Public Choice vs Government Health Drive In The US

How delightful. US fast food chain Jack in the Box look to be tempting Michelle Obama's righteous anti-fatty food crusaders into a bit of a row.

There's an accompanying website and everything, along with a hefty 'up yours' of a milkshake, as breathlessly described by the Mail.

The marriage of salty, high-fat, high-cholesterol bacon with a super-sweet, high-fat, high-calorie milkshake is already being hailed as one of the most decadent items on already-unhealthy fast food menus.

The new milkshake comes in 16 in 24-ounce sizes. The large shake has 1,081 calories, 37 grams of saturated fat and 108 grams of sugar.

Reactions to the new treat have ranged from exultation to utter disgust

Good God! The sky is falling, so it is.

Ah, but they're already ahead of you Yanks, you see.

“A high school student just shared with me this week a website they were told to go on in their health class to calculate their overall health based on input regarding their diet and exercise. The USDA’s site is called “Supertracker.” The name says it all. Once registered, you are asked to enter all the foods you ate on a typical day. You are then asked to input all the activity you did that day. Each of these screens come with drop down menus with several hundred food and activity options. This is not a superficial, gimmicky, analysis program. Someone has put a lot of time and effort into creating it.

Once you have entered all that information, SuperTracker provides you a health report detailing how many of your daily calories came from fats and what kind of fats, what your sodium intake is, and how much you need to increase your activity levels.

Even IF the government doesn’t use this data to track students individually, they are amassing a lot of conglomerated data on the average teen lifestyle which will just be too tempting to ignore."

Woe betide anyone who dares to log their love of repeated bacon consumption with Michelle's food monitors. I mean, don't Jack in the Box realise that this isn't a laughing matter. Bacon isn't fit for human consumption, let alone marriage!

And that's all before we consider the subtle message in the ad which plays, mischievously, on parental fears about homosexuality or mixed racial matrimony.

Sales, however, are apparently sky high.

Demand was so monstrous, stores already began to run out of the special bacon-flavored syrup after only a few days.

The company says supplies are 'limited as limited can be.'

That just won't do. We can't have the public making their own free choices, now can we?

I admire the chain's cojones, but reckon this will be a campaign that is - as we speak - being written up as a future example of why the industry as a whole requires anti-consumer regulation. Probably couched as the killing of kids, or some such, with that transatlantic Oliver berk somewhere in the background.

One to watch, methinks.

H/T The ever-vigilant CA jewel robber, David G