how geeky ideas and how we eat are colliding

A proposal to ban most artery-clogging trans fats from New York's restaurants could save thousands of lives at little cost to restaurateurs, supporters of the initiative said on Wednesday.

But a leading industry group called for dialogue with city authorities to modify their "Orwellian regulation", which comes as many fast-food restaurants are already trying to reduce transfats in response to shifting consumer demand.

The New York City Board of Health on Tuesday proposed a near total ban on artificial trans fats - those that are made synthetically when food processors harden fat to make it more like butter in a process called hydrogenisation.


Such oils gives french fries their crunch. They also contribute to heart disease by raising the body's "bad cholesterol" and reducing the "good" cholesterol.

The use of “Orwellian” here, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with any of Orwell’s ideas -- there is nothing “Orwellian” about banning something that is completely detrimental to human health while offering nothing positive in return (except for, perhaps, corporate bottom lines), any more than there is in banning, oh, lead-based paints. It’s a simple public-health issue.

And, naturally, for Charles Hunt of the New York State Restaurant Association to say something like:

We're going try to get into a dialogue with the health department where perhaps we can convince them to modify their proposal where it's not a broad-brush, one-size-fits-all, Orwellian regulation.

actually hurts those trying to point out how truly Orwellian some shit going on today is, like the Bush Administration’s wholesale rewriting of history about the months immediately before 9/11.

All of which highlights a huge danger of the new prominence of geeky concepts: because most people don’t actually understand such terms as Orwellian, even though they may have heard them before, these terms are prone to deliberate misuse, in this case, as a red flag -- every one knows “Orwellian” is bad, so anyone can use the term to mislead the functional illiterates that make up the majority of our society by invoking the term.

And then there’s this piece in today’s New York Times about the rising cost of health insurance, which is related, though the writer seems not to realize that:

An industry that once defined the American economy, meanwhile, is sinking in large measure because of the cost of caring for its workers and retirees. For every vehicle that General Motors sells, fully $1,500 of the purchase price goes to pay for medical care. “We must all do more to cut costs,” G.M.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said on Capitol Hill this summer while testifying about health care.

Mr. Wagoner’s argument has become the accepted wisdom about the crisis: the solution lies in restraining costs. Yet it’s wrong. Living in a society that spends a lot of money on medical care creates real problems, but it also has something in common with getting old. It’s better than the alternative.

To understand why, it helps to look back to a time when Americans didn’t worry much about health care costs. In 1950, the country spent less than $100 a year — or $500 in today’s dollars — on the average person’s medical care, compared with almost $6,000 now, notes David M. Cutler, an economist who wrote a wonderful little book in 2004 titled, “Your Money or Your Life.”

Most families in the 1950’s paid their medical bills with ease, but they also didn’t expect much in return. After a century of basic health improvements like indoor plumbing and penicillin, many experts thought that human beings were approaching the limits of longevity. “Modern medicine has little to offer for the prevention or treatment of chronic and degenerative diseases,” the biologist René Dubos wrote in the 1960’s.

Now, there is no question that the cost of health insurance is absolutely absurd today, for many reasons that have to do with the general asininity of insurance companies coupled with the fact that the insurance companies have bought off the politicians who might otherwise have, you know, insisted that they follow the laws that apply to them.

But whatever. Why doesn’t this NYT writer discuss the very basic fact that many of our health problems are being caused by the junk that is in our food -- like trans fats and high-fructose corn syprup -- and by the fact that junk food gets subsidized by the federal government while healthy, unprocessed food doesn't? As the online magazine Grist succinctly explains, we must distinguish:

between "energy-dense" and "nutrient-dense" foods. For energy-dense, think of a package of Ding Dongs -- 360 calories, 19 grams of fat, and a liberal dose of high-fructose corn syrup. For nutrient-dense, think of a three-ounce chunk of wild salmon, delivering high-quality protein and essential fatty acids, among other nutrients, in a 185-calorie package. The former will run you about a buck at any convenience store, bodega, or supermarket in the country. For the latter, prepare to sidle up to a pristine Whole Foods fish counter and shell out about $5.

The upshot? “[P]eople are gaining weight and getting sick because unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy food -- thanks in large part to federal policies.”

Well, okay -- this is obvious to anyone who is paying attention... as well as anyone who is trying to eat healthy on a budget. And it highlights how superficial the geek revolution has been. We, as a culture, bow toward geeky ideals about logical thinking, but we haven’t quite figured out how to put those really very simple and obvious ideals to work yet.