’d have to come up with two-tiered regulations or opt-out options of some kind.