Baylen Linnekin on the Unappetizing State of Food Freedom

Lokate366

Reason.com food columnist Baylen Linnekin sounds off over at Fox News about the unsavory treatment in the United States of our right to eat and drink the goodies of our choice.

In fact, 2014 may go down as the worst year for food freedom since the New Deal era, when Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Supreme Court conspired to strip Americans of many basic food rights. Just how ludicrous was that period? In 1942, the Supreme Court actually upheld a New Deal law that prohibited farmers from using wheat they grew on their own farms to bake bread to feed their own families.

While we haven't matched that historic low yet, there are still nine months left in the year.

Linnekin points to rules requiring chefs and bartenders to wear gloves, bans on trans fats, nagging nannies adopting tech tools so that it's increasingly difficult to escape their concerns, and more issues you may have already found cringe-worthy through his pieces and those of other great Reason writers.

It just may inspire you to stock the pantry with soon-to-be-forbidden treats.

Read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Emmerson Biggins]

What do they mean we haven't matched that historic low? We've been stuck with it ever since.

[Dances-with-Trolls]

sounds off over at Fox New

What, there's another Fox? How many is that now?

[EDG reppin' LBC]

I like donuts. Alot.

Also, fried chicken.

[Sigivald]

That's a hell of a misreading of Wickard v. Filburn, is all I can say.

(It was a terrible decision, but it simply did not say that Mr. Filburn couldn't use his own wheat to make bread.

It said he couldn't use it to feed livestock he then sold.

This is abundantly clear if you actually read the decision.

His use of wheat to make bread or for reseeding was mentioned only in the preamble, establishing the uses of wheat on Filburn's farm; the part the Court found violated the act was its use for animal feed, and then only because the animals/animal products themselves were sold.

It's none of the State's rightful business, but it's not what was presented in the article above either, and it is at least facially related to commerce, far more than the travesty in Raich, which didn't involve even use as a "precursor" to a commercial transaction.)

[Emmerson Biggins]

The broader meaning is "ALL YORE LAND BELONG TO US". So ya, as far as I read Filburn if they also wanted to prohibit him from growing any grain at all, then they could because somethin something something FYTW.