Great Britain’s food-control freaks took a uniquely absurd step this month in their never-ending crusade to dictate what their countrymen can consume. Ofcom — the country’s media standards board — has banned broadcasters from airing advertisements for cheese (yes, cheese) during children’s television programming. According to a nutrition study published by Ofcom in November 2006, cheese — along with ketchup, oatmeal, raisins, and lemonade — is a “junk food.”Unsurprisingly, there are a number of problems with Ofcom’s study. Most notably, it measures the fat and sugar content of foods based on 100-gram servings. The typical portion of many newly-proscribed foods, including cheese, is much smaller than that.One of the more outspoken critics of the ban has been British MP Dan Rogerson, who chairs — we kid you not — the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cheese.” He’s called it “simplistic and counter-productive.” And he tells The Daily Telegraph that:
[It’s] preposterous that Ofcom restrictions should be based on a model so flawed as to take cheese off the air, while diet cola, which has no nutritional value whatever, is left firmly on children’s menus. It has to be perverse that while milk may be advertised, a wholesome product made from milk — cheese — cannot.
