Too Many Nannies in the Kitchen

The following is reprinted from Marc Fisher's blog, Raw Fisher, which appears every day on the Web and every Tuesday in this spot, along with a selection of reader comments. Random Acts, which had appeared on Tuesdays, has moved to Wednesdays.

Montgomery County, where only county-run stores can be trusted to sell liquor and where the county has tossed smokers out of bars and restaurants, is now the first county in the nation to ban trans fats. The County Council voted last week to prohibit restaurants, bakeries and delis from using the unhealthful fats in cooking and food preparation.

The nannies who run Montgomery County voted unanimously to take choices about what to eat away from consumers, cooks and restaurant owners and place all authority in the hands of the bureaucrats.

Little did MoCo voters know when they went to the polls that they were electing chefs-in-chief. Never mind that naturally occurring trans fats might help prevent cancer, according to research at Cornell University. Never mind that some people might prefer to eat foods made with trans fats over foods made with high levels of saturated fat, such as palm and coconut oils. The county knows better.

It's clear that trans fats are bad for you. And lots of food businesses are reacting to widespread public opposition to trans fats by working on new recipes that eliminate or drastically reduce use of those oils. But a ban on trans fats -- very much like the smoking ban, which utterly ignores the fact that the marketplace is effectively reducing smoking in public gathering spots as well as smoking behavior overall -- elbows the natural forces of the marketplace out of the way. A government fiat encourages health hysteria and an insidious belief that only the nanny state can protect us from ourselves.

Having completed its work on trans fats, the County Council will be searching the universe for things to ban. Please help: What would you like to see MoCo tackle next? I would be pleased to see elected officials pass and enforce bans on mosquitoes, cellphones in theaters and concert halls, public coughing fits, leaf blowers and that scourge of civilization, wind chimes.