Readers will be aware of the war on junk food. We think, for instance, of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s unsuccessful attempt to ban large soft drinks from the city, the FDA’s ban on trans fats, and the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that fast food chains prominently display calorie information.
The Scrapbook regards these and related efforts with slight distaste, feeling as we do that government fails to meet so many of its most basic responsibilities that it forfeits the right to tell citizens what they can eat. But it could be worse. Compared to what the Chilean government is doing, as we learned recently from the New York Times, the United States is a libertarian paradise. “The Chilean government, facing skyrocketing rates of obesity, is waging war on unhealthy foods with a phalanx of marketing restrictions, mandatory packaging, redesigns and labeling rules aimed at transforming the eating habits of 18 million people.”
Since the law went into effect in 2016, companies like Kellogg have had to remove cartoon characters from cereal boxes, and candy companies have been forbidden from including trinkets with their products. No more Tony the Tiger or Cracker Jack prizes. The law prohibits the sale of “junk food like ice cream, chocolate and potato chips in Chilean schools.” (The Scrapbook, incidentally, strongly objects to ice cream being termed “junk food.”) Beginning in 2019, ads for these and similar items “will be scrubbed entirely from TV, radio, and movie theaters between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.” Packaged food items now display “black warning logos in the shape of a stop sign” if the items are high in sugar, salt, calories, or saturated fat. Kellogg, PepsiCo, and other companies have raised objections to the law, but lawmakers like Senator Guido Girardi, who calls big food companies “21st-century pedophiles,” aren’t inclined to listen.
The Times report, not surprisingly, casts the whole story as a simple case of good versus evil—of earnest and public-spirited public officials “encountering ferocious resistance from food companies eager to protect their profits.”
We don’t pretend to know how serious the Chilean obesity epidemic really is, or whether the animus of Senator Girardi and his allies may be motivated in part by old-fashioned anti-gringoism. Maybe in a decade or so, we’ll discover that Chile’s national congress has helped the country’s people slim down and lead healthier lives. We do wonder, though—whereas the Times reporter does not—where it all leads. Once government officials seize authority to tell free citizens what they can and can’t do in matters of strictly individual choice, they’ll be just a little more emboldened to do so again in some other area.
Elsewhere we recently learned that Chile, where consumption of cannabis is illegal, has the highest per capita marijuana use in all of Latin America, and that the national congress is considering a bill that would legalize the use of marijuana for “medical, recreational, or spiritual reasons.” We defer to the wisdom of the Chilean people on this point. We would only say this: You enjoy your pot, and we’ll enjoy our Frosted Flakes.
