The San Francisco Board of Supervisors have approved a ban on Happy Meals and other fast-food servings that fail to meet nutritional standards. While sympathetic to the motivations behind the legislation, I have serious questions over the constitutionality (and logic) of the ban.
For many years, advocates attempted to use tort law to curtail fast-food as a defective product or a nuisance. Like others, I was critical of the use of tort law in those cases. Now, there seems a push to simply try to outlaw such food. Yet, it is hard to see how they can satisfy even the rational basis test under constitutional law. After all, other low nutrition food will be available in a city famous for its Ghirardelli’s chocolate. They are simply targeting those chains which give away toys.
Moreover, this denies parents the ultimate say as to what their children eat. Parents may impose a perfectly healthy diet on their children but allow them to eat at McDonald’s once a week or once a month. This is the ultimate expression of patneralistic legislation — taking such decisions from parents. Companies could challenge the law under equal protection, due process, and other constitutional claims.
The government can certainly demand the posting of nutritional information and campaign against such low nutrition foods. It can certainly ban such food from school cafeterias, but this is one bill (in my view) that would not pass constitutional mustard . . . I mean muster.
Jonathan Turley
Source: CNN
Bda,
Email’s on its way
Bob Esq:
dandy indeed. but people want to play with the rules instead.
Blouise,
Thanks for clearing that up. I think I may have become over-sensitized when it comes to abundant supply in incivility associated with political differences. It seems too many would rather say “screw you” (or much worse) than accept the fact that good, reasonable people can have ideals that are polar opposites.
I recently read Bill Moyers “Report from Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787”. I recommend it for all. Though not a complete accounting, it does well to introduce the reader to the men. The sense of duty. The willingness to accept compromise. And the learned respect for those of different backgrounds and ideals.
Ronald,
Don’t you think the world would be just that much more dandy if people would just learn how to play by the rules already in place?
Gyges,
You’re right, it is an aside regarding the main points I’ve made here.
But as a further aside, I stubled across this nifty observation cited in the Wikipedia article on ‘Brave New World’
“Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
Mespo727272:
““The laws… which must effect [a people’s happiness] must flow from their own habits, their own feelings, and the resources of their own minds. No stranger to these could possibly propose regulations adapted to them. Every people have their own particular habits, ways of thinking, manners, etc., which have grown up with them from their infancy, are become a part of their nature, and to which the regulations which are to make them happy must be accommodated.” –Thomas Jefferson to William Lee, 1817.”
there must be more to that letter. So what you are saying is that Jefferson thought people should pass laws to ensure their happiness because they are incapable of finding their own happiness? The government is necessary to make people behave because people have habits they wish to control?
I seriously doubt Jefferson would agree to government making a law promoting the decaffeination of coffee because of the lack
of will power on the part of a beaner.
So what does the entire letter say?
“Ronald”, 🙂
Bdaman:
Circumcision? Can you get moyel scissors with a happy meal as well?
http://www.judaism.com/display.asp?nt=aaci&etn=GDFGF
Oh great Blouise I’ve been kinda under the weather since I got back in town from Palm Bch. I saw today that part of the money the U.S. has pledged will soon be released. If my memory serves me correctly it’s 1/10th of the pledge. It took seven months.
Will you please e-mail me that info to Dabuhreport AT hotmail.com
and thank you so much for your effort.
Now not only is Cholera a concern in this part of the world we now have this.
Sad news has made its way into the Surfer offices this afternoon as we’re hearing confirmed reports that 3X World Champion Andy Irons has passed away.
Irons, 32, withdrew from a professional surfing event in Puerto Rico last weekend due to illness and passed away during a layover en-route to his home in Kauai, Hawaii. He had reportedly been battling with dengue fever, a viral disease.
http://blogs.surfermag.com/office-blog/breaking-news-andy-irons-passes-away/
Locally acquired case of dengue fever turns up in Miami
The first locally acquired case of dengue fever in Miami-Dade County in more than 50 years was confirmed Thursday by health officials. They warned people to take precautions against the mosquitoes that carry it.
“This is a big deal,” said Lillian Rivera, administrator of the Miami-Dade Health Department.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/health/locally-acquired-case-of-dengue-fever-turns-up-1040936.html
This is not good, this is a La Nina year which typically means warmer wetter weather during winter. The upside for Northern Florida is we just finished a record 30+ days with no measurable rain and we’ve been running 15+ inches behind in yearly rain fall so mosquito’s were not a problem this year. I may have been biten five times.
Anyways I look forward to hearing from you and it’s nice to know that you cared that much. Thanks 🙂
Oh great Blouise I’ve been kinda under the weather since I got back in town from Palm Bch. I saw today that part of the money the U.S. has pledged will soon be released. If my memory serves me correctly it’s 1/10th of the pledge. It took seven months.
Will you please e-mail me that info to Dabuhreport@hotmail.com
and thank you so much for your effort.
Now not only is Cholera a concern in this part of the world we now have this.
Sad news has made its way into the Surfer offices this afternoon as we’re hearing confirmed reports that 3X World Champion Andy Irons has passed away.
Irons, 32, withdrew from a professional surfing event in Puerto Rico last weekend due to illness and passed away during a layover en-route to his home in Kauai, Hawaii. He had reportedly been battling with dengue fever, a viral disease.
http://blogs.surfermag.com/office-blog/breaking-news-andy-irons-passes-away/
Locally acquired case of dengue fever turns up in Miami
The first locally acquired case of dengue fever in Miami-Dade County in more than 50 years was confirmed Thursday by health officials. They warned people to take precautions against the mosquitoes that carry it.
“This is a big deal,” said Lillian Rivera, administrator of the Miami-Dade Health Department.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/health/locally-acquired-case-of-dengue-fever-turns-up-1040936.html
This is not good, this is a La Nina year which typically means warmer wetter weather during winter. The upside for Northern Florida is we just finished a record 30+ days with no measurable rain and we’ve been running 15+ inches behind in yearly rain fall so mosquito’s were not a problem this year. I may have been biten five times.
Anyways I look forward to hearing from you and it’s nice to know that you cared that much. Thanks 🙂
Bob Esq:
“Correction: Should read simply ‘modern fantasy’ since both liberals and conservatives have similar agendas seeking to merge duties of right with duties of virtue.”
you sir have said a mouthful, your next happy meal is on me.
Just tell them Ronald sent you.
Kudos to your intellectual acumen.
I thank everyone for their comments from which I learn much. Personally, I have the rather extreme view that marketing to children for anything should not be allowed. But I don’t guess the Constitution would allow that.
Bda,
In case you check back while I’m gone:
Hands Together
http://www.handstogether.org/
Bda,
I have the info for you on Haiti … been waiting for you to show
Next on San Francisco’s Hit List: Circumcision
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/politics/Next-on-San-Franciscos-Hit-List-Circumcision-107316878.html?dr
Bob,
Dystopian refers to a branch of literature. Many of which exhibit those characteristics but not all.
Sometimes it’s simply a crappy future, “Do Robots Dream of Electronic Sheep?” or any number of other Philip K Dick books are considered dystopian, even though in most of them a repressive government isn’t the prominent feature.
Which is all an aside. My point was simply that I don’t think that anyone who hears the term “Huxlean dystopian” would think “Oh he means passive vs. fear based acceptance of totalitarian rule.”
ekeyra
1, November 12, 2010 at 3:34 pm
You do realize that advocating this as a good idea boils down to pointing a gun at a mcdonalds worker for giving a child 30 cents worth of plastic? Did i miss when we solved the rest of this country’s mounting problem that this is what we now have to occupy our time? Have you all lost your goddamned minds?
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Possibly ….
You do realize that advocating this as a good idea boils down to pointing a gun at a mcdonalds worker for giving a child 30 cents worth of plastic? Did i miss when we solved the rest of this country’s mounting problem that this is what we now have to occupy our time? Have you all lost your goddamned minds?
Bob,Esq.
…….
The law is meant to protect the weak; not the stupid from themselves.
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Yes! I agree with that statement!
And, if I may add … the weak aren’t stupid and the stupid (put in any name you’d like) aren’t necessarily weak.
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome.. to the desert.. of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?.
Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control! The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.
Neo: No. I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.
Morpheus: I didn’t say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.