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As a compulsive reader, I enjoy the nutritional information that appears on food labels. There's always something informative: recommended daily allowances, calorie counts, vitamin contents, etc. As the speaker drones on at a luncheon, I can stay awake by reading the butter pat.
Beyond that, though, I'm not sure how useful these labels are.
For instance, a Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheel at hand contains 110 calories, of which 40 come from fat. But would anyone concerned about his waistline even be in the same building as a pecan spinwheel, let alone eat one?
At least that label provides information that I might
not have otherwise gleaned. But does anyone really need to
be told that a 12-ounce can of Safeway Select Seltzer Water
has no calories and is not a significant source of other
nutrients
? What school in this country graduates people
who might otherwise think they were building strong bodies
from seltzer water, and why hasn't that school been closed
as a public menace?
Then there are the nutrition facts
on a bag of
Wavy Lays brand Au-Grautin Flavored Potato Chips.
If
you cared about nutrition, would you be chomping on potato
chips? Aren't potato chips the very definition of empty
calories
that our health teachers warned us about?
Maybe not. I now know that each serving -- about 13 chips -- provides one gram of dietary fiber, as well as 10 percent of my recommended daily iron intake and 2 percent of the requisite vitamin C.
The next time that a bag of chips disappears from the cupboard and Martha glares at me suspiciously, I'll just point out that I had to devour it for my daily dose of vitamin C, and that I'm still about 936 chips short, although I'm 40 percent over on my iron and just about right on sodium. Maybe she'll be impressed.
Despite all this data now provided to us consumers, some information still does not appear on the packages.
For instance, chocolate companies never tell you how
many rodent hairs are provided per serving. There is a
standard, and while a few mouse whiskers might not sound
all that pernicious, rodent hair
is actually a
euphemism.
Rats nibble at their own pelts and the hairs are passed through the digestive tract, to be excreted with other waste products. The presence of rodent hairs in a processed product like chocolate actually indicates the presence of rat manure in the mixture, and for some reason, I've never seen that listed among the ingredients of candy bars.
Something similar holds for poultry -- there's an allowable percentage of fecal matter, and you don't see that on the label, either. Don't expect to. The poultry industry swings a big stick politically, and besides that, some Republicans in Congress want to eliminate meat inspections, trusting that the free market will protect us.
The market didn't protect much early in this century,
when a left-wing trouble-maker named Upton Sinclair wrote
The Jungle,
a novel about the travails of immigrants
who worked in the great abattoirs of Chicago.
In those days, sawdust was about the most wholesome ingredient in many processed meats. You could find just about anything in a sausage: spoiled organs, floor sweepings, ground rats, grandpa's carcass, etc.
When such reports first surfaced in the scurrilous media
of the day, Sen. William Lorimer of Illinois -- home of the
big packing plants -- assured President Theodore Roosevelt
that they were a tissue of falsehood.
Roosevelt was
quite willing to believe him, since one packing house had
contributed $200,000 to his presidential campaign.
Although this might make cynics believe that nothing has changed in American politics -- think of the poultry industry and Bill Clinton's political career in Arkansas, or of agri-business in general and Robert Dole's supportive legislative record -- eventually Roosevelt and Congress agreed on the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
So the inspection law was not some liberal New Deal burden on hard-working entrepreneurs. It was instead the result of an aroused public, tired of being lied to and poisoned.
Certainly the current system isn't perfect, as occasional outbreaks of meat-borne maladies remind us. But if the Republicans gave it extended thought, I don't think they'd eliminate inspections. Consider the consequences:
· More Americans, suspicious of meat, would become vegetarians. Have you ever met a vegetarian Republican? Neither have I. Vegetarians vote Green, Libertarian, Socialist Worker, Democrat -- but never Republican.
· We who remain carnivores will buy our meat from local butchers, where we can look around and satisfy ourselves as to sanitation, rather than from the big multi-national agri-biz protein factories. Sending business away from your campaign contributors is not good politics.
· Suppose there's a tainted entree at some rubber-chicken dinner in New Hampshire next winter. Pete Wilson wouldn't be the only speechless GOP candidate as potential presidents spend their days clutching their bellies and crawling from bed to toilet.
While the resulting campaign hiatus might be construed as a blessing to the nation, it is dumb politics. It is really not in the Republicans' interest to eliminate meat inspections, and they'll figure that out one of these days.
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