Iqra’i

Via Adam, a story about government intervention that doesn’t get me up in arms:

Better labels are all well and good, but “we don’t want to exhort people to look at labels for trans fat,” he said. “We want people to walk into a restaurant and not worry there’s an artificial chemical in their food” that is killing them. A city trans-fat ban, he says, could prevent 500 premature deaths a year from heart disease.

The first time I ever heard of trans fats was in high school, when I was working in a bakery. A customer asked if our products had any trans fats; I’d never heard of them, so I asked the owner, who had never heard of them either. “What are trans fats?” she asked. The customer allowed as she didn’t know, but that they were bad for you.

“Well, we use the same ingredients you’d use in your kitchen,” my boss said, “just in larger quantities.” (If you’ve never seen a five-pound stick of butter, you haven’t lived.) And that’s the crux of this.

Saturated fats, like butter or lard, really aren’t that bad for you. The problem is when you take unsaturated fats and artificially saturate them. Liquid oil becomes a solid, which is much easier to transport and store. That’s great for bakeries that use large quantities of shortening. (If you’ve never had to clean up the five pounds of butter that have melted into a greasy mess because someone forgot to put it back in the fridge, I envy you.)

Still, if you’ve used oil while baking, you know it doesn’t taste as good. No one would choose partially hydrogenated soybean oil over butter — except that it’s much, much cheaper. The price has been artificially lowered by corn and soybean subsidies (though vegetable oils would probably be slightly cheaper than animal fats anyway, because plants are more efficient converters of energy).

And, like most cheap, convenient food-like products, it’s also much worse for you.

The trans fat crisis is just another symptom of industrial agriculture. It galls me to see programs like this — we incentivize Very Bad Things, then ban them — but it’s a short-term fix for one of the worst consequences of a disastrous federal program. The best option, of course, would be to end farm subsidies and make sustainable farming and eating a viable option for Americans. If people could bake with butter for a reasonable price, they would.

In the short run, though, this is better than nothing.