No, We Don't Need Big Government To Save Us from "Big Food"
Americans ought to rejecting this totalitarian temptation.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who liked junk food. And I mean really liked junk food. He liked junk food so much, that, as a result of an excess in consumption of said foods, the boy was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease upon reaching his sweet sixteen. Unfortunately, the boy was doomed to deal with these chronic health conditions for the rest of his life. This predicament made him sad, understandably. So, when he turned 18, he took the only reasonable course of action to reckon with his eating mistakes.
He sued the producers of these junk foods.
Soon, the tycoons at companies like PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and General Mills found a strange envelope at their desks. Inside these envelopes, was a lengthy document, which, to their dismay, said, “NOTICE. You have been sued in court.” Serves them right. After all, they’re the ones who failed to label that their products were just so dang good. If only Big Food warned everyone that consuming their products by the ton could lead to ailments, then folks like this poor boy surely would have never received diabetes or liver disease.
Thankfully, the boy was not alone in holding Big Food accountable. He had the forces at the Make America Healthy Again squad by his side. MAHA could see that behind all that deliciousness with Big Food was poison—deadly poison, in fact. Food dyes, seed oils, pasteurized milk, and all of these poisons are responsible for the health epidemic in modern-day America. That boy was just one of many who have suffered under the tyranny of Big Food. Thank God MAHA has finally emerged.
Now, Back in the Real World
In case you didn’t know, everything you just read above was largely true. The boy is named Bryce Martinez, and he’s suing players in the so-called “Big Food” cabal for, as Axios describes, “‘engineering’ ultra-processed products to be addictive, marketing the items towards children and allegedly causing chronic disease in kids.” Simply put, the kid ate too much junk food in his teens, got diabetes and liver disease as a result, and now he’s blaming the food producers for his own bad choices (not to mention the negligence of his parents).
I think this is all profoundly stupid. Martinez wants to paint himself as a victim of Big Food instead of owning up to the decisions he freely chose to make. The idea that he couldn’t help but eat too much because the food corporations made their products “addictive” should strike any sensible chap as being ridiculous.
I’ve enjoyed plenty of sodas, candies, chips, and all sorts of junk food. They’re all really good, but to say that they are inherently addicting is nonsense. It’s literally the job of PepsiCo or KraftHeinz to make their products so good that you want to keep buying them. If that’s not their goal, they have no reason to exist.
Every day, I make choices to eat or not eat these products. If I get craving for a bag of Doritos, I have to make the call on whether I want to give in and enjoy the chips or resist and either have some fruit or nothing at all. These are choices we all have to make, and we all own the consequences of our choices.
But Martinez just wants you to feel bad for him. He doesn’t want to bear any responsibility.
According to Martinez and the lawyers surrounding him, if you produce a really tasty product, and someone decides to eat so much of it that they get chronically sick, then you are the problem. You must be doing something to the food that is forcing people to get sick.
MAHA Avengers, Assemble!
And now this all brings me to the Make America Healthy Again craze being spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and friends. RFK is all about blaming the food producers for the health problems in America and not the individuals who are choosing to eat in excess. I’m not saying that all the ideas of the MAHA people are garbage. I think policies like reforming food stamps so that you can’t buy junk food with taxpayer money are good ideas. If you’re being subsidized to buy unhealthy food with food stamps, then you are being incentivized to live irresponsibly. But sensible ideas like this aren’t the main goals of the MAHA Avengers.
RFK has gone as far as to say stuff like, “We are betraying our children by letting these industries poison them.” How is Big Food “poisoning” the children? Typically RFK would say through stuff like seed oils. His argument rests on the correlation of diabetes greatly increasing in the 1990s, around the same time seed oils started being used.
Now for starters, RFK is grossly exaggerating the unhealthiness of these targets of his ire. Doctors debate the upsides and downsides of seed oil. Some say there is hardly any reason to avoid them. Others will say it might be wise to ditch them. I don’t have any strong opinions on the healthiness of seed oils myself, but that’s not my point. Most people use seed oils (especially canola oil) because they are cheaper than better and probably healthier options like olive oil. You can make the choice to bid adieu to seed oils, but it’s gonna cost you. That’s called personal responsibility.
But the MAHA crowd wants to take that responsibility away and shove a big middle finger in the face of Americans who don’t see any real downsides with these oils. There are congresspeople like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna tweeting, “We must BAN seed oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and other highly processed additives.”
I’m sorry, were you enjoying using low-priced canola oil? Well too bad. It’s for your own good.
Fundamental to so many bad policies that exceed the safeguards of limited government is the idea that we must be kept safe from ourselves. Only a big government savior can rescue us from all our woes. And because they have the power, big government gets to tell us what our woes are and whether we need rescuing from them. Whether right-wingers who are all for MAHA realize it or not, they are becoming more and more like socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders by the day.
Regardless of what you think about the healthiness or unhealthiness of Big Food (I’m tired of typing that name), we don’t need the government to save us, especially when the claims being made by our self-appointed saviors are dubious at best. Sure, we’ve seen an increase in diabetes since the 1990s, but the diabetes mortality rate (despite seeing a bit of a jump for a while) is largely the same now as it was back then—though still higher than most other developed countries.
The public health challenges America is facing are complex. Simply banning seed oils is unlikely to solve the prevalence of diabetes, and it opens the door to the government micromanaging how we live. As a conservative, I believe in limited government. Letting the government ban a major ingredient that millions of Americans use frequently is an invitation to totalitarianism.
Realistically speaking, I don’t really see these more troubling aspects of MAHA coming to pass, but if RFK is confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services under the Trump Administration, it is certainly more likely to happen. If we really want to champion making America healthy again, then we must emphasize personal responsibility. That means rejecting dumb lawsuits from Bryce Martinez blaming the food industries for his bad choices and rejecting bad policies from the likes of RFK that would restrict seed oils under the deceptive guise of caring about health. It’s not like Americans are incapable of choosing to eat balanced meals.
Hopefully, the totalitarian temptation of MAHA will be discarded to the waste basket of bad ideas.