French Fries cooked in Lard (or making bad food good for you.)

Sitting at lunch today, eating my Hot Pockets (that's what Bruce calls me, Hot Pockets, cause that's what I always eat. I can just imagine Yoda saying, "How you become strong eating this? (or something like that)), I glanced over at the Papa John's Pizza boxes sitting next to me (why don't they pick Pizza Hut? It's always Papa John's, and it always tastes like cardboard, with garlic sauce, which is the only redeeming quality.), and noticed the saying, "All Papa John's Pizzas have 0 Trans-Fats!" I immediately launched myself into a tirade to the first person I saw, which was Andrew, about the criminal act of making bad food good for us.

Remember when McDonald's french fries were so irresistible? That's cause they were cooked in lard, or as bad as an oil as you can get. I look at it this way. We have a choice. We can eat healthy and live long time, or we can enjoy ourselves, carve a few years off of the end, when we will be senile, bitter fools in nursing homes, and enjoy the passage of time, as James Taylor once sang. God gave us free will. A choice between Eden and the Apple of Knowledge and a lifetime of work, labor, and self-awareness. He gave us the choice to choose what is best for us, or to travel down other roads.

So when it comes to Fast Food restaurants, they should know very well and good that a person coming into, say, a McDonalds, and wants to order a double-quarter pounder with cheese and supersize the fries thank you very much is not going to care about whether or not his fries are cooked in non-trans-fat oil or not. He wants them to taste good. And if you poor salt on them, they taste okay, because all you can taste is the salt. But the taste of fried goodness is all gone, because they are trying to make bad food good for you.

What really irks me is that the restaurants don't actually care about the need to make you healthy. They are afraid of lawsuits (such as those that have already been dismissed), or of government legislation that will forbid or outlaw the businesses from making money. Such has recently been enacted by the liberal legislature of the City of Los Angeles, which has denied any fast food chains from building in certain lower socio-economic areas of the city. The reasoning is that poorer people would rather spend the dollars on a double cheeseburger than they would on healthy food. The studies indicate that poor people are obese. Now, while I could spend all day showing how real poor people couldn't be obese because they would not have any food to begin with (i.e. Africa, parts of Asia...etc.), I will settle instead on looking at the ideological basis on which they made the law.

The Democrats in the legislature have determined that poor people obviously can't spend their money correctly, nor can they have the self-discipline to eat healthy, so the government has decided to make the decisions for them. The government has no right to interfere in the private lives of it's citizens (see numerous blogs about Libertarianism prior to this), and if they want to line up inside of a Mcdonalds and gain weight to the moon, it is their choice. Even to be indirectly influencing the businesses to make things healthy goes against the free market system. If Mcdonald's french fries taste better cooked in lard, and will make them more money, then they should cook them in that manner. I won't buy french fries from them anymore, because they taste awful. And therefore they are losing money from me, and probably from more than just me.

So let us eat our fatty foods, and let us drink our high-calorie drinks, and know that we probably won't live as long, but it's our choice to do so. I know that in a past blog, I have referenced Mike Huckabe's book Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork where he says that we are all slowly committing suicide, and I understand that point. But I also know that it's our fundamental right to choose to do that if we want to. Now....where'd I put my Coke???

As an addendum, I came home and flipped on the Internet, and the first thing that I saw on Yahoo was an article talking about what Michael Phelps craved after winning his 8th gold medal. The answer.... junk food. Even the most fit person on the planet will want bad food. Of course, he deserves it. :)