If your french fries start tasting soggy and the crust on the pie you love to eat at the diner starts taking on the consistency of glop – and if both start costing more, to boot – blame it on the latest stunt by Mother Bloomberg. It turns out that the mayor has been using your tax money to launch a campaign to get restaurants to start using a kind of cooking oil that makes lower-quality fries and baked goods on the theory that it’s healthier.

This was reported by our Jill Gardiner, who discovered that Mr. Bloomberg has been mailing out letters trying to convince local restaurants to use the inferior, but allegedly healthier and in any event more expensive, oil on a voluntary basis. It seems that the unhydrogenated oil the mayor wants the restaurants to use is less likely to clog your arteries. It didn’t take Ms. Gardiner long to find a deli cook who could see through all this, pointing out that people don’t eat french fries for their health.

The mayor is heavily invested personally in the idea of public health – he’s poured millions into a program for public health at Johns Hopkins University. But at some point, people are going to start to react to all this kind of intervention by asking about delegated powers. By which we mean, when did it become the business of the government of the city of New York to use money that it wrests from you forcibly to start telling you how to make your french fries?

Nobody thinks that the city is going to stop with a “voluntary” letter of advice to our food-vending establishments. That will be just a first step to more coercive measures, the kinds that were used to deny to bars and restaurants discretion over how to deal with customers who want to smoke – or don’t want to. Next thing you know, New Yorkers wanting a good serving of fries or a nice delicious flaky piece of pie will have to go to New Jersey.