Food Nanny-in-Chief?

Several news outlets are reporting that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who declared war on salt and Big Gulps when he was mayor of NYC, is considering a late entry into the already cray-cray 2016 presidential race. Which, if true, would not bode well for the cause of food freedom.

Chipotle Be Like: GMOs GTFO. The FDA Says: Meh.

Today, Chipotle (Hillary's new favorite burrito place) loudly and proudly announced that they shall no more serve genetically modified foods. Because those are terrible for you, right?

Maybe not so much ...

GMOs in foods have been a controversial topic for years, and even the FDA refuses to take an official stance. “While FDA regulates foods and ingredients, including foods made from genetically-engineered plants, the agency neither supports genetically-engineered plants based on their perceived benefits nor opposes them based on their perceived risks,” the agency says on its website.

But the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety center has said the agency found no basis that GMOs pose any different safety concerns than foods developed by traditional plant breeding.

Read more on Yahoo Health, and sarcastic tweets at Twitchy.

No One Has Ever Loved a Little Caesars Pizza More Than This Man.

Like millions before me, I've discovered Daym Drops and his Super Official food reviews on YouTube. No wonder he's become a huge internet star: it's a joy watching this guy react to fast food, which he usually eats inside his car, as one should. In this video, he crosses paths with Little Caesars' provocative new bacon-wrapped pizza. Enjoy.

Breakfast Shaming

Are you ashamed of eating normal breakfast foods when you please? No, of course not, because you are a normal person (albeit one with exceptional taste in blogs). But the food police aren’t normal down-to-earth folks like you and me.

When golfer Bubba Watson won the Masters, he decided to enjoy a Victory meal at good ol’ Waffle House and tweeted a picture about it. A nutritionist then went on Fox News and criticized Watson for setting a bad example by eating there, which set off a chain reaction of waffle-shaming by food-shaming types.

Some normal people might look at this and see a top athlete who is keeping it real by going to a normal-folks restaurant after winning a huge coveted prize – but that kind of humility doesn’t appeal to the elite food-shamers.

Rush Limbaugh made really good points about the larger significance of this seemingly silly incident: “They are not a kooky, small minority.  They're the base of the Democrat Party and they're out there actively stigmatizing … if you don't conform, and apparently the left thinks that eating any food other than what they say, is bad for your kids … Folks, it's not an insignificant thing … The left has really did a bang-up job of creating an army of like-minded genuine idiots to whom this stuff matters, and they are willing to act like a bunch of little junior fascist brownshirts running around trying to interrupt people's freedom, freedom of choice, what have you.”

“You've got Michelle Obama basically doing the same thing.  When you've got the First Lady of the country setting this example, and you've got people following it, don't make the mistake I made 20 years ago and think it's fringe and never gonna amount to anything.  Because now it has come to amount to things.”

It’s funny that Rush mentioned Michelle Obama, because she was targeted by the food cops next, despite being on their side, rhetoric-wise. PETA tried to shame the First Lady for using real eggs in the White House Easter Egg Roll. Of course if she’d used candy eggs, they would have called her out for encouraging kids to eat candy on Easter (imagine that). This stupid stunt puts me in the uncomfortable position of feeling some sympathy for Michelle Obama, which tells me that things are really getting out of hand.

Global Warming Guacamole Panic

It looks like Chipotle’s heavy-handed food-politics propaganda is starting to backfire.

The chain’s three-minute animated video, which pretentiously implied that Chipotle was saving the world from processed-food-dominated dystopia one taco at a time, was slammed as one of 2013’s worst ads by a panel of ad-industry insiders.

Their new TV series “Farmed and Dangerous” has ticked off farmers.

Then, this week, word got out that the company’s annual report said that the decreasing supply of avocados, driven in part by climate change, could force it to stop selling guacamole.

When you start messing with people’s guac, there will be panic – at least on Twitter. Enough so that Chipotle has had to reassure the burrito-loving public that its famous guac isn’t being pulled from the menu.

As much as some folks love their somewhat-pricey guac, do they think people are going to stopping driving their cars to save it?

Or maybe this is just a plot to sell more guac. I like Chipotle’s food but I wish they’d focus on green food like guacamole and stop pushing green politics so aggressively.

If You Like Your Trans Fats, You Can't Keep Them

Trans fats are back in the news with a vengeance.

I didn't go back and research this, but remember how a few years everyone (or the media, at least) was freaking out about trans fats, and then a bunch of restaurants & companies said, ‘Hey, we took all of the trans fats out of our foods,’ implying that their foods were now good for you, but it turned out they were still unhealthy? It seemed like the most of the public panic about trans fats dissipated after that episode.

Obviously trans fats should be avoided or eaten in moderation but getting rid of them is not the key to a healthy lifestyle.

But this week the FDA announced that it plans to seriously limit the amount of trans fats allowed in foods. Banning trans fats would change the essential yummy goodness of foods like doughnuts, popcorn, cake frosting and Doughboy-type products.

Obnoxiously, USA Today tried to hypnotize readers into thinking that they don’t really care if trans fats are banned; as their headline puts it, 'Trans Fat Doesn't Stir Much Nanny State Debate.' See, nobody really cares if trans fats are banned … but, oh, what’s this: a Pew Research poll finds that 52% of Americans are against banning trans fats (breaking down to a clear majority among Republicans and a slight majority among Democrats).

Don’t be fooled into thinking that most people don’t care if certain foods are banned; it’s just not the biggest problem on their minds. Right now, millions of Americans are more worried about losing the healthcare plans that they were promised they could keep.

Here's Pat and Stu's take on the whole situation: