Maine’s Governor signed a bill the other day, part of which forces chain restaurants within the state to publish nutritional information on their menus. For now this law will only apply to those chain type restaurants that have at least twenty locations nationwide or otherwise. In other words, fast food places and the theme type restaurants that you see all over the country these days would have to comply while your favorite one-offs would be exempt.
The goal is to give people the nutritional information they are lacking so they can make healthier choices in these eateries and become healthier as the end result. Baldacci and his liberal way of thinking insist that once again, only Big Brother can truly take care of you and I the lowly John Q. Public. I am so fucking tired of these jerk-offs telling me how to live and what I should be eating and what I should be avoiding. Today it’s the nutritional information on the menus, tomorrow it will be the banning of foods deemed unhealthy by the government.
I don’t know about anyone else in this great state we live in but I know that when I go out to eat I am not worried about the calories in what I am ordering. The reason for this is twofold. The first is that since I am eating out as opposed to eating at home I am there because I want to be and not because I am trying to maintain some sort of diet. When I go out to eat whether it is at a McDonald’s or a Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse, I eat whatever the fuck I want. I eat what I want because I am there to do just that. An imbecile can figure out that if you care about what you take in you need to stay out of restaurants in the first place. The second is that I do not eat out enough for the intake of calories I receive from one of these places to be a major factor in my long term health. I know that some people eat out every day and that their risk of health problems may be higher because of it but I think that comes down to choices and personal responsibility. At some point we need to usher the children out from under the apron and let them make decisions on their own and suffer the consequences or reap the rewards of those decisions.
Putting the nutritional values on the menus may make some of the people not eat the things they would have eaten otherwise but those people are assholes and easily led around by the nose. They’re the same people who join cults like organized religion because they can’t think for themselves and need to be told how to fucking do everything. The same moron that ate at McDonald’s every day for twenty years and then tried to sue them because he claimed he didn’t know their food was making him fat, would fall into this category. I would go as far as saying that I don’t want to know what the fat content is in any of the fast food that I eat. What’s next, forcing the meat companies to reveal what’s really in hot dogs, Vienna sausages, SPAM, and bologna? It would be the end of humanity as we know it if those things were revealed. They say there’s no Santa Claus, well let me tell you, SPAM is our fucking Santa Claus if anything ever was. SPAM is something that can’t possibly be true and yet there it is for all to see and buy and dare each other to eat. SPAM is Santa Fucking Claus for the masses.
The other thing that pisses me off about this new bill is something that started quite a few years ago and makes bills like this ridiculous in the first place. Almost every fast food place and a lot of sit down restaurants offer healthy food alternatives to the normal fat filled shit on the menu. They started this marketing scheme back in the early nineties when the country was on one of its many health kicks because they wanted to appeal to those customers they were starting to lose to diets. So, all of these places now have healthy alternatives on their menus and people still eat the nasty shit because that’s what they really want. That’s why I think putting the nutritional value on the menu isn’t going to attract any more people than those I already mentioned that are too easily influenced as it is.
On a side note to this story I would like to express my disappointment to those fast food places that started the trend of offering healthy alternatives in an effort to keep a larger customer base. I understand why they did it. They didn’t want to lose money due to people trying to eat healthier by not offering something for them. It made good fiscal sense and it kept more of the same people coming through the door and maybe even added a few new customers. What I am disappointed about is that this was really nothing more than a sellout for the easy cash. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, and every other successful fast food greasy spoon out there sold out their core values for the sake of the easy green. People should not be going to one of these places because they know they can get a pre-packaged salad with a celebrity’s own dressing on it. No, you go to these places to eat because you want a big, nasty, greasy double cheeseburger or an all meat pizza and fuck all to the calories. You go there to get hot salt laden French fries, and chocolate shakes, not to visit the salad bar that everyone has sneezed all over a hundred times.
I don’t eat at the fast food joints that much anymore because I realize that food is not healthy and I need to eat such food in moderation, but when I do go there I get what I want. So, go ahead and put the nutritional values on the labels, Governor Pizza Face and let’s see what a massive difference it makes in our fat state. (Pretty rich that a man whose family made its money serving greasy Italian food to people would feel so strongly about this whole thing.) I don’t care if the label says a Double Quarter Pounder has 10,000 calories and 500 grams of trans fats, if I decide to go to McDonald’s I will order one if that’s what I feel like.
Remember people all this shit is just one more piece of control that we give up to the government. How long before someone in Augusta decides we’d all be better off if we just didn’t have that stuff to eat in the first place? When that day arrives I think I will move to the state house, throw on a diaper, and let the governor baby sit me good and proper like he’s wanted to do from day one.
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Like you're going to look up at the menu board, do some quick calculations and have this Road to Fucking Damascus moment when you shout, "Holy Christ! Eating two Double Whoppers with cheese, a honkin' sized order fries and a vat of Coke ain't good for ya! Oh, wait...make that a Diet Coke instead. Gotta watch my caloric intake, y'know."
ReplyDeleteWhat pisses me off is that Hannah Pingree apparently thought this bill was more important than all the other things they should have been working on in Augusta.