From The New York Times:
A Brazilian court ruled this week that McDonald’s must pay a former franchise manager $17,500 because he gained 65 pounds (30 kilograms) while working there for a dozen years. The 32-year-old man said he felt forced to sample the food each day to ensure quality standards remained high . . .The man also said the company offered free lunches to employees, adding to his caloric intake while on the job.
This is sheer idiocy. McDonald’s does not make people fat. I lost 10 pounds while working at McDonalds for a summer. McDonald’s food is not any fattier than the food served by many other restaurants. The foie gras served in fancy restaurants is much fattier than hamburgers. Quiche Lorraine is also fattier than a hamburger. Food snobs may not like proletarian food like hamburgers, but then, I am indifferent to foie gras, which tastes a lot like canned dog food to me. Should I be able to keep food snobs from eating foie gras, just because it’s very fatty? (Ironically enough, my wife is French, so I’ve been exposed to foie gras a lot.)
There is now a big movement afoot to tax fast food in the pursuit of mythical public health benefits. The government is also moving to restrict the salt content of food, which could lead to increased obesity rates, more heart attacks, and “higher death rates among some individuals,” and make it harder to market low-fat foods.
Richard Morrison and Marc Scribner welcome Chris Horner, Sam Kazman, and Ryan Radia to Episode 96 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover Chicago’s dishonorable gun restrictions, a special interview with bestselling author Christopher C. Horner, civil disobedience on National Donut Day, a shout out to CEI’s annual dinner gala and the FTC’s proposed “Drudge Report Tax”.
Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome guests Marc Scribner, William Yeatman, Lee Doren and Angela Logomasini to Episode 94 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We tackle politics in the Aloha state, freedom of information at the University of Virginia, Bureaucrash’s best and brightest and the attack of the nanny state.
Are you thinking of getting one of those cool new “fish pedicures” in which two-inch-long carp nibble dead skin off your toes and feet? Well, you’d better act fast. Many states are considering a ban on the process. And an article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal (sorry, may be for subscribers only) explains that 14 states have now already banned it or found that the process violates an existing cosmetology or other public health rule.
Indeed, the introduction of fish pedicures in the United States was almost stillborn after Vietnamese immigrant John Ho imported the technique and thousands of fish from China. Ho, who is believed to be the first to use the technique in the U.S., was almost thwarted by the Fairfax County Virginia Health Department, which decided that a communal tub shared by the feet of several customers at once was a “public swimming pool” and that the fish made it unsanitary. A switch to individual tubs was enough to make it lawful in Virginia.
And, in other good news, Ohio has made an affirmative decision that the process is OK. In a fit of rationality that often seems unusual for state public health officials, the Ohio Board of Cosmetology decided the practice was sanitary enough. As the Journal explains:
[O]phthalmologist Marilyn Huheey, who sits on the Ohio State Board of Cosmetology, decided to try it out for herself in a Columbus salon last fall. After watching the fish lazily munch on her skin, she recommended approval to the board. “It seemed to me it was very sanitary, not sterile of course,” Dr. Huheey says. “Sanitation is what we’ve got to live with in this world, not sterility.”
Would that all governments recognized what seems so obvious.
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