I'm not with the health nazis, but
...I don't see a lot of discussion here about the trend in the postwar (or should we now be calling them "interwar"?) decades for a lot of interlocking agro-industrial-marketing corporate factors to dump a shitload of Bad Stuff, of which transfats may serve for our present purposes as a plump poster child, into the food supply offered for sale to an increasingly ad-besotted and less-informed public. Sure, you can strike a noble pose against paternalism and the nanny state, but you can be certain that many of the talking points you lovingly copy-and-paste have been developed, focus-grouped and strewn out in our electronic smog of misinformation for you by Archer-Daniel-Midlands and sundry co-enablers. Believe me, if ADM (taking them up as an arbitrary example) suddenly discovered that its vast corn holdings were contaminated with mercury, you'd see an aggressive PR/political campaign to put the message across that any claims about supposed adverse health effects of mercury were unproven, of suspect provenance, and likely advanced by liberal so-called scientists with a hidden agenda to force Americans away from the blessings of high-fructose corn syrup and back onto dependence on foreign sugar—maybe even Cuban sugar.
Would you have the government stand out of the way in that event, and let the market sort it out? After all, if mercury is actually bad for a body the consumer will figger it out eventually. Worked [link|http://whyfiles.org/201mercury/images/minamata_child.jpg|in Japan] back in the day, didn't it?
It ain't a level playing field. Government is an imperfect instrument, to put it mildly, but corporate managers whose bonuses depend on the next quarter's numbers will poison you without a second thought.
cordially,
