Felix Mizioznikov/iStockphotoFor some people, the central knock on Mayor Bloomberg is his eagerness to institute a “nanny state,” the most recent example of which is his administration’s attempt (opposed by nearly two-thirds of Americans)to ban large servings of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). In this scenario a nanny is unquestionably a bad thing: an excessive and patronizing intrusion, something to be feared and reviled.
A nanny — at her worst — is someone who treats people like children. At her best and most basic, however, she takes care of and protects our children while we’re not around. And off the top of my head I can think of one group of people who deserve to be treated and protected like children: children.
What might Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal accomplish? Will it get grown-ups who are dead set on drinking two liters of soda a day to drink less? Probably not. Will it create an environment for the next generation of kids in which it is no longer normal to be served a 32-ounce cup of soda? Yes.
And if that’s nannying, I’m all for it. Here’s the question: Who do you want taking care of your kids while you’re not looking — governments interested in improving public health, or corporations interested in improving the bottom line at the expense of same?
There is a maddeningly false “choice” being put forth by the staunchest critics of this plan: either the government tells us what we can and cannot eat and drink, or we exercise our unbridled freedom in making those decisions for ourselves. If we were truly free to make our own uncorrupted choices about what to eat and drink, then corporations wouldn’t be allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing junk food to kids (including onschool buses), and the federal government would subsidize fruits and vegetables (otherwise known a s “specialty crops”) at the same rate as the commodity crops that are often used to produce junk. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we’re already being told what to eat, and more often than not it’s the wrong thing.
Campaign for a Commercial-Free ChildhoodFor sure, the government doesn’t always act in our best interest when it comes to nutrition — an understatement, really — but Big Food never does, nor should we expect it to. If somebody with some real political clout is willing to stick his neck out for the public health of his city, then good for him and lucky for us. It’s easy to forget sometimes, but that’s what government is supposed to do: identify the activities that are bad for us or for others and make it harder for us to do them; activities like smoking cigarettes, wearing seat belts or drinking 32 ounces of soda at a stretch.
Some critics are more worried that the plan just won’t work. As the mayor himself admitted, there is nothing besides mild inconvenience preventing people from drinking just as much soda as ever; maybe that inconvenience will work and maybe it won’t. Either consumers will find it too burdensome to carry two cups at once or to go back for more, or they’ll exercise their right to free refills with a renewed sense of purpose (perhaps burning off some extra calories in the process of walking back and forth from the soda fountain).
Strangely enough, I don’t think it actually matters much if, in the short-term, consumption of SSBs drops off a bit or stays level. The battle to reverse the calamitous turn that the American diet has taken is long and uphill. The average portion sizes of our dietary staples (burgers, fries and soda) have increased at an alarming rate since the 1950s. A four-ounce burger, 2.5-ounce fries and seven-ounce soda used to be called a meal. Now it’s called tapas. We’ve created a new normal in which eating the average amount of the average American foods all too often leads to the average case of obesity or Type 2 diabetes. The real promise of the Bloomberg plan is not in immediately changing the habits of our adults, but in slowly beginning to change the environment for our kids.
Absurd IntellectualCould this be in our future?Drinking 64 ounces of soda in one sitting was likely as hard to imagine in the 1950s as drinking just four ounces is now. But somewhere down the road, when we’ve fully acknowledged the disastrous health implications of added sugars and elected enough people willing to do something about it, we’ll look back at the Double Gulp and say, “What the hell were we thinking?” The shift back to a sane diet (and make no mistake, drinking ourselves sick with sugar is insane) has to start somewhere. Is a ban on giant cups the most effective deterrent? No. But could it begin to pave the road (or the slippery slope, as some would call it) towards more aggressive and successful forms of legislation like taxation? Yes. And I hope it does.
Largely because of obesity, we are now raising the very first American generation with a shorter life expectancy than their parents. If this is where we’ve gotten without a nanny, I think it’s about time we get one. Several, in fact.
