The Dreaded Cupcake

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

News is in from the front lines of the epidemic afflicting our nation. No, I’m not talking about Swine Flu, which seems to be well under control, but the raging “Childhood Obesity Epidemic,” against which Mayor Bloomberg has just banned the common practice of selling at school fund-raisers the dreaded cupcake. Apple pie, no matter how American, will, I predict, be next.

I don’t know about you, but I sleep better knowing that our children are so much safer, protected from the evils of cupcakes by the mayor’s food police. Now we can breathe easier knowing that fewer of the innocents will get hooked on cupcakes, only a small step on the road to addiction to the harder stuff, such as cinnamon buns. Surely the announcement of the mayor winning Nobel Prize for Medicine is imminent.

It is good to see that city officials are equally concerned with what might be available to wash down the approved healthy school diet of Styrofoam. Those famous vending machines selling Snapple, mandated in every school just a few years ago, in that unenlightened age when children were still permitted to ingest sugar, are soon to be carted away. A new contract for vending machines in schools and other city facilities permits only drinks containing no more than twenty-five calories per eight ounces, and forbids artificial sweeteners or caffeine. In other words, water.

There is no scientific evidence to support any of this. The limits on calories were simply pulled from thin air by the most radical advocates of the mayor’s efforts to turn Gotham into Nanny City. And don’t look to the supine city council to play an honest investigatory role or just act to protect constituents’ right to eat what they want. On the rare occasion that they have “weighed” in, it has been to facilitate the mayor’s madness. Nor has the comptroller, William Thompson, who is campaigning for mayor, picked up the issue.

On the other front in the war on our children’s (and your) waistlines being fought at your local McDonalds or Burger King, it seems that the mayor’s calorie posting initiative is not quite working as hoped. According to a study done by the Health Department, it was found that despite posting the calorie counts on the menu boards for each item, in the hope of scaring people skinny and choosing salad instead of Big Macs and carrot sticks instead of fries, customers are actually purchasing meals with more calories than they did before the postings were mandated.

This to me is the good news in all of this. It seems that armed with accurate information about calorie content, New Yorkers are now making the informed decision to purchase the most calories for their fast food dollar.

I am concerned about this issue. I am concerned that we are creating a marketing climate of “food as poison,” a strategy that can well lead to a generation of children afflicted with eating disorders.

If children can’t eat things with sugar, or salt, or fats, what is they can eat? Whole milk is taboo, and even 99% fat free milk is frowned upon. Fat free or skim milk is the preferred beverage for our young people, the stuff that reminds me of dirty dishwater, and doesn’t taste much better. Orange juice? Too much sugar, too many calories. A few years ago, I saw the first packages of foods proclaiming to be “carb free,” as if carbohydrates were a poison to be avoided at all costs. Weren’t they supposed to be a vital nutritional component of everyone’s diet?

The most popular item on school lunch menus, pizza, has been replaced with a “healthy” variety that, I’m told, tastes like a cracker made with sawdust with a bit of watery tomato and runny cheese on top. Isn’t anything sacred? The new school-lunch pizza is an insult to the brilliant people of Naples, who invented this iconic treat. Pizza is food that is healthy, satisfying and inexpensive, the reason it is so popular everywhere in the world. I’ve been to Naples, and most Neapolitan children look pretty fit and trim to me.

If we want to blame something for childhood obesity, let us look not to how many calories young people ingest, but rather how fast the children of today burn them off. Certainly children’s activities today are different than they were when I was growing up. We had few organized activities that, to my observation, are far less intense than the non-stop street games played on my block in my day — and that one might see today in a neighborhood in Naples, where children substitute a soccer ball for the 15-cent “Spaldeen” we used in our games. The result is the same – a couple of hours of intense physical activity, and the burning off of thousands of calories.

It is easy to poke fun at the often ridiculous initiatives coming from City Hall. But in Britain, there is actual debate over whether parents of chubby children should be prosecuted for child abuse. We’re on a slippery slope, fueled by panic and unsupported by science. At stake is a substantial degree of our individual freedom to make our own decisions, something that should be feared a lot more than a super-sized order of fries.


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