Andrew Cuomo’s anti-science war on Buffalo wings

The whole story of Cuomo and food in bars is a perfect example of how meddling big-government liberals who think they know best end up implementing heavy-handed rules that don’t work and aren’t grounded in science.

Cuomo began with a reasonable observation and goal. It does seem that post-Memorial Day, a significant portion of the coronavirus spread is happening at bars. Specifically, young people drink into the late hours of the night, and they’re not all sitting at distanced bar stools or in a booth with a small group, but instead, they’re drinking the way young people drink: standing, walking around, mingling, chatting.

It gets loud, and people start shouting to be heard. It gets boozy, and so people lose their inhibitions, including their coronavirus inhibitions. It gets busy, and the staff finds it impossible to enforce spacing or mask rules on a drunk and loud crowd. Especially indoors, this is a recipe for spreading the virus.

But it seems safe to allow folks to sit at the bar or in a booth and have a meal, the way boring old people do.

Where can we draw a line?

In Anne Arundel County, Maryland, all bars need to close their indoor spaces at 10 p.m. It’s a bit arbitrary but seems reasonable to me.

Cuomo, however, decided: Let’s draw the line at food. You’re allowed to drink and eat dinner, but no just drinking. So, the state issued new rules: A bar “shall not serve alcoholic beverages unless such alcoholic beverage is accompanied by the purchase of a food item.”

You know where this is going. Bars started selling super cheap, pointless food just to comply with the regulation.

This angered Cuomo, who really wanted his rule to force people to buy real food. Cuomo said this:

“To be a bar, you had to have food available. Soups, sandwiches, etc., more than just hors d’oeuvres, chicken wings — you had to have some substantive food. The lowest level of substantive food were sandwiches.”

What the hell is he talking about?

Has the governor of New York state literally never eaten chicken wings? Buffalo wings were invented there!

Wings are a meal. In fact, they are the greatest meal.

I have eaten wings as my dinner or lunch in dozens of bars in dozens of states. A decent portion of my columns and books were written over wings. I had wings at Smitty’s in Uniontown, at the Emerald Isle in Imogene, at the Rusty Bucket and Mulligans in Ohio, and countless others. I will have wings for lunch today at Maddy’s Taproom, a great downtown bar that is shutting down. Tonight, I will have wings for dinner at the Irish Times while watching the Mets.

And you know what? I will be thoroughly fed. That’s because an order of eight wings has about 800 calories and 56 grams of protein.

The USDA recommends about 56 grams of protein per day for an adult male.

So, Cuomo’s not motivated by science in his denial of wings. He’s hung up on some superstition that if it’s on the appetizer side of the menu (or, in Cuomo’s preferred French, the hors d’oeuvres), it doesn’t count as a meal.

So, in his effort to make sure people aren’t crowding together indoors for extended periods of time with insufficient spacing, the governor who loves to declare how motivated he is by science is going after Buffalo wings because of what side of the menu they’re on.