Food Fight: California brings the nanny state to the kitchen table
California’s new state motto might as well be “Does this dress make me look fat?” No other state comes close to California’s aesthetic obsession, which has birthed innumerable diet and fitness fads and made the gym into the equivalent of a state church. Considered on its merits, it’s a largely unobjectionable trend—laudable, even, for its emphasis on self-improvement. But when wed to two of California’s more unfortunate proclivities—a reflexive, nearly primitive worship of all things “natural” (usually evangelized by someone carrying an iPhone) and an insatiable appetite among government officials for meddling in the most minuscule aspects of everyday life—it spells trouble.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the City Council in Los Angeles, the state’s epicenter of vanity, recently made headlines by expanding its portfolio to include citywide dietary management. Last month, the body unanimously voted to approve a resolution exhorting Angelinos to participate in “meatless Mondays,” a weekly exercise in herbivorousness justified on multiple grounds: from combating obesity (which cynics might note is a malady afflicting some of the council members) to reducing carbon footprints to preventing animal cruelty (apparently tolerable the other six days of the week). It was as if council members dared one another to see how many liberal erogenous zones they could stimulate with a single initiative.