God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 7
It’s one thing for my doctor to ream me out about my weight, triglycerides, or blood pressure, but I’m not too keen on good ol’ Uncle Sugar getting in the middle of my dinner plate, picking through it, and scraping off what is deemed “not good.”
Let me be clear—crystal clear. Clear as the pure and organic bottled water from the natural springs in my home state. I believe we should practice good health habits. Not because the government tells us to but because, first and foremost, our bodies belong to God. We don’t own them—we just get to use them as our “temporary temple” while on Earth. Abusing them and ignoring the possible effects of our choices in eating or exercising is no different from throwing trash on the floor of our church during worship services or propping our muddy shoes on the pews. But the point is precisely that while God has a right to tell me to take care of my body, government is not my God, and it takes a treacherous “fork” in the road when it turns our dinner tables over to government regulators.
I consider myself a “health crusader,” in that I believe public policy should promote the good health of Americans. But government oversteps when it goes beyond the effort to inform, lead, and encourage, and creates a kind of “Supernanny” that forces steamed and unsalted Brussels sprouts down our gagging throats.
I grew up eating the food that was simply part and parcel of my own culture. We fried everything. everything. I would later understand the Southern habit of frying, and it’s quite practical. In a poor family, food needs to stretch to feed a maximum number of mouths at minimum cost. Breading and frying allows one to take pretty much anything and add to the caloric content and “fullness factor” without adding to the cost. Got a cheap piece of meat? Beat the daylights out of it to tenderize it, then bread it and fry it. Smells delicious, tastes great, and if you smother it (and some potatoes) with cream gravy—made with the pan drippings and a little flour and milk at virtually no cost—and pass the biscuits and corn bread, you’ve created a culinary masterpiece that will feed more people. Voilà! (Although I don’t remember my mother ever saying “Voilà!” or using any other French words or recipes.) It was all sooooo good, I’m salivating just writing about it. As a kid, I thought we were eating fried foods because we were lucky. It wasn’t until my teen years that I realized we ate those “rich” foods because we were poor!
Frying had another advantage. In homes where poverty meant not always having refrigeration or reliable ways to protect from spoilage, especially in the summer, it took food to such a high temperature that any bacteria were also crispy-cooked. On a 2008 trip with the ONE Campaign to Rwanda, over breakfast with former U.S. Senator Bill Frist, I discussed with him the challenge of eating safe food in developing countries like Rwanda. Prior to his being an outstanding senator from Tennessee and serving as Senate Majority Leader, he was Dr. Bill Frist, renowned heart surgeon. I’ll never forget his turning to me and saying that when one travels to places where sanitation is questionable, the fallback is simply to eat french fries and a Coca-Cola. What??? A heart surgeon encouraging me to have an order of fries and a Coke? My first thought was, “Now, that’s my kind of heart surgeon!” But the advice was not about nutrition—it was about food safety.
French fries are fried long enough, at a temperature high enough, to kill off most germs. Pair the fries with a nice bottle (any vintage) of Coca-Cola, which is surprisingly available even in the most remote places on Earth. I’ve seen Cokes sold out of makeshift “stores” in Afghanistan that were nothing more than shipping containers turned on their sides to serve as a “building.” I’ve seen them peddled along dusty desert pathways in the interior of Egypt, stored in an ice chest that hadn’t seen ice in twenty years, but served as the “Coke box” from which one could buy the familiar beverage. (Have you ever tasted a Coke served at 120 degrees Fahrenheit? Yow.) The bottling standards are the same the world over, and the sealed cap keeps it fresh and pure. Wouldn’t try that with a can, though—God only knows what the top of that can has been subjected to!
So there you have it. Eating fried foods—long before Paula Deen had a cookbook—wasn’t just a cultural tradition for those of us who grew up in the South, though it certainly was that. It was a means of survival, both in terms of having enough calories to sustain a life of hard manual labor in the fields and also promoting food safety long before the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, local health departments, and even Michelle Obama told us how to eat.
Food safety has a certain value for society, especially now that people eat more of their meals away from home. Knowing that a restaurant has passed an inspection to make sure the roaches aren’t bigger than the cooks and the rats confine themselves to leftovers—not food off diners’ plates before they’re served—offers some comfort as we sit at the table. We know we’re consuming food prepared by people who work back there in the kitchen where we can’t see, and we can only hope they heed the signs telling them to wash their hands after they go to the bathroom. So we’re okay with a little regulation.
But just how much government do we need in our own grocery bags and our own kitchens? According to some, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, we shouldn’t consume a single morsel that hasn’t first been nutritionally analyzed, weighed, inspected, prepared, approved, served, and previously digested by Uncle Sugar himself. Because I work in New York each week to do my Fox News TV show, I have more than a casual exposure to life in the “Big Apple.” Some people assume that because I spend so much time there, I must surely live there, but ironically, that’s why I don’t and won’t live there. As I said before, the only way I’d consider living there would be if I could duck hunt in Central Park, and that’s not going to happen!
New York is an amazing city, and I don’t want to be dismissive of this marvel of energy, entertainment, excitement, and influence. That it functions at all is a testament to the hardworking, resourceful people who grit it out every day. But as independent as New Yorkers tend to be, it’s surprising that they haven’t been more resistant to the city’s ever-increasing regulation of all they do, say, and, especially, consume.
Michael Bloomberg’s twelve years as mayor may be remembered as much for his “nanny state” approach to governing as for anything else he did. When I hosted a three-hour-a-day radio show for a couple of years, one of the regular features that my producer Joey Salvia and I created was the character “Nanny Boy,” with the tune of “Danny Boy” and fractured lyrics to remind our listeners of the many ways in which “Nanny Boy” had involved himself in the daily personal lives and habits of New Yorkers.
There was, of course, Bloomberg’s famous ban on salt shakers on restaurant tables and in restaurant kitchens. That was largely ignored, but he preached it like Joel Osteen preaching a happy life. He banned trans fats. Yes, trans fats are bad, so that’s a topic for debate, but it was just one plank in the mayor’s full good-health platform. Perhaps most famous was his much-ridiculed ban on sugary sodas over sixteen ounces. He actually got that one passed by his hand-appointed city board of health. The rationale, explained Hizzoner, was that “no one needs” a soft drink larger than sixteen ounces. Gee whiz, Mr. Mayor, I’m not sure anyone “needs” a soft drink at all when you get right down to it. Not sure anyone “needs” a cold beer or would collapse and die without a big tall glass of sweet tea, either. Who gave the mayor of New York the divine insight to know precisely how many ounces of a soft drink are too many? It always seemed to me that the sixteen-ounce limit was arbitrary and that since people come in various sizes, maybe cups should, too. Sixteen ounces isn’t the same for NFL lineman Michael Oher as it is for a teenage girl whose entire left leg doesn’t weigh that much. Of course, the mayor didn’t really stop people from drinking more than sixteen ounces of soda. They just bought two sodas, duh. And like most clunky government dictates, the ban arbitrarily targeted sodas but not other beverages, such as a calorie-laden frappe at Starbucks; or a fruity drink that can have more calories than a soda; or a milkshake, which can have far more calories
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So if the government’s job isn’t to order off the menu for me, does it have any role in trying to influence health habits? Sure, because it’s the taxpayers’ money going down the grease pipe when people don’t care for themselves and then need help to foot medical bills for a heart attack, an amputated foot from diabetes, or expensive medication for chronic disease. Still, there’s a huge difference between government encouraging healthy behavior and government force-feeding us an arugula salad because some bureaucrat sitting in a cubicle thinks his power to control is more powerful than our freedom to choose.
I’ve seen a number of cultural revolutions right here in America, in my own lifetime, and the government had a role—a limited one—in helping bring about these shifts. Let me mention a few ways in which I’ve seen government play a part in changing behavioral norms.
I can remember as a kid when American highways were cluttered with litter. People routinely threw trash out car windows as they drove our nation’s roads. In the sixties, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson launched a campaign to “Beautify America.” It was a simple awareness campaign to encourage people to take pride in the beauty of our country and not to toss litter on our sidewalks, streets, highways, and byways. Who could argue with that? There was no order to arrest or shoot a litterer, but rather just a straightforward, positive message to think differently about our surroundings.
I also remember when cars didn’t have seat belts. They were an after-market item, but I didn’t know of anyone who actually had seat belts in their car. Frankly, where I grew up, it would have been scandalous to go to an auto parts store, buy some seat belts, and then go to a local mechanic to have them installed. I can just hear it now: “You want me to do what? You want me to put these straps in your car so you can tie yourself down while you’re driving??? Dang fool wants to strap himself in his car!” You would’ve been the talk of the town!
Another major change in our culture: the prevalence of smoking. It was virtually automatic for adults in the South to smoke. And, of course, kids would swipe cigarettes from their parents and sneak off to pretend to be “grown up.” Heck, we had candy cigarettes. I can remember kids in my own neighborhood trying cigarettes as young as age seven, with some becoming hard-core confirmed smokers by age thirteen. The schools actually accommodated junior high and high school students who smoked by giving them their own on-campus “smoking zones.” (I kid you not!) I suppose I’m lucky to be highly allergic to tobacco smoke, because I’ve never smoked a single cigarette and never wanted to. It was hard enough having it all around me! I found it repulsive even though it was normal and regular behavior for adults in virtually every walk of life.
So, what did doctors have to say about this? Well, doctors not only smoked—they smoked in their offices while treating patients. I remember my own family doctor puffing on his pipe as he examined me when I was just a tot. There were ashtrays in the waiting room, and if I wasn’t all that sick when I got there, I sure was by the time I got in to see the doctor, thanks to my then-unknown and untreated allergies! Doctors were even featured in cigarette ads with slogans such as, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” In today’s world, that would be as absurd as an ad that says, “More chefs use arsenic than any other poison.”
Ads for Virginia Slims, the first cigarette created for and marketed to women, told them, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Likewise, our government has come a long way when it comes to cigarettes. It once all but insisted that we smoke. It literally pushed cigarettes by including them as part of soldiers’ field rations, right along with food and water. That’s right—a man had to have food, water, and a cigarette, said the government. But a boatload of research linking cigarettes to cancer, proving what we’d already suspected (check out the chorus of the 1947 “Tex” Williams hit, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)”; note also that the singer later died from lung cancer), sent us along the path to a totally different reality when it came to smoking.
Another cultural transformation: the total change of attitude toward drunk driving. Up through the seventies, drunkenness wasn’t exactly promoted but still was fodder for entertainers such as Dean Martin and Foster Brooks. We laughed at Foster Brooks and with Dean Martin, who gave tipsiness a kind of Rat Pack cool. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving gave names and faces to the victims of drunk driving, and being drunk wasn’t so funny anymore. The culture shifted dramatically yet again.
So, changes can happen, but not by having the government force new behavior. (Case in point: prohibition.) There’s a pattern common to all the examples offered here—litter, seat belts, smoking, drunk driving—but it’s not one in which government was the entity that made them work. And it’s certainly not one in which the government “nudged” an unwilling public with outright bans and punitive taxes and fees, as left-wing ideologues love to do.
In each case, three things had to happen to make the needle move: First, a difference in ATTITUDE, sparked by education and advertising to create an awareness that didn’t exist before. For example, the emotionally powerful “Keep America Beautiful” ads put the issue of littering before the public in a fresh new way. I vividly recall the television spot featuring a Native American (we called them Indians in the sixties) looking at a river polluted by trash and turning to the camera as a single tear rolled out of his eye and down his cheek. I remember thinking, “Please, Dad, don’t throw stuff out of the car—we don’t want to make that Indian cry!”
Coincidentally, an awareness campaign featuring Native Americans was launched in 2014, sponsored by the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation to help Washington Redskins fans understand why they’d like to see the name “Redskins” changed. The ads don’t have to do much explaining. They simply present a series of video images featuring proud Native Americans celebrating their culture, and end on a picture of the Redskins helmet. A powerful point is made, very elegantly: We are proud people, and this trivializes our culture. I can’t imagine a more effective way to change attitudes than this.
The second ingredient: an encouraging ATMOSPHERE. This was fairly simple to accomplish, but not without some cost. Signs were placed that said, DON’T LITTER, along with strategically placed trash barrels in public areas, along roadsides, in parks, and on beaches. (Took a real genius to figure out that if you had a convenient receptacle for your trash, you might be more likely to use it!) We changed the atmosphere so it became easier to do the right thing.
Finally, the third step: ACTION. Yes, there was and is a role for government, but notice that the “action” phase, in which government puts forth a rule or a law, happens after and not before the attitudes and the atmosphere change. Government can’t make people behave differently; in fact, most Americans value their individual freedom so much that if the heavy hand of government says, “You can’t,” the public is likely to say, “Oh, yes, we will.” But if the public has modified its attitudes and wants society to reflect that, they’ll accept and even insist that this new norm be codified into law.
Had someone in 1964 said the day would come when people could be fined $1,000 for littering the roadside with a gum wrapper, he or she would have been laughed out of the room. Back then, the idea that seat belts would one day be mandatory in forty-nine of the fifty states and that in most states a motorist would be pulled over simply for not wearing one would’ve sounded insane. By the way, there’s only one state that still has no seat belt law—New Hampshire. But then, the state motto of New Hampshire is “Live free or DIE!” so I guess that makes sense.
To change ATTITUDES on the value of seat belts, there first came an ad campaign and efforts to educate the public (remember the crash test dummies?). Then seat belts were mandated—not to be worn, mind you, but just to be in the car, creating the ATMOSPHERE. Finally, once the public knew the research and not only accepted but insisted that seat belts were a good idea, states took ACTION and codified the new cultural norm into law. Except for New Hampshire, of course.
The same thing
happened with smoking: In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General released his report definitively linking smoking with lung cancer. The release of this report made huge headlines and was named one of the top ten news stories for that year. Starting in 1965, warning labels on cigarette packs proclaimed the famous Surgeon General’s warning that “smoking may be hazardous to your health.” (Warning labels did come by way of congressional legislation, but this was still not the kind of law that specifically bans a product or behavior.) TV ads showed a dad picking up a cigarette and his little son wanting to pick one up, too, as if to say, “Pop, if you smoke ’em, so will your kid.” And even back then, most smokers didn’t really wish that habit on their kids. As attitudes changed, so did the atmosphere. Ashtrays were replaced in many public places with NO SMOKING signs. Hotels began offering a limited number of nonsmoking rooms. Airlines created separate smoking sections, as did restaurants. The question became, “Smoking or nonsmoking?”
Only then, as Arkansas governor, did I sign the Indoor Clean Air Act, which stated that all indoor public places were to be smoke free. This law was overwhelmingly popular, and even opponents who owned restaurants later admitted it was a godsend to their businesses. Turns out, it didn’t cost them customers since people come to eat, not just to smoke; their cleaning expenses were dramatically cut by not having to deal with smoke residue; and, to their delight, their tables turned over twenty minutes faster because nobody stuck around after the meal to smoke. That legislation could never have passed even a few years before, but when it did, it wasn’t that controversial because the public had changed. Had the government tried to dictate behavior in 1968 simply by declaring America “smoke free,” there would have been smoke all right—cities burned to the ground by raging nicotine addicts who would have torched city halls and the Capitol building with their lighters.