Too True

How Little We Understand Our Food Chain

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Letter From America (About Government Enforced Diets)

Michelle Obama’s Control-Freak Lunch Program

It can’t make kids actually eat what they’re served. 

By Michelle Malkin
May 21, 2014
National Review Online

Look out, everyone: The nation’s school-lunch lady, Michelle Obama, is mad. With her federal nutrition program under fire across the country and now on Capitol Hill, Mrs. Obama put out a “forceful” call to arms this week to “health activists,” according to the Washington Post.  She’s cracking the whip. Her orders are clear: There must be no escape. The East Wing and its sycophants zealously oppose any effort to alter, delay, or waive top-down school-meal rules. Big Lunch must be guarded at all costs.

Progressives blame kid-hating Republicans and greedy businesses for the revolt against Mrs. Obama’s failed policies. But the truth is right around the corner in our students’ cafeterias. Districts are losing money.   Discarded food is piling high. Kids are going off-campus to fill their tummies or just going hungry.

According to the School Nutrition Association, almost half of school meal programs reported declines in revenue in the 2012–13 school year, and 90 percent said food costs were up.
Local nutrition directors are demanding more flexibility and freedom. Look no further than school districts in Los Angeles and Chicago.
As I noted in 2011, the L.A. Unified School District pronounced the first lady’s federally subsidized initiative a “flop” and a “disaster.” Principals reported “massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away.” The problem has only worsened. The Los Angeles Times reported last month that the city’s students throw out “at least $100,000 worth of food a day — and probably far more,” which “amounts to $18 million a year.”

Draconian federal rules dictate calorie counts, whole-grain requirements, the number of items that children must put on their trays, and even the color of the fruits and vegetables they must choose. Asked for a solution, LAUSD food-service director David Binkle told the Times bluntly: “We can stop forcing children to take food they don’t like and throw in the garbage.”

Or you can do what Arlington Heights District 214 in Michelle Obama’s home state of Illinois just did: Vote yourselves out of the unsavory one-size-fits-all mandate. Last week, the state’s second largest school district decided to quit the national school-lunch program altogether. Officials pointed out that absurd federal guidelines prevented them from offering hard-boiled eggs, hummus, pretzels, some brands of yogurt, and nonfat milk in containers larger than 12 ounces.  The district will deliberately forgo $900,000 in federal aid and instead rely on its own nutritionist to devise healthy choices that students actually want. One local parent summed it up well: “The government can’t control everything.”

As more schools look to withdraw, you can bet on the White House to ramp up the Republican-bashing rhetoric. Mrs. Obama’s advocates have already taken to social media to complain about Big Business special interests. But let’s remember: Mrs. Obama has been working the food circuit since 2005, when the wife of newly elected senator Barack Obama was named to the corporate board of directors of Walmart processed-foods supplier TreeHouse Foods Inc. — collecting $45,000 in 2005, $51,200 in 2006, and 7,500 TreeHouse stock options worth more than $72,000 for each year.

Fact: The first lady has been the most insatiable crony at the center of the fed-food racket. Her nonprofit Partnership for a Healthier America has reported assets of $4.5 million from secret donors. It’s not just mean conservatives pointing out her Big Business ties. The left-wing documentary Fed Up made the same point before being edited under pressure. Hello, Chicago Way.

Mrs. Obama’s allies also have accused opponents of wanting to repeal “science-based” standards. But the first lady herself was caught spreading false claims that her program was responsible for reducing childhood obesity, when the decline began a decade ago.

And as I’ve reported previously, deep-pocketed Big Labor’s push to expand public-union payrolls with thousands more food-service workers is also driving Mrs. Obama’s agenda.

Waste, failure, lies, and special-interest ties. If federal food policy were really about the children, the East Wing would be embracing change. But this is not about protecting the kids. It’s about protecting Michelle Obama. Her thin-skinned response to criticism is telling: Hell hath no fury like a Nanny State control freak scorned.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.

The Poison of Nanny McPhee

 A Disastrous Diet With Deadly Consequences

Never trust “official science”–that is, the science being pushed by government agencies.  If scepticism is the good oil of solid scientific research, once the science becomes “official” in the sense of being accepted by government programmes and enforced by government regulations, healthy scepticism withers on the vine.  At that point, science has become intermingled with, if not captured by, propaganda: the trustworthiness of science diminishes substantially.

To make matters worse, there are lots of vested interests vying for commercial advantage when science becomes “official”.  Engineer a government “tick” and millions can be made.  Achieve the promulgation of a government programme, and millions can be parlayed into billions of dollars.  It becomes, in the coarse words of US Vice President, Joe Biden, a “big . . . deal”–that is, a crude joke.

It is now becoming clear that generations of diet advice–official diet prescriptions–backed by scientific research, is wrong.  In fact, it has done enormous damage to human health.  A significant essay recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, by Nina Teicholz:

The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease

Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade

“Saturated fat does not cause heart disease”—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.

The new study’s conclusion shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with modern nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.

Bad science is bad enough.  But the remedy is always critical, sceptical peer review.  By such means, bad science is screened out through counter evidence and exposure.  But when bad science is coupled with “personal ambition, politics, and bias” the results always risk a much bigger harm.

Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.

This idea fell on receptive ears because, at the time, Americans faced a fast-growing epidemic. Heart disease, a rarity only three decades earlier, had quickly become the nation’s No. 1 killer. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Researchers were desperate for answers.  As the director of the largest nutrition study to date, Dr. Keys was in an excellent position to promote his idea. The “Seven Countries” study that he conducted on nearly 13,000 men in the U.S., Japan and Europe ostensibly demonstrated that heart disease wasn’t the inevitable result of aging but could be linked to poor nutrition.

But it turns out the research methodology deployed by Dr Keys was fundamentally flawed.  Lazy scientists and scientific establishments just went along for the ride.

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn’t choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn’t suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study’s star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders’ diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws weren’t revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by his erroneous data had become international dogma.

Enter the Heart Association and the US Department of Agriculture, a Harvard professor, and a Senate Committee.  They could not possible be wrong and they were going to save us from ourselves.

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn’t choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn’t suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study’s star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders’ diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws weren’t revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by his erroneous data had become international dogma.

But there was no turning back: Too much institutional energy and research money had already been spent trying to prove Dr. Keys’s hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense. As Harvard nutrition professor Mark Hegsted said in 1977, after successfully persuading the U.S. Senate to recommend Dr. Keys’s diet for the entire nation, the question wasn’t whether Americans should change their diets, but why not? Important benefits could be expected, he argued. And the risks? “None can be identified,” he said.

No risks.  Really.  Trust a Harvard nutrition professor to come up with that kind of bunkum.  Actually, it is likely that the unintended consequences of this intrusive state-nannying are enormous, even deadly.

One consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best available government data. Translation: Instead of meat, eggs and cheese, we’re eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt, are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires the addition of fillers to make up for lost texture—and these are usually carbohydrate-based.  

The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease. 

The real surprise is that, according to the best science to date, people put themselves at higher risk for these conditions no matter what kind of carbohydrates they eat. Yes, even unrefined carbs. Too much whole-grain oatmeal for breakfast and whole-grain pasta for dinner, with fruit snacks in between, add up to a less healthy diet than one of eggs and bacon, followed by fish. The reality is that fat doesn’t make you fat or diabetic. Scientific investigations going back to the 1950s suggest that actually, carbs do.

Let’s repeat that: evidence now suggests that fat does not make you fat or diabetic . . . actually, carbs do!  Anyone suffering from diabetes want to sue the US Departments of Health, Agriculture, and just about every other “health” bureaucracy and government quango?  How about Michelle Obama, dietician-in-chief?  But what about all those beneficial vegetable oils which have replaced animal fats–as prescribed by officialdom?

The second big unintended consequence of our shift away from animal fats is that we’re now consuming more vegetable oils. Butter and lard had long been staples of the American pantry until Crisco, introduced in 1911, became the first vegetable-based fat to win wide acceptance in U.S. kitchens. Then came margarines made from vegetable oil and then just plain vegetable oil in bottles. 

All of these got a boost from the American Heart Association—which Procter & Gamble, the maker of Crisco oil, coincidentally helped launch as a national organization. . . . After the AHA advised the public to eat less saturated fat and switch to vegetable oils for a “healthy heart” in 1961, Americans changed their diets. Now these oils represent 7% to 8% of all calories in our diet, up from nearly zero in 1900, the biggest increase in consumption of any type of food over the past century.

This shift seemed like a good idea at the time, but it brought many potential health problems in its wake. In those early clinical trials, people on diets high in vegetable oil were found to suffer higher rates not only of cancer but also of gallstones. And, strikingly, they were more likely to die from violent accidents and suicides. Alarmed by these findings, the National Institutes of Health convened researchers several times in the early 1980s to try to explain these “side effects,” but they couldn’t. (Experts now speculate that certain psychological problems might be related to changes in brain chemistry caused by diet, such as fatty-acid imbalances or the depletion of cholesterol.)

We’ve also known since the 1940s that when heated, vegetable oils create oxidation products that, in experiments on animals, lead to cirrhosis of the liver and early death. For these reasons, some midcentury chemists warned against the consumption of these oils, but their concerns were allayed by a chemical fix: Oils could be rendered more stable through a process called hydrogenation, which used a catalyst to turn them from oils into solids. 

From the 1950s on, these hardened oils became the backbone of the entire food industry, used in cakes, cookies, chips, breads, frostings, fillings, and frozen and fried food. Unfortunately, hydrogenation also produced trans fats, which since the 1970s have been suspected of interfering with basic cellular functioning and were recently condemned by the Food and Drug Administration for their ability to raise our levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol.  . . . 

The past decade of research on these oxidation products has produced a sizable body of evidence showing their dramatic inflammatory and oxidative effects, which implicates them in heart disease and other illnesses such as Alzheimer’s. Other newly discovered potential toxins in vegetable oils, called monochloropropane diols and glycidol esters, are now causing concern among health authorities in Europe.

In short, the track record of vegetable oils is highly worrisome—and not remotely what Americans bargained for when they gave up butter and lard.

Some countries, including New Zealand, have seen alarming increases in asthma and allergies.  It is unclear at present whether this is related to the “official” dietary advice.  But there appear to be plenty of unintended and unexpected consequences:

Cutting back on saturated fat has had especially harmful consequences for women, who, due to hormonal differences, contract heart disease later in life and in a way that is distinct from men. If anything, high total cholesterol levels in women over 50 were found early on to be associated with longer life. This counterintuitive result was first discovered by the famous Framingham study on heart-disease risk factors in 1971 and has since been confirmed by other research. 

Since women under 50 rarely get heart disease, the implication is that women of all ages have been worrying about their cholesterol levels needlessly. Yet the Framingham study’s findings on women were omitted from the study’s conclusions. And less than a decade later, government health officials pushed their advice about fat and cholesterol on all Americans over age 2—based exclusively on data from middle-aged men.

Sticking to these guidelines has meant ignoring growing evidence that women on diets low in saturated fat actually increase their risk of having a heart attack. The “good” HDL cholesterol drops precipitously for women on this diet (it drops for men too, but less so). The sad irony is that women have been especially rigorous about ramping up on their fruits, vegetables and grains, but they now suffer from higher obesity rates than men, and their death rates from heart disease have reached parity.

Nanny McPhee’s official diet has not worked.  Obesity rates are sky-rocketing.  The general population grows sicker.  What’s to be done?  Nina Teicholz has some sane advice:

Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys’s hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation’s health woes.

Post-script:  Let us not forget the slogans and slurs that have been the currency of this disaster: opponents, critics, and sceptics were allegeded to be practitioners of “junk-science”; the good-diet science was “settled”;  critics would have “blood on their hands”, etc.  Sound familiar?

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part II

Public Policy Demands Science Be “Settled and Certain”

Public Policy Requires Junk Science

In our previous post on this subject, we canvassed how much  “official” dietary and food advice of the past fifty years is turning out, not just to be counter productive, but actually harmful.  This advice has been delivered with emphatic certainty, as if those giving it were utterly convinced of the accuracy and truthfulness of what was being purported.  And they no doubt were.

The reason for such certainty turned upon the overwhelming veracity of  Science.  The discipline which exploded all myths, errors, and superstitions, replacing them with certainty and truth was Science.  That is an overwhelming presumption of our world.  “Science says” is tantamount to the word of a god in our  understanding–an understanding held in common by officials, governments, scientists, the Commentariat and even the common man.

Much of the research into diet and human health relies upon statistical research and analysis.  Much of the research and inferences there-from are flawed.
  Moreover, always lurking in the wings are suppressed assumptions–quasi-religious assumptions–informing, controlling, and shaping the “science”.  The first of these is the attempt to repudiate death itself. 

Achieving longevity is a driving goal of all health science and the resulting dietetic paradigms.  Death must be put off as long as possible.  Somewhere between the Epicurean “eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we die” and the cryogenic freezing of mortal remains to achieve eternal life lies reality and sanity.  Death is a reality.  It is a reality Christians do not fear, but look forward to.  It is our last enemy, but it has already been defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore, Christians long to live, but not for life’s own sake.  We long to live “in the flesh” just as long as we can profitably serve God.

Hence, the inspired confession of Paul, to which all Christians subscribe:

For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.  If I am to live on in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me.  Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.  I am hard pressed between the two.  My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.  But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.  Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith . . . (Philippians 1:21-25.)

The modern assumption is that death is always evil and must be put off as long as possible.  It is the last enemy which has not been abolished.  Official public health is bent to achieve longevity at almost all costs.  When this translates into dietary advice it is almost always of the type, “Don’t eat or drink this or that, so that disease will be prevented and you will live longer.”  Official dietetic policy seeks to impose this on the population through hectoring, lecturing, educating, and directed primary health care–all funded by taxing citizens, all for our own “good”.

But it turns out that every decision to eat or not to eat has trade-offs.  It is now emerging that many of those trade-offs do far more harm than good.  It appears that it would have been far more wise to follow the advice of the apostle Paul when it came to diet:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons . . . who . . . require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.  For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. (I Timothy 3: 1-4).

We should be very wary, therefore, of people hectoring us with official advice about what foods are “good” for us, and what are not.  It is far better to welcome all foods created by God as good, and maintain a diversity and balance in diet.  Eating is a great joy and pleasure, for which we must be thankful.  Food is one of the greatest blessings of creation: preparing it, cooking it, and eating it together is a slice of heaven on earth.

But Science tells us otherwise.  In many cases, however, the science is junk.  In the food and health field so much of the “research” is based upon statistical analysis, which looks for correlations between food types, or food elements, on the one hand, and diseases, on the other.  Very, very quickly co-incidence morphs into fallacious inferences about causality, as in, “all people who die have spent their life breathing oxygen.  Therefore, oxygen causes death and must be avoided at all costs.”

Causality is a complex business, and proving it scientifically even more so.  See, for example, the entry  “Causal Inference and Statistical Fallacies” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, here to get a flavour for the complexity involved and the dangers of fallacious inferences of causality.  Despite this, public policy and advice require certainty.  When it is lacking, the science will be “framed” as if it were certain, which immediately turns it into junk science. 

The problem faced by hectoring public health authorities (that is, government funded officials) is that careful qualification does not a recommendation make.  A campaign for public health would never get out of the gate unless it were framed as dealing with a clear and certain danger.  No-one is going to take notice of a “campaign” which had a script reading, “It is possible that eggs, which contain cholesterol, cause higher cholesterol levels in humans, but it has not yet been proven.”  No, it has to be: “cholesterol in eggs causes high cholesterol in humans: therefore, reduce or stop eating eggs.”  That’s attention grabbing.  That demands action.  That overcomes inertia.  It is also junk science.

The longer term damage done by such short-sighted ignorant wowsering is not insignificant.  It builds over time a profound scepticism of governments and public officials, on the one hand, and a burgeoning incidence of conspiracy theories, on the other. 

Worse, when it comes to diet and health, the advice more often than not turns out to be harmful, festooned with unintended negative consequences. 

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part I

The Ministry of Food Propaganda

Almost everything the “authorities” have told you about bad food over the past forty years is wrong.  The assertion was made in The Guardian by  Joanna Blythman. There are at least two aspects to this story, equally important.  The first is to expose the errors, fallacies, and chicaneries for what they are.  The second is to expose the research methodologies, posing as scientific, for the sugar puffs they often are.

First, the exposure of the errors.

Could eating too much margarine be bad for your critical faculties? The “experts” who so confidently advised us to replace saturated fats, such as butter, with polyunsaturated spreads, people who presumably practise what they preach, have suddenly come over all uncertain and seem to be struggling through a mental fog to reformulate their script.

Last week it fell to a floundering professor, Jeremy Pearson, from the British Heart Foundation to explain why it still adheres to the nutrition establishment’s anti-saturated fat doctrine when evidence is stacking up to refute it. After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that concluded “there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease”.

No convincing evidence.  None.  Nada.
  What about all the headlines of this study or that study “proving” the very same–for example, that saturated fats, like butter, were very, very bad and must be banned?  It seems that it was all based on the fallacy of repetition: say something often enough and eventually everyone will come to believe it.  The fallacy of repetition is also known as propaganda.

Now Blythman is calling for a new script.  The choice of the word “script” is a hoot because it implies a work of fiction, of the theatre, or the playhouse–as, no doubt, deliberately intended by the author.

Neither could the foundation’s research team find any evidence for the familiar assertion that trips off the tongue of margarine manufacturers and apostles of government health advice, that eating polyunsaturated fat offers heart protection. In fact, lead researcher Dr Rajiv Chowdhury spoke of the need for an urgent health check on the standard healthy eating script. “These are interesting results that potentially stimulate new lines of scientific inquiry and encourage careful reappraisal of our current nutritional guidelines,” he said.

We have to eat something.  When saturated fats went out the window of “expert” approbation, something had to replace it to stop the growling hunger pangs.  Starchy foods have been the dietetic replacement darling of the day.  Ooops. 

Chowdhury went on to warn that replacing saturated fats with excess carbohydrates – such as white bread, white rice and potatoes – or with refined sugar and salts in processed foods, should be discouraged. Current healthy eating advice is to “base your meals on starchy foods”, so if you have been diligently following that dietetic gospel, then the professor’s advice is troubling.

There have been other reversals and recantations.  It has almost got to the stage of the truth being the exact opposite of what is being avowed by government run and funded science.  If the government orthodoxy, voiced by publicly funded health and diet experts, is to not eat “X” because its bad for you, then more should be consumed with gusto.  You will be better off.  No wonder Reagan once quipped that the utterance, “We are from the government and we are here to help you,” is one of the most terrifying sentences one could ever hear in a lifetime.

Of course, we have already had a bitter taste of how hopelessly misleading nutritional orthodoxy can be. It wasn’t so long ago that we were spoon-fed the unimpeachable “fact” that we should eat no more than two eggs a week because they contained heart-stopping cholesterol, but that gem of nutritional wisdom had to be quietly erased from history when research showing that cholesterol in eggs had almost no effect on blood cholesterol became too glaringly obvious to ignore.

The consequences of this egg restriction nostrum were wholly negative: egg producers went out of business and the population missed out on an affordable, natural, nutrient-packed food as it mounded up its breakfast bowl with industrially processed cereals sold in cardboard boxes. But this damage was certainly less grave than that caused by the guidance to abandon saturated fats such as butter, dripping and lard, and choose instead spreads and highly refined liquid oils.

Despite repeated challenges from health advocacy groups, it wasn’t until 2010, when US dietary guidelines were amended, that public health advisers on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged that the chemical process for hardening polyunsaturated oils in margarines and spreads created artery-clogging trans-fats.  Manufacturers have now reformulated their spreads, hardening them by chemical methods which they assure us are more benign. But throughout the 20th century, as we were breezily encouraged to embrace supposedly heart-healthy spreads, the prescription was killing us. Those who dutifully swallowed the bitter pill, reluctantly replacing delicious butter with dreary marge, have yet to hear the nutrition establishment recanting. Government evangelists of duff diet advice aren’t keen on eating humble pie.

“Government evangelists of duff diet advice” indeed.  But it gets worse.  Sit up straight and pay attention now.  It turns out that what everyone needs more of is, wait for it, protein and fat.

But what lesson can we draw from the cautionary tales of eggs and trans fats? We would surely be slow learners if we didn’t approach other well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye. Let’s start with calories. After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time. Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

Blythman goes on to speak about the “distended belly of government eating advice”–we are sure the pun is very much intended.   Traditional foods which have sustained generations have been portrayed as “natural born killers”, but have been replaced by the truly deadly.

As protein and fat bask in the glow of their recovering nutritional reputation, carbohydrates – the soft, distended belly of government eating advice – are looking decidedly peaky. Carbs are the largest bulk ingredient featured on the NHS’s visual depiction of its recommended diet, the Eat Well Plate. Zoë Harcombe, an independent nutrition expert, has pithily renamed it the Eat Badly Plate – and you can see why. After all, we feed starchy crops to animals to fatten them, so why won’t they have the same effect on us? This less favourable perception of carbohydrates is being fed by trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

When fat was the nutrition establishment’s Wicker Man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar on the nation’s health sneaked in under the radar. Stick “low fat” on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers.

But, we move on.  It is not just fat and protein which are “back on the menu, boys”.  It’s red meat!  Gimli would be pleased. 

In line with the contention that foods containing animal fats are harmful, we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

The good, old fashioned advice of a balanced diet, with proteins, fats, and lots of fresh veggies is about all we need to know.  But that would do all sorts of bad to an entire industry dedicated to Victorian wowsering.  Worse, this industry is locked into government propaganda and the medical bureaucracy, which needs a crisis in order to justify its procession of bloated salaried “experts” hectoring, lecturing, puffing and pontificating. 

The crucial phrase “avoid processed food” appears nowhere in government nutritional guidelines, yet this is the most concise way to sum up in practical terms what is wholesome and healthy to eat. Until this awareness shapes dietetic advice, all government dietary guidance should come with a tobacco-style caution: Following this advice could seriously damage your health.

Joanna Blythman is the author of Bad Food Britain and What to Eat

It’s science, Jim but not as we know it. 

The Futility of Taxing Foods to Achieve Social Change

Lazy Intellects and Food Zealots

We have endured the monstrous regime of the feminazis.  We continue to labour under the monstrous regime of the foodnazis.  There are those who wish to command and control all that we put in our mouths–for our own good–and, of course, society’s good, since the state pays for health care.  And we are facing a plague of illnesses, about to descend with more deadly intent than the Bubonic Plague.  Obesity, diabetes, heart disease: this evil triumvirate must be combated with taxes, rules, regulations, controls, bans and government sponsored cotton-wool. 

One biggie is the cost of fast food–you know, that fatty stuff sold in burger bars and fish ‘n chip shops.  What’s wrong here, you ask.  Well, it’s too cheap the foodnazis tell us.  It is being bought and consumed by the truckloads because it is cheaper than decent food.  Coke is cheaper than milk.  So, let’s force the price upwards. Let’s tax it.  The new-left command and control economists tell us that if you tax something, you get less of it.  Let’s put a tax on sugar saturated drinks.

Such moves would hit the poor obese, forcing them to consume something better, argue the zealots
.  It would force them to be righteous and holy and eat better.  Actually, it would do nothing of the sort.  True, the poor obese would find it harder to pay for their daily food.  They would show up in income statistics as being increasingly unable to feed themselves.  The poor in New Zealand would get poorer; more people would be classified as below the “breadline”, unable to afford food.  Pressures would, therefore,  mount on the government of the day to increase the minimum wage and welfare payments so that the poor could afford the now more expensive food.  Governments would legislate Canute-like for higher wages and welfare payouts.  And so the cycle of descent into national recession would commence once again. 

As is so often the case, the poor obese (we generalise) are arguably recipients and earners of too much money as it is.  They spend it unwisely.  They like the taste and the convenience of fast foods and fizzy drinks. If they were poorer, necessity, being the mother of invention, might force them to eat more healthy food, instead of junk stuff. 

It turns out that healthy food and eating is much less expensive than fast food junk.  The latter is a luxury that only the relatively wealthy can afford.  Richard Meadows does the sums in an article in Stuff:

It’s not our fault we’re obese. Potato chips are cheaper than apples. Coke is cheaper than milk. Fruit and veggies are unaffordable. The Government must act! That’s the tone of a slew of opinion pieces which have popped up in recent weeks, calling for everything from subsidies for fruit and veggies to taxes on sugar and fat.

But the underlying premise – that it’s cheaper to stuff your face with fizzy drink and KFC than to cook healthy meals – is simply wrong. Takeaway food is convenient, delicious – and generally very expensive. With a bit of knowhow and a dash of common sense, you can spend at least two to three times less with a frugal but healthy diet. . . .

Breakfast
There’s a reason they feed oats to horses – they’re incredibly affordable, and packed with energy.  “Oats with some low fat milk is a perfectly great breakfast – it doesn’t have to be an expensive breakfast cereal,” says Healthy Food Guide nutritionist Claire Turnbull.  A big bag of oatmeal costs 15c per serving, while a cup of milk is another 35c. All up, that’s breakfast sorted for 50c.

Want to splash out on a cooked meal? It’ll still cost you less than a dollar.  Eggs, which are a great protein source, are roughly 30c each, while wholemeal bread is about 15c a slice. Two eggs plus two slices equals 90c.  How does fast food stack up? The cheapest possible pie – with roughly the same protein, but more fat and calories – is $2. . . .

Lunch
The midday meal should contain some protein, but that doesn’t necessarily mean meat.  “Things like lentils, kidney beans and chickpeas, which are a great source of protein and fibre, are really cheap,” says Turnbull.  You need to eat a range of vegetable-based proteins to get the goodies you need, but that’s simple enough.  Mix a grain with a legume – say, a wholemeal peanut butter sandwich – and you’re set.

One hundred grams of lentils contains a whopping 26 grams of protein, along with at least 12 micronutrients – and costs just 70c. Add some brown rice – also insanely cheap at about 10c per serve – and you’re on track for a filling meal.. . .

Healthy lunch: $2
Fast food lunch: $7 (Big Mac and fries)

Dinner
According to [AUT professor of nutrition Elaine] Rush, dinner should be a quarter carbohydrates, a quarter protein, and half different-coloured vegetables. ”That’s the ideal for the proportions of your plate, and your shopping basket,” she says.

Protein is the most expensive, so we’ll tackle that first. Whether it’s chicken breast on special, cheap fish, mince, BBQ steak, or stewing cuts of meat, you should be able to pick something up for about $10 a kilo.  Rush did an analysis on the cost per gram of protein a few years ago. ”Mince actually came out on top – it beat Kentucky Fried,” she says.

Eating meat is affordable, says Dale Folland, a nutritionist and director of Newlives Nutrition.
”The problem is, we overeat,” he says. ”You may have your average male eating 200g, 250g of protein [in a meal]. That’s when it gets expensive, when you’re eating more than you need to.” He says 100g to 130g of meat or other protein is about right for a woman’s evening meal, while men should take in 100g to 170g, depending on size.

That’s a cost of about $1 to $1.70 per meal.  Add another 50c or so for veggies, and another 50c for a serving of carbs, like  potatoes or pasta. All up we’re talking less than $3 – or $4 if you allow wriggle room for a bit of flavour and variety.
Healthy dinner: $3-$4
Fast food dinner: $9.90 (KFC quarter pack). . . .

MYTH BUSTED
If you add up the three meals, snacks, and drinks, the artery-clogging convenience diet costs $20 at the bare minimum – and probably a whole lot more.  A bare-basics healthy diet with a bit of leeway costs more like $7 to $9, roughly two to three times cheaper.  No matter how you nitpick the numbers, it’s hard to keep arguing that healthy food is prohibitively expensive. . . .

Soup Nazis

Ubiquitous Food Police

One of the most famous episodes in Seinfeld is the Soup Nazi. It has probably been watched more than any other.  (In case you have missed it, there is a YouTube highlights version below.) 

As life once again imitates art, years later we find ourselves beset by food Nazis of all kinds, telling us what to eat and, more importantly, what not to eat.  But the matter does not stop at nagging and hectoring.  It is ironic that Seinfeld, which was such an acute insightful commentary upon New York City and New Yorkers, has ended up parodying-in-advance the actual charge by Nanny Mayor Bloomberg to rule and regulate what New Yorkers can and cannot eat.  Bloomberg became the actual incarnation of the Soup Nazi, aspiring to control every part of the human anatomy–for our own good, naturally.  And so it has come to pass that Food Police are now everywhere–yearning and lusting for the reins of power–passing rules, regulating, and controlling, all to protect us from ourselves. Bovine New Yorkers love it.  The rest of us?  Not so much.

We read and hear this sort of thing almost daily:

Imposing a 20 per cent tax on Coke and other fizzy soft drinks could save 67 lives a year by reducing ill-health, a New Zealand study has found.  A high sugar intake is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. [NZ Herald]

Then comes the fine print:

The study by Auckland and Otago University researchers said the tax would avert or postpone between 60 and 73 deaths a year from cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes – or about 0.2 per cent of deaths from all causes.  Based on economic survey data showing the effect of varying food prices on household buying, they calculated the tax would reduce daily energy consumption by 0.2 per cent.

Oh, so the proposed tax–designed as an implicit penalty for designated evil doing–would only avert or postpone about 0.2 percent of deaths in this country.  Not prevent.  Not grant the gift of eternal life.  Only delay the inevitable–and then only 0.2 percent of deaths in any year. And the ultimate insult to this injury to common sense?  We, the taxpayers, are funding this kind of inanity.  They are taking our money to facilitate their swaddling us into a state of perpetual infancy. 

It is a fundamental principle of civil liberty that everyone has a freedom right to go either to hell in their own way, regardless of how horrific hell may be.  There is no statute of limitations on folly and stupidity.  Folk have a freedom right to be foolish and stupid.  If they don’t, the concept of freedom has no meaning.  We do not object to disclosure when it comes to food and drink–in fact, honesty and integrity and good faith are compelling reasons for its employment.  We do not object to health warnings–provided they are honest, accurate, truthful and not alarmist.  We all have to die of something at the end of the day. 

What we absolutely object to is the Soup Nazi attitude whereby elites and self-appointed authorities  rule, regulate, and attempt to ration what one shall have, when, how, and in what quantities, all for our own good.  Such despotism is an anathema to a human being born free. 

The Soup Nazi is comedy.  The real Food Nazi’s are not so funny.  But, probably the best defence we have is to mock and ridicule them.  If you want to get into training for the grand liberation, watch this episode of Seinfeld a few times.  It is positively, nefariously seditious.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

On Taunting the Cows

Posted on Wednesday, February 5, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

The task this morning is to follow up on some reasonable questions raised in the comments of the previous post, God’s Bistro. The basic outline of my response will be to grant a point at the center, but to differ as to what the appropriate responses and applications ought to be.

The questions I want to address concern the pervasive force and influence of advertising, questions about justice in the production of food (e.g. fair trade), and the matter of basic health issues and diet.

I quite agree that advertisers and mass marketers have figured out that there are a lot of people out there who are like sheep without a shepherd. They want to prod and steer everybody into various purchases and brand loyalties, and they industriously work at it. This is something we should respond to, but my suggested response would not be to say that people have to choose between Ads and Adbusters, between corporate and fake alternative corporate.

Protesting the new global economy and actually escaping it are two different things.

My response has been to encourage the establishment of Christian schools that teach kids how to think like Christians, how to identify fallacies, how to stand up to group-think, and so on. Nothing is more truly counter-cultural than holiness.
There is nothing new about any of this — the choice is the same in every generation, and that choice holiness or the world. There is nothing new under the sun, including the lie that there actually is something new.

So we must not trust in worldly alternatives to the world. That just gets us opting into secular right/left divisions, or becoming a Laurelist instead of a Hardyist. And we can’t fix things by opting for a thin Christian veneer of these right/left distinctions — Sean Hannity or N.T. Wright.

So in trying to lean against this problem of thoughtless brand loyalty, I don’t want to trust the critical outlook of people who would stand in line for three days for the latest iPhone. They might not know what the actual problem is, and so perhaps we should call them iPhoneys.

Full disclosure: I do own an iPhone myself, but I have managed to do this without being one of the cool kids. The issue is not the thing, but rather our approach to the thing. Same as with food. Our temptation is to objectify the problem, trying to locate sin in the stuff — in the tobacco, in the alcohol, in the gun, in the donut — instead of where sin is actually located, which is right under the breastbone.

On matters of gross injustice in the production of my dinner, I quite agree with the principle. In other words, if I knew a restaurant in town with the best-tasting steak got those fantastic results by flogging its cooks out back, cheating its wholesalers, double-crossing the waitresses on the tips, and sending representatives out to the stockyards every month to taunt the cows, I would not patronize that restaurant. I don’t want to bless known scoundrels with my business. So the principle is fine.

But the problem is with that word “known.” To assert injustice is not the same thing as proving it. Much ado is made over the concept of “fair trade,” for example, but largely by people who don’t know what “fair” means, or what “trade” is. In short, I flat don’t believe them. Sometimes the business is run by scoundrels, and other times the agitating protesters are the scoundrels. And going back to the first point, how many people who drink fair trade coffee were stampeded into it by a marketing campaign? A lot more skepticism is in order.

Another question concerns basic health issues. I would take the same general approach here. That is, I would grant the principle, but dispute the plethora of contemporary applications. If we concentrate on the how and why we eat together, and the emphasis is on love, of course a faithful mom is going to make sure her kids get enough citrus to enable them to avoid scurvy. That is all to the good, and is common sense. To my detractors, I would simply say this: I approve of little children not getting scurvy.

The problem here is not what we know, but rather what we think we know — and how quickly we start pressuring and condemning others on the basis of what we think we know. The issue here is that claims about health and well-being are very much like claims about global economics. A lot of what is said just ain’t so. Daniel was willing to put his dietary request to the chamberlain to the test. After ten days, are we ruddier or are they ruddier? After ten days are we fairer and fatter in flesh, or are they (Dan. 1:14-16)? Mom, have your husband run a blind taste test for you – put an organic apple and a regular Safeway apple in the kids’ lunches for ten days, without telling you which one is getting which one. Then after ten days, you tell him which kid has been eating healthier.

But if the claims stand up, as they do with Vitamin C and scurvy, then the point stands. Sure. Everything else being equal, a family should be served a healthy, well-balanced meal. Mom should not let her teen-aged son ruin his dinner by wolfing a bag of chips half an hour before. Marshmallow pop tarts are not the breakfast of champions. My phight against phood pharisaism should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of maple bars with bacon on them . . . although I might try one sometime. It is simply that a lot of the dietary harum-scarum these days is based on statistical hoodoo, galloping fads, shrewd marketing, and crony capitalism (again, see the first point). Again, a bit more skepticism before making any claims about food that reflect on any person’s standing with God.

You don’t need to be so skeptical that you won’t try anything new. You can sell the food options without selling the guilt. In fact, the pastor said, that is what you must do.

And finally, apropos of nothing in particular, but staying on the general theme, I thought I should share with you this short video on how McDonald’s makes their Chicken McNuggets. Bon Appétit!

Doug Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

God’s Bistro

Posted on Tuesday, February 4, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

What is the balance to be kept when it comes to saying that God “doesn’t care what you eat,” which He doesn’t, and saying that we are to exercise dominion in all that we do? If there is no neutrality anywhere, and there isn’t, then how does this fit with statements like “God doesn’t care”?

The answer is that God cares about everything, but He doesn’t care about things the same way we do. Our job is to learn how to care the way He does, instead of invoking His name to make it seem like He cares the same way we do. There is a way that seems right to a man, but the dead end of that cul de sac is death (Prov. 14:12). Men have a way of esteeming things that God considers below dumpster scrapings. “And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15).

So there no neutrality anywhere, but this is not the same thing as saying that everything matters in the way we want it to.
For example, say that somebody started saying that a particular brand of white tee-shirt was guaranteed to make you holier, wiser, and healthier than you are now. I would be willing to say that God doesn’t care about whether you wear that tee-shirt or not because His Word leaves that kind of decision up to us and our preferences. But this doesn’t make us “tee-shirt neutral.” God cares if those who made it were doing the best job they could given their resources, He cares if we cheat people or not when we sell it, He cares if it was shoplifted, He cares whether it is folded in a drawer or dumped on the bed all the time, and He cares if we make spurious claims about how holy, wise, and healthy it might make us. If someone claims that this tee-shirt he is selling can cure my cancer, and I dispute it, it is not an adequate comeback for him to say, “I thought you believed there is no neutrality!” There is no neutrality, but “no neutrality” doesn’t mean any thing can do everything.

So bring it down to food. It is not remembered often enough that the Pharisees were pushing, in part, a pure foods movement. But the problem was not with their food — it was the leaven that they insisted on putting into everything. Jesus warned us about that leaven, and not about the food per se. Jesus had no problem going to a Pharisee’s house for a Pharisee dinner, and when you do that you are going to get Pharisee food (Luke 7:44). But Jesus was strict in his warning to His disciples — watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees (Matt. 16:11-12). Beware of their teaching concerning food, not the food as such.

We know from Scripture what food tastes like without that leaven. The Bible tells us plainly. “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 14:17). “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4-5). The world is God’s bistro, and the menu is enormous. The bottles in the middle of every table at God’s bistro are full of righteousness, peace, joy, and thanksgiving. It is a special sauce, and it goes on anything.

So why do I say that God doesn’t care what you eat? Well, because, you know, because of the verses that say the same thing. And why do I also say that the glory of God is involved down to the last caramelized onion? Because the Bible says that whatever you eat, it should be to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). But this concerns the way we come to food, not what food we come to. Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19). When He declared all foods clean, He was not declaring all food fussery clean. Just the opposite. 
Declaring all foods clean means that every attempt to make the foods unclean again is a vain form of uncleanness. It won’t work — the food cannot be defiled by this teaching, but the hearts can be.

So — righteousness, peace, joy, and thanksgiving, all of them in green bottles. By way of contrast, the foodie movement as it exists in its natural state, at its point of origin out in the world, consists of fear, anxiety, self-righteousness, timidity, guilt, ingratitude, and pride. It is a warehouse of fifty gallon drums full of Pharisaical leaven. Anybody who cannot see that reality is simply not paying attention. So when Christians go over there to get some food, I don’t care — because God doesn’t care what’s in your food. He cares what is in your heart. So I don’t care if you get your food at Safeway or at the Coop. You have to buy it somewhere. Just make sure you get some, and make sure you thank God for it.

God doesn’t care what is in your food, but He cares very much what is in your food-thoughts. So what a pastor must care about is whether Christians are picking up any of the leaven — the fear, anxiety, self-righteousness, and so forth. And the answer is that they are, and in many cases, in terrible, debilitating ways. One of the ways I know this is the case is the inability of some to grasp these very simple distinctions. All foods are clean. Not all hearts are. Everything else follows.

I am afraid I can’t really make this point as I would like to without bragging a bit about Nancy, but (truth be told) I don’t mind doing that. Anybody who frequents this blog for a while might easily gather that I take a dim view of food righteousness. That would be right. And they may have read me saying that “God doesn’t care what you eat.” But does this mean that God doesn’t care how we eat, or why we eat? Or with whom? Of course not. The world is God’s bistro, remember, and the production and consumption of food is necessarily a big part of all our schedules.

So food is a big deal at our house, not a little deal. Every Saturday night we have our Sabbath dinner, where Nancy spends her Saturdays preparing a thanksgiving meal for twenty-nine people, and that is if there is no company — and there is frequently company. And she uses cloth napkins. One time she was ironing the cloth napkins, which are not just for sabbath dinner, incidentally, and I asked why she was doing that. She said, putting it all in a nutshell, “it’s reformational.”

So meals are about loving people with something hot for the plate. Meals are about loving people with pressed cloth napkins. Meals are about joy and laughter across the table. Meals are about the pandemonium of clean-up. Meals are a big deal. We should love them more than we do, and this means receiving God’s permission slip to eat absolutely anything, and then with equal joy and grace to receive His commandment to love the person sitting across from you.

Government Wowsering

Up in Smoke

In New Zealand we have a messianic crusade to make the country “smoke free” by 2025.  The definition of this paradisaical state is as follows:

 What does Smokefree New Zealand 2025 mean?

• Our children and grandchildren will be free from exposure to tobacco and tobacco use

• The smoking prevalence across all populations will be <5%. The goal is not a ban on smoking.

• Tobacco will be difficult to sell and supply.  [http://smokefree.org.nz/smokefree-2025]

Of course this is being promulgated by government and its agencies, and driven by particular wowser-politicians.  We do not question the motives of said protagonists.  Smoking can cause much harm.  But we do question the wisdom of the wowsers. 

Moreover, we are also deeply sceptical of government promoted programmes and causes where the underlying object is to restrain government spending on health (as is the case of the anti-tobacco movement).  The reason is straightforward: when an entire population (that is, more than 5 percent) is dependant upon government provided healthcare, the government has been given a license to control human behaviour to an extraordinary extent for its own ends.  In this case, the broader campaign against smoking shows every sign of not being driven primarily by concern over smokers welfare, but by a desire to restrain public health expenditure.

The fiscal logic is simple: less smoking mean less smoking related diseases which, in turn means, less government spending on health.  Such logic is pernicious in that it “proves” far too much.  It can (and has) rapidly extended to arguments for nanny controls over food, diet, exercise, and drinking. 

In addition, the fiscal argument is just sloppy.  It is relentlessly self-defeating.  The cold fact is that from a fiscal perspective once medicine and health is socialised and paid for out of the public purse, the sooner people die off, the less expenditure impact upon government revenues.  Thus, from a fiscal perspective alone, the more people that smoke and become obese the better.  The shorter the life span, the less the cost to the government (and the taxpayer), because the biggest costs always occur towards the end of life, particularly when, as is the case in New Zealand, we have a universal, non-means tested, taxpayer funded, retirement income scheme. 

In the end, then, the wowser campaign against tobacco falls back on humanitarian concerns–trying to prevent people from harming themselves.  This is a highly tendentious position, particularly because the actual results are likely to be desultory.  And the unintended consequences are adverse to say the least. 

One of our daily newspapers carried a “canary in the mine” story about how people are likely to respond to ever increasing taxation costs upon tobacco (the key strategy being employed to make people stop smoking):

A Southland woman is beating tobacco tax price hikes by turning over a new leaf and growing her own. Liz, who does not want her surname published for fears someone might steal her crop, has been growing, curing, and smoking her own tobacco for about two years.  She and her partner each smoked about 50 grams of loose, roll your own tobacco per week, she said.  “Who wants to pay $60 a week for something you can grow yourself for less than $5?”

Each plant provides about 100 grams of tobacco, and takes four to six months to grow, she said.  Liz said that after picking the leaves, she hangs them and leaves them to “colour cure”. . . .  The plants grow to up to 2 metres tall, and Liz grows them throughout her garden at home.  “I’ve got about 30 in at the moment, they grow really well down here but they can’t go anywhere near frost so you have to get your seasons right,” she said.

It is legal to buy seeds, grow and smoke tobacco for personal use in New Zealand, but against the law to sell or give away home grown tobacco away.

We have seen the home-brew market grow substantially in New Zealand–and that without any substantial restrictions upon the sale of alcohol.  We have also seen an explosion in home poultry.  The opportunity of saving around $60 per week will  no doubt generate a huge expansion in home-grown tobacco. 

How are the wowsers and the nannies likely to respond?  By campaigning to make home-grown tobacco illegal.  And that is when the trade will become extremely profitable to criminal gangs and smugglers. 

One wonders how many times we have to repeat this kind of folly before we learn. 

Letter from the UK (About Chicken)

Water Worth Its Weight In Gold

The article below documents a rip-off practice in the UK.  We do not doubt that pretty much the same occurs in New Zealand.  When you next buy that oh-so-cheap chicken in the supermarket and find it to be superbly moist upon roasting, reflect on the origin of the moisture.  The same goes for most bacon.  Try frying it in the pan, and you have to evaporate the copious volumes of water coming out of the meat first, before you can brown and crisp the meat.  A sure sign that water has been injected into the meat. And think about that juicy chicken from the fast food restaurant–the juice is most likely just heated water. 

Supermarkets selling chicken that is nearly a fifth water

Consumers paying 65p a kilo for water, as legality of process of ‘tumbling’ imported chicken called into question

Felicity Lawrence
The Guardian,
Friday 6 December, 2013

Frozen chicken breasts on sale in leading supermarkets are being pumped up with water and additives that make up nearly a fifth of the meat to the point where consumers are paying about 65p a kilo for water, the Guardian can reveal.  The legality of the industrial process, in which cheap imported chicken is “tumbled” in cement mixer-like machines, has also been called into question, but the products are available in discount ranges sold in high street retailers.

One large poultry processor in the UK, Westbridge Food Group, is importing raw frozen Brazilian chicken to which salt or a mix of corn oil and salt has already been added, then “tumbling” it with water and water-binding additives.  The meat is then repacked for sale as frozen chicken breast fillets in leading supermarkets. Asda, Aldi and Iceland all sell frozen Brazilian chicken tumbled this way by Westbridge as part of their own-label discount ranges.  Sainsbury’s also sells frozen chicken from the same factory with added water under a brand name – but not as its own label. . . .

It is not illegal to sell chicken with added water so long as it is declared.  The legality hangs on whether the chicken is defined after tumbling with water as a “preparation” or a “product” that no longer retains the characteristics of raw meat. . . .

The cheap ranges of frozen chicken on sale in the UK do declare the added water, as well as additives such as phosphates incorporated to stop the water from flooding out during cooking and dextrose, a sugar added to mask the saltiness of the raw material.   The industry argues that the water and additives make the meat more succulent.  But few consumers are aware that they are paying for large quantities of water in their meat, however.  Asda and Aldi packs have 18% added water in their chicken; Iceland and the Valley brand in Sainsbury’s have 15% added water. . . .

Chicken bulked up with water is also being widely used in the food service sector, particularly by fast food restaurants. Industry trade literature shows that some companies are marketing poultry pumped with 30% water as a way of cutting costs. Dr Duncan Campbell, a former president of the Association of Public Analysts, said it had become the norm to find levels of water even higher than this. “When we last looked, 40% added water in wholesale frozen chicken breasts was not uncommon. Consumers are being swindled.”  Industry sources said that the recession has led to increasing pressure to keep costs down by using higher levels of water – which is legal if it is declared, although consumers do not see the labels in restaurants.

Our view is that provided the larceny is disclosed so that practice is neither deceptive nor misleading, we are content.  Then, if folk find it to their taste, good on them.  But there is enough Scots and Dutch blood in our circles to make us bridle at the prospect of paying so much for what is an abundant commodity–that is, water.  We much prefer to eat chicken or pork or bacon where the moisture and succulence is a product of the way the animal or bird was farmed and fed, rather than the result of what was injected after slaughter. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Gravy of Grace and Gratitude

Posted on Tuesday, November 26, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

If you like to eat what you like to eat, this means that you are a human being. If you are morally indignant about the food choices of others, this means you are well on the way to becoming a food leftist.

Leftism is that impulse that wants to establish coercion and call it community. Apply the coercive impulse to food and farming choices, and you have the food leftist.

And it begins with the indignation. Once the indignation is established, it becomes possible to draw on a hidden premise that too many Americans share — that sins should be crimes — and move from that position to the idea that made up sins should be made into real crimes.

When the food regulators change their minds, and start cracking down on this product instead of that product, this is simply part of the way authoritarian regimes operate.
In a despotism, sometimes this is in favor and sometimes that — it can be an official, or a policy, or a method of manufacturing cheese — but regardless, the right of the despotism to continue being a despotism is always in favor. That doesn’t change.

This obviously does not mean that it is impossible to sin with food. Food leftists are sinning with other people’s food. And you can always go old school and sin with your own food. If your approach is all-four-feet-in-the-trough, then perhaps you are a piggy-piggy glutton. If you have a couple bottles of whiskey in your cubicle at work, then maybe you are not the suave 1950′s advertising executive you think you are. Maybe you are just an aspiring drunk. And if you are a fastidious eater, and cannot be troubled to be a charitable guest at the table of another, then you are an enemy of love.

In the meantime, every Christian who understands the gospel must fight — as part of our sanctification — the impulse to despise the food that God has given to somebody else. This applies even if the apple was not locally grown, if the coffee was not certified fair trade, if the bread came from a monoculture crop, if the asparagus was modified to taste horrible to asparagus predators, or if the food in question has “chemicals” in it.

We live in a sinful and fallen world, so food must indeed be sanctified. But the only thing that sanctifies it is the gravy of grace and gratitude (1 Tim. 4:4-5).

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Food Libertarian

Posted on Tuesday, November 12, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

From time to time the authorities haul in some renegade cheese maker, and those who love bureaucratized food safety all breath a sigh of relief. This kind of tyranny is heavy-handed enough to get noticed by those who yearn for food freedom — as I do — but not so noticed generally that we can get the food fascists to stop it. Yet.

There are two basic points that need to be made about this. The first is that the government does have a role in food safety — but it is not the role of preventative regulation. Rather, in a realm of food libertarianism, the government would set the definitions and standards. This is what a fluid ounce is, and that is what counts as cleaning a chicken.

These standards would not be enforced by food inspectors before the fact, but would rather be used whenever an action had been brought by a dissatisfied or food-poisoned customer.
The civil magistrate would publish, before the fact, what weights and measures they are going to use to adjudicate legal actions and disputes. An action could be brought either against Tyson or Ma Beedle’s Chicken Ranch.

Once the contaminated food were traced back to the offending source, if it were shown that the problem had been caused because Ma Beedle or Tyson had different views (than reasonable people do) on what cleaning a chicken meant, then then the assigned damages would be more severe. But the food producer would be liable for the costs associated with the problem, even if the contamination slipped through generally reasonable processes.

When it come to matters of food safety, anybody who has had a batch of bad oysters can attest to the fact that we need a referee to sort things out after the fact. Feelings can run high.

The second big issue has to do with where the real threats to food freedom are actually coming from. Before saying what follows I do want to note that I believe alternative food producers should be free to sell their unpasteurized milk off the back of their pick-up truck if they want to. We are all Christians here, and we all have to go to Heaven sometime. I believe that in a free society, we should all be allowed to take our own risks.

The price of this risk taking is that there must be no whining when the price of that risk comes due — whether for the customer, who got what he paid for, or for the proprietor of the small family farm that will be put out of business by one bad batch of milk. The guys who drive their milk around the country in eighteen wheelers will not be put under by one bad batch, and this is part of the cost of freedom. Freedom can be harder on those who don’t have as much money. But it is still worth it for all of us.

What we cannot have is a system that regulates the “big guy” and then leaves the little guy alone. Once establish regulations before the fact, then the big guys will get control of the regulators. “Regulations” to “reform everything” is how we get crony capitalism. This means if you want freedom for the little guy you have to have it for the big guy.

And this relates to one other observation about food freedom. For every small alternative dairyman being oppressed by an overweening state, there are a thousand conventional merchants being oppressed. Food freedom means food freedom. This should include, on a equal footing, the guy who wants to sell you his curds and whey right out of the cow almost, and the guy who wants to sell you 16 ounces of sody pop.

In doing this, we have to distinguish levels of intrusiveness and bossiness, represented by the conventional approach to food safety, and the new foodie approach. As should be plain from what I have written above, I do have foundational disagreements with our current approach to food safety, and want to see it completely reformed. The old system was the set up for the new tyrants. But I still want to make a distinction.

In the old days, health inspectors would drop in on restaurants in order to enforce basic hygiene, and to prevent any of the customers from departing this world in paroxysms of pain later that same week. There was a fairly straight line connection between what they were seeking to discourage and what they were trying to prevent — a line that just lasted for just hours.

The new cries for regulation coming from what might be called the foodie left are being done in the name of health and safety (just like the old days), but they are not trying to prevent agonizing deaths later this week. Rather, they are trying to usher in a food utopia, by means of regulations and taxes. They have a vision for the good life and, by George, you had better come along. They want it mandated that your apple will have been locally grown, which has nothing to do with dying a slow death as far as I can see.

The foodie left are totalitarians of the plate. All the frenzies that they get going, whether it is about sugar, or gluten, or locally produced, and so forth, are frenzies that serve the same function that the global warming frenzy tried to produce — more state power, exhaustive state power.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Eating the Bag Itself

Posted on Tuesday, July 9, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

This morning I sent out a link to what I called an edifying food rant, which you can read here. Having done so, I thought it might be good for me to summarize a few basic observations about food and the modern Christian. This is by no means exhaustive, but it should give the lay of the land. This is why this subject is of such major concern to me.

The basic food law for Christians is love. The basic food law for Christians is that of reducing friction to table fellowship. Adding diet barriers increases potential points of friction. Whenever diet barriers are necessary for medical reasons (as they often are), we should work with them, of course. But we should all recognize what our shared goal should be — free table fellowship, for all Christians, in every direction. Two Christians, with completely different brown bag lunches, should be able to laugh and talk together over those lunches, even though one bag is filled with food that is full of pure thoughts and the healthiest thing to do with the other lunch would be to eat the bag itself.

Whenever I write about food, which I am constrained pastorally to do, one of the standard dismissive responses that I see in comments and web chatter is that I am not educated on the subject, that I have not read the right studies, etc.
But I am not making these observations as a food expert (though I am reasonably well-read on the subject). I am making these observations as someone who has been studying people in depth for four decades or so. I couldn’t recognize gluten under a microscope to save my soul, but I can recognize monkey-see-monkey-do when I see it. I do know how to identify a young woman with daddy issues that are all heaped up on her nearly empty plate. I know what food wowserism looks like. I can recognize a green produce pecksniffian. I know what a moralistic crusade looks like.

For those whose food choices are different from mine, and who are not doing these weird people things, then I am quite prepared to bless God for every one of their menu choices. Honestly. But to appeal to that great Seinfeld line — “People! They’re the worst!”

So the issue is the people, never the food. Jesus declared all food, as such, clean. He didn’t just declare what I like clean. He declared the following clean — sun-dried raisins, bacon, clam chowder, tofu, GMOs, Wonder bread, Grape-Nuts, and the yogurt, strawberries and granola I just had for breakfast. When the food is just food, and God is thanked for it, and there are no hidden ideological agendas, I couldn’t care less what my brother eats. I wouldn’t dream of taking him to a restaurant and ordering for him. And when he orders, I wouldn’t dream of turning up my nose at his choice, saying, “You know, studies have shown . . .” Okay, I might say something if he ordered grits with shrimp, but only in a jolly, comradery way.

As one sage has said, knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad. This principle of knowledge and wisdom applies to more than just tomatoes.

Sanity and Progress At Last

Going Dutch

It’s taken thirty years, but it looks as if the GM food revolution is happening.  First, some context.  Genetic modification of food (both animal and vegetable) has been in existence since the time humans were first created.  In New Zealand, our agricultural industries have thrived and become more and more productive due to genetic engineering.

New Zealand gardens have bloomed with ever increasing numbers of rose varieties, all the product of genetic engineering.  Genes of plants and animals have been altered due to the selective breeding of species.  But as soon as it became technically feasible to alter the genetic structure of foods by splicing genes together in a laboratory Greenist luddites, inflamed with visions of an imminent holocaust, shut down research centres, destroyed experiments, and used fear and manipulation of the public mind to stop deploying genetically modified crops. 

Protesters destroy GM crops. Photograph: David Hoffman Photo Library / Al/Alamy

“Keep NZ GE free” was the slogan.  It sprouted up on bumper stickers everywhere.  Eventually sanity has prevailed–at least in more advanced and enlightened countries, such as the Philippines and India.  This is one of the more encouraging pieces you will read in the newspapers this year.  It appeared in The Guardian.
 

Scientists say they have seen the future of genetically modified foods and have concluded that it is orange or, more precisely, golden. In a few months, golden rice – normal rice that has been genetically modified to provide vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world – will be given to farmers in the Philippines for planting in paddy fields.

Thirty years after scientists first revealed they had created the world’s first GM crop, hopes that their potential to ease global malnutrition problems may be realised at last. Bangladesh and Indonesia have indicated they are ready to accept golden rice in the wake of the Philippines’ decision, and other nations, including India, have also said that they are considering planting it.

“Vitamin A deficiency is deadly,” said Adrian Dubock, a member of the Golden Rice project. “It affects children’s immune systems and kills around two million every year in developing countries. It is also a major cause of blindness in the third world. Boosting levels of vitamin A in rice provides a simple, straightforward way to put that right.”  Recent tests have revealed that a substantial amount of vitamin A can be obtained by eating only 60g of cooked golden rice. “This has enormous potential,” said Dubock.

This has been a long time coming.  It could have happened decades ago–improving, if not saving the lives of thousands upon thousands of vulnerable children.  But fear and apocalyptic scaremongering had paralysed regulators and politicians.

But scientists’ satisfaction over the Golden Rice project has been tempered by the fact that it has taken an extraordinarily long time for the GM crop to be approved. Golden rice was created late last century, but its development and cultivation has been opposed vehemently by campaigners who have flatly refused to accept that it could deliver enough vitamin A, and who have also argued that the crop’s introduction in the developing world would make farmers increasingly dependent on western industry. The crop has become the cause célèbre of the anti-GM movement, which sees golden rice as a tool of global capitalism.

Read that last paragraph again.  It avers that one objection was based on quasi-scientific grounds: Golden Rice would never deliver enough vitamin A (now thoroughly debunked).  The second objection was purely ideological and political.  Golden rice was seen as a tool of “global capitalism”!  It’s better to have humans go blind and starve than subject them to “global capitalism”–whatever that might be.  All ideas have consequences.  In this case, the consequences of a very bad ideology have been deadly and cruel.

Thankfully, some Greenists are recognizing the errors of their previous position.  Hats off to these folk.

This view is shared by Mark Lynas, the environmental campaigner and one of the founders of the anti-GM crop movement. He has publicly apologised for opposing the planting of GM crops in Britain. “The first generation of GM crops were suspect, I believed then, but the case for continued opposition to new generations – which provide life-saving vitamins for starving people – is no longer justifiable. You cannot call yourself a humanitarian and be opposed to GM crops today.”

One wonders if dyed-in-the-wool Greenists in New Zealand, such as Sue Kedgely and Jeanette Fitzsimmons who have viewed GM food as the ultimate anathema, together with the current crop of Green politicians, will likewise recant their errors.  Unlikely.  They have now moved on to other cause c’elebres, such as windmills and green energy.  GM is so passe.  So last century.

Peter Beyer, the inventor of Golden Rice, recounts how the “approval process” worked.

The reactions of bureaucracies to golden rice were also described by Beyer as “hard to believe”. “We have had to undergo endless trials and tests and endure endless amounts of bureaucracy. Yet new breeds of standard crops have no such problems, even though they are often created by exposing them to doses of radiation. This is done to create new mutant breeds which you can then grow to see if any have features you like. None of the regulations that we had to meet in creating golden rice were imposed on these plant breeders. Yet this is the standard means by which new crops, including organic crops, are created. It is manifestly unbalanced.”

This point was backed by Dubock. “All the time we have been required to show that there are no risks associated with growing golden rice, but at no point did we get a chance to point out its benefits. Everything is about risk assessment and nothing is about benefits assessment.” 

The focus upon risks, not weighed against benefits shows that the whole approval process was deliberately slanted to shut GM engineered food down.  Now, thankfully, it is being exposed as apocalyptic luddite ignorance.

The fate of golden rice is therefore important, as Professor Jonathan Jones of the John Innes Centre points out. “When I started making GM plants 30 years ago I did wonder if there might be “unknown unknowns”. But the evidence now is clear. GM food and crops are as safe as non-GM food and crops”.

Of course, not all countries and cultures have rice as their staple food.  But the successes with Golden Rice have prompted other food engineers to come up with modified bananas.

The Golden Rice project has had one beneficial knock-on effect, however. It has triggered a series of similar crop modification programmes that aim to tackle vitamin A deficiency through use of other GM foodstuffs. One example is provided by the golden banana, which has been created by scientists led by Professor James Dale of Queensland University in Australia.

“In Uganda, where the banana is a key source of nutrition, there is considerable vitamin A deficiency and also iron deficiency in diets,” he said. “The former not only causes blindness but leaves children less able to fight disease which, in Africa, is particularly serious. The latter, iron deficiency, causes blood disorders.”

To put this right, Dale and his team have found ways to boost beta-carotene levels in bananas. Now they are working on boosting iron levels as well. The team expects to have a golden banana that will raise both iron and vitamin A levels, though that will take until the end of the decade. “People in Uganda eat up to a kilogram of mashed banana a day, so we don’t need to get a great deal of beta-carotene in our bananas,” said Dale.

No doubt some will say, “Ugh–how shocking.  Golden bananas.”  Imagine the grotesqueness of peeling a banana only to find that has the colour of a carrot.  Playing fast and loose with the natural order will end up destroying us all.  Mmmmm.

 The result of the team’s work will be similar to golden rice: peeled, the pale fruit will be carrot-coloured. And if that sounds strange, it is worth noting that carrots were not originally orange. In the 17th century they were mostly yellow or purple, but were bred to be orange by Dutch farmers in tribute to the ruling House of Orange.  

How about that.  For centuries we have been happily munching on genetically modified carrots, and the world has not come to an end.  But it does confirm one canard: the Dutch have a lot to answer for.

 

Freedom and Eccentricity

Celebrating Difference and the Odd

There is something endearing about a national culture which does not just tolerate, but celebrates eccentricity.  For our money it is one of the attractions of the United Kingdom.  Yes, we acknowledge the UK is in a kind of death spiral; only radical changes in the polity will allow its survival as the UK we have known.

But vestiges of former greatness remain.  Take, for example, the irascible Duke of Edinburgh who, amongst other diverting behaviours, has had the temerity to scorn, mock and deride wind power.  According to His Royal Highness, wind power is a stupid crock.  So much for respecting current PC wisdom.  Not to mention, of course, his son Charles, who reportedly talks to plants.  And then there are delightful characters like Jeremy Clarkson and his colleagues.

Clarkson is a publishing and broadcasting phenomenon.

No Idea What Freedom Means

Swaddled in Kindness That Kills

People have a right to go to the grave in their own way.  It’s called freedom.  Necessarily contingent to the ethic of freedom is that we have a human right to damage to ourselves, undermine our own health, shorten our lives by stupid habits, and otherwise act to our own destruction. Not before God, mind–but before civic authorities.

The most oft-heart objection to freedom arises out of social welfare: since the cost of paying for damage is collectivised in our kookie world, those who damage themselves–by what they eat, or drink, or ingest, for example–end up costing the collective.  So, they must be made to stop it.

Rubbish.
  Economic models have demonstrated repeatedly that people who live short, relatively diseased lives cost the Exchequer far less than those who live long lives of physical probity.  The people with stupid self-harming behaviours actually do the Exchequer (that is, all of the rest of us) a great good.  They are saving us all money.

In the United States, Michelle Obama has accepted the duty to be the nation’s Mother–lecturing all and sundry about the duty of healthy eating.  Mayor Bloomberg, wowser-in-chief, has banned just about everything ingestible to improve public health and to fight obesity in New York.  Both–along with all their confabulating confederates–are enemies of human freedom.

Far, far more salutary would be a very simple message: take responsibility for yourself and face the consequences of your actions.  That’s what a freedom is after all.   Therefore, you have a right to be stupid, to do damage to yourself, to shorten your own life, to impoverish yourself, and to engage in your own destruction. And the rest of us will defend your right to do it, even while choosing other courses.

Ironically, US citizens sing about living “in the land of the free and the home of the brave”.  Nah.  In Bloomberg City and Obamaland US citizens live in the land of the wowser and the home of the cocooned.  “We know what’s best for you, so do what we say.”

Yes, we shall.  Mayor Bloomberg is our Father and Michelle is our Mother.  Will you sing nursery rhymes to us as you swaddle us in our beds?  

Selling Our Souls Down the River

State Control of Stools and Urine

The electronic communication zone is running hot over some inane comments by some “researchers in public health”.  These illuminati were interviewed on national radio and had the temerity to utter the following inanity:

Obesity, she said, was “not a problem with individual choice and self-discipline, which we’ve proved successfully doesn’t work”.  Instead it’s the fault of “big institutions and the market”.

Most of the criticism rightly points out that for 99 percent of the obese population their condition is caused by three things–what they ingest, how much, and what is not done to burn the calories off.  It is a completely self-inflicted condition.  Quite right.
  Naturally, the “researchers in public health”  have alternative predictable solutions: more rules, regulations, restriction, and government controls over what you eat.  In the end, the government will have to ration our food and ban lots of nasty things.  We will end up clinging to Mother’s skirts in a perpetual, malingering second childhood. 

Naturally enough this sort of nannying (incidentally, both researchers are females) is offensive.  At this point in history most New Zealanders resent a government telling them how to act, what to think, and above all, what to eat.  Sadly almost no-one amongst the objectors is prepared to acknowledge that the fight was lost almost eighty years ago. 

When our forebears, in their myopic wisdom, decided that government had a duty to provide state funded health-care, and voted for politicians who would give them their lusts,  it was all over, rover.  For, as a perceptive sage pointed out, if you cede to government the duty and responsibility to take care of your health, you have implicitly given over total control of  your physical being.  A government that is responsible for your healthcare, is responsible for your health, period; such a government will inevitably extend its reach to control what you eat and what is allowed to come out the rear end–and how often. 

It will all be done under the cloak of cost containment, of course.  We have got to control what people eat, because if we don’t the rampant costs of treating the obesity epidemic will squash us all flat.  It’s a matter of survival of our species as we know it.  Toss in a dose of guilt and another generous helping of pious pity and who can resist–with principled consistency, that is?

Most of those railing against the two nannies who “research” public health do so with a fair dose of inconsistent hypocrisy.  We do not doubt that these objectors would at the same time argue for the reasonableness of a publicly funded health system per se.  Getting rid of the entire nannying edifice would be as offensive to them as the stupid observations of our elite health researchers.

We repeat: if you are going to look to government to fund your doctors’ visits, health procedures, subsidize your medicine, and provide you with hospitals you have already, in principle, ceded to the state control over your body.  Such a Leviathan will eventually move to control the food you ingest, the air that you breathe, the hours you must sleep, the length and temperature of your showers, and the “quality” of your stools and urine.

Whilst we remain gratified that there are still people in this country who will stand up to intrusive government controls, another part of us want to say, “Stop your whining.  You sold your souls to the Devil a long, long time ago.  Now Old Nick has come to collect.”   

The Deadly Results of Left-Wing Politics

The Moral High Ground

Jim Lacey

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
September 7, 2011
The Left’s “morally superior” policies kill millions and impoverish billions.

Soon after I published an article questioning the global-warming orthodoxy, the world’s foremost hypocrite, Al Gore, informed anyone who still listens to him that my position is akin to racism. The wise course of action would be to ignore the rants of a man who desperately needs the world to remain fearful of carbon, the element on which all life on earth is based. If that fear were to vanish, how would he continue to rake in the millions needed for the purchase of his next beach house?

But enough is enough. Why should I sit quietly and let myself be branded a racist? In fact, will someone please explain how the Left is always assumed to have the moral high ground in these kinds of debates? I am particularly curious about this, as leftist policies continue to destroy the lives of tens of millions in this country and billions worldwide.

Let’s go through just a small part of the evidence.

The Left has fought the spread of genetically modified (GM) foods with every weapon in its arsenal. Leftists did this in the name of combatting a long list of “potential risks” that never materialized. They have been permitted to overlook the fact that their assaults on GM food were not cost free. For instance, they have greatly delayed and in some places stopped cold the use of rice modified to increase vitamin A content. For the Left this is cause for celebration. In fact, widespread use of this “golden rice” would have prevented a half-million cases of child blindness a year.

So the next time someone talks to you about the evils of genetically modified foods, remind him of the millions of poor children this crusade has condemned to a lifetime of blindness. How do folks prepared to allow millions to needlessly go blind still command the respect of any truly moral person?

However, even looking the other way as children go blind pales in comparison to the needless starving of millions that has occurred because anti-GM-food groups have frightened and bullied the people and governments of Africa into forbidding the use of GM seeds. Such seeds, modified to resist the effects of drought and disease, would make Africa self-sufficient in foodstuffs. But for most African farmers they remain unavailable because of the successful efforts of American and European anti-GM-food groups. Even though every American consumes GM foods on an almost daily basis, with no ill effects, they remain off limits to those most in need.

There is no reason the Somali child pictured below needs to be hungry except for the fact that some groups are working overtime to prevent his country from growing the food needed to feed him. What do you call people who are willing to let millions starve to death rather than let them grow food that scientists long ago proved safe?Why the anti-GM groups are not condemned for crimes against humanity escapes me. For that matter, as these groups have made it their life mission to starve poor Africans, Asians, and other peoples of color, how come they have never been branded as racists?

And malnutrition is not the only problem afflicting Africa and other poor regions of the world. Among the greatest scourges is malaria, which infects 250 million and kills 1 million every year. In fact, in Africa, one in every five childhood deaths is a result of malaria. If you are a reader of average speed, then consider that ten to twelve children will have died from malaria between the time you started this article and the time you finish it. None of this is necessary. Malaria was vanquished in the United States and Europe through the copious use of DDT. But this blessing has been denied poor African nations because Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring blamed DDT for killing eagles and other birds.

Fifty years later Carson’s discredited work remains a rallying cry for environmentalists who tirelessly work to ensure that poor nations do not have access to DDT, favoring instead a cocktail of methods that have been proven ineffective. Interestingly, I was once accosted by an environmental zealot over that last statement. He wanted to know what proof I had that other methods were ineffective. I pointed out the continuing deaths of a million people and asked how long he had been involved in the environmental movement. When he told me he had been doing this for a dozen years I casually mentioned that during his activist years he had worked for a movement responsible for killing two times as many persons as perished in the Holocaust, and that was just from malaria-related deaths alone. Yet he thought, and probably still thinks, that he occupies the moral high ground.

In truth, almost all the harmful effects attributed to DDT have been proven not to exist. Moreover, the benefits of DDT use can be achieved using a fraction of the quantity used to eradicate malaria in the United States. Just what do leftists have against blacks, particularly blacks in Africa, that causes them to push policies that sicken and kill them by the tens of millions? And why do they get to claim they sing with the angels as they preside over this slaughter of innocents?

Let’s move on a bit. That most stupendous of hypocrites, Al Gore again, uses more electricity in a week than 28 million poor Ugandans use in a year. Still he gets to brand me a racist for doubting his unsupported claims about global warming. The simple fact of the matter is that alternative sources of energy are inefficient, unreliable, and very expensive. If poor countries are forced to adopt alternative energy sources over cheap carbon-based energy, then there is no feasible scenario in which developing nations will be able to afford even a fraction of the energy required to escape poverty. As the Ugandan Fiona Kobusingye points out in a recent article:

Not having electricity means millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning — or offices, factories, and shops to make things and create good jobs. Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles, and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.

She goes on to say, “Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development — except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels — is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.” And she concludes, “We need to stop listening to global-warming witch doctors, who get rich telling us to keep living ‘indigenous,’ impoverished lives.”

Yet I am the one Al Gore brands as a racist.

But the damage the warmists are doing or hope to do does not end there. To save a planet that stopped warming in 1998, they want the United States and other industrial countries to reduce carbon output by 80 percent by 2050 (many are shooting for 2020), relative to a 1990 baseline. Let’s assume we multiply our wasteful spending on solar and wind power tenfold. If we do, then on particularly sunny and windy days we may eventually get 25 percent of our energy from those sources. That leaves us short about half the energy we need to support current GDP levels. As studies demonstrate that every 1 percent reduction in power causes a 0.7 percent reduction in GDP, I wonder how the warmists plan to employ the additional 25 million Americans thrown out of work.

Moreover, in the world’s emerging economies each 1 percent loss of GDP causes almost 2,500 premature deaths per 100,000 population. So, if the warmists get their way, they would kill off about 50 million persons a year on their way to a 2050 nirvana. One could plausibly claim that as soon as the pain became apparent, politicians would immediately reverse course before more damage was done. Such a belief would be comforting if we were not witnessing the destruction of huge amounts of food in order to turn it into inefficient and costly energy. One would think that global food riots and millions of starving people would cause a rethinking of our priorities. But this year, American farmers will grow more corn for ethanol than for food. After all, why should the empty bellies of countless children get in the way of saving the planet from warmist fantasies? Look again at that picture of a starving black child and tell me whose policies are racist.

How about something closer to home? Data released last week show that America’s jobless rate among black teenagers was 46.5 percent, and the overall rate of black joblessness is double that of the white population. Why? One needs to look no further than liberal policies implemented in our major cities, which have destroyed the black family unit, discouraged business investment, and subsidized the worst education system in the developed world. In fact, if a foreign power tried to force our education system on inner cities, we would send in the Marines to stop it.

Instead, we let leftist-dominated teachers’ unions run an education system that ensures half of the students trapped in it will be unemployable upon graduation. When these unions are called to account, they attack the critics as wanting to hurt the children. For how much longer will unions be allowed to claim they are “all about the children,” while in fact they are wrecking those children’s futures and condemning many of them to spend the rest of their lives in poverty? And why am I called a child-hating racist for daring to point out the truth?

There is so much more. What, for instance, can one say about the morality of economic policies that place a $70,000 debt on every American child? Is it really moral to take all the money the better-off earn and thereby deprive them of funds they could have invested to create the millions of jobs the unemployed need? What is moral about expanding the multicultural dogma, when the one thing it definitely creates is an unassimilated mass of youths with limited future prospects? What is moral about diversity programs that more often than not create isolated warring tribes within America’s most important institutions? Finally, is it really moral to force Americans to purchase medical insurance coverage they don’t want? And if you think it is, then where does government power over private lives end? What of freedom?

The day has long since passed when the Right needs to concede the moral high ground to the Left on any issue. Yes, we may be able to win most of the great debates on the merits of our ideas; but as a wise man once explained to me: “What I believe rationally is open to debate and change. What I believe emotionally cannot be changed by reason. An emotional belief can only be changed by an emotional argument.” The Left has known this for decades. That is why the those on the left never misses a chance to brand those on the right with the most contemptible slurs they can think of. We need not descend into the gutter and trade personal insults, but we should never miss a chance to point out the vile results of the policies the Left is pushing.

In every sphere of public debate, the moral high ground belongs to the Right. Claim it!

— Jim Lacey is the author of The First Clash and Keep from All Thoughtful Men.

>Reading and Weeping

> More “Help” From Unlawful Government Acts

We posted recently on the looming global food shortages being caused by do-gooding government restrictions, rules, regulations, and rorts.  Oxfam’s response to solve the shortages is to call for–you guessed it–more government.  Actually, the mother of all government–the big one–global government.  It’s time for an international Five Year Plan.  Uncle Joe, where are we when we need you?  Come back  All is forgiven.  We are dump stupid sheep; we need an iron fist.  Go, Oxfam.

Whilst our mockery is holy, being joined to the scorn and laughter in heaven itself, (Psalm 2:4) it also includes an undertone of deep, abiding anger at the cupidity and hubris of men who would vainly attempt to banish God from our world.  The despite they cause! The destruction they wreak!  Another undertone is mourning and sadness for the millions of people who will suffer and die in squalid hunger as a result of these ungodly, unlawful exercises of government power.

ScrubOne kindly referred us to an article detailing yet another example of the genre–this time in Canada.  As he aptly said, “read it and weep”.