Denmark has repealed its tax on the saturated fat content of food to much rejoicing. The tax created compliance nightmares, encouraged cross-border shopping trips, and punished small retailers that could not absorb the tax’s impact and apply it across all products. There’s no evidence that it made anybody healthier either, as people switched to lower-quality products, and an administrative regulation oddly applied the tax both to lean cuts and fatty ground portions of meat. Even the nags at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) admit that Denmark’s experiment didn’t work, but they think they’ve solved the administrative problems.- PETA — fresh off a defeat in European court for its widely condemned “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign (the campaign’s former leader “failed up” in animal-rights world and is now Food Policy Director for the so-called “Humane Society” of the United States) — recently launched a series of anti-fur advertisements, and even some ideological allies don’t like them. They depict a model with exaggerated pubic hair and that drove singer Amanda Palmer to ask the animal rights group: “If you care about animals, and their health and overall happiness index, take your human animals into account alongside the rest of them.” If PETA ever does take humans into account, it might be the first time: the group has offended Holocaust victims, people of many faiths, parents, beachgoers, and countless others. Oh, and it has also given money to violent extremists and opposed lifesaving medical research.
- Foodie leader Michael Pollan Tweeted at us this week, taking umbrage at our assessment of his tattered dreams of a politically active “food movement” in the aftermath of the failure by over 570,000 votes of California’s boneheaded Proposition 37. In Tweet-speak, our response is: “u mad?”
- CCF in the News: The New Yorker gave us a shout-out in its “Quotes of the Week” for asking the vegan activists at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) to “let the President eat his hot dog.” Agriculture media also finds that the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) was a big loser in last week’s elections. We’re also providing a resource on the animal-rights origin of Meatless Mondays to the Daily Caller and locals concerned about the deceptive fundraising practices of HSUS are using our HumaneWatch project to get the facts.
- CCF This Week: In our daily posts this week, we’ve covered the elitist foodies’ emphatic political reality check, found that New York Times columnist Mark Bittman is once again on the wrong side of the science on biotechnology, showed that the animal rights movement-backed Meatless Mondays garner more blowback than converts, and called out PETA for targeting kids with ads at Thanksgiving.
