Standards
for meals
The Meals Ministry is
responsible for investigating nutrition,
digestion, allergies, and other food related issues, and using that
knowledge to determine what type and quantity of foods the farms should
produce. They also set standards for the meals at restaurants in order
to
ensure that all of the restaurants are providing healthy
meals. They must set different standards for the restaurants that serve
children, such as requiring lower levels of sugar.
The Meals Ministry is also required to ensure that the farms, food
processing businesses, and restaurants are producing food that is safe
to eat, so this ministry must set and update rules on the production
and
distribution of food, and periodically inspect the businesses that
handle food. This ministry has a role that is similar to the FDA, but
only for food, not medicines.
The Meals Ministry can experiment
on the public
The Meals Ministry has the
authority to conduct experiments on the public, such as having one
particular school provide children with meals that use lard as the
primary oil, and another school that uses olive oil.
Although the concept of a government experimenting on the public might
seem cruel and dystopian, allowing the public to have the freedom to
choose their meals is allowing parents to conduct experiments on their
children.
However, the Meals Ministry is required to continuously monitor the
health, physical abilities, mental abilities, and attitude of the
children in order to determine the effect that their experiments are
having. Since there is no secrecy, all of the data about the children
is available to the scientists. That allows them to notice if one group
of children is showing signs of problems, in which case they can
correct the situation and learn from it.
By comparison, when parents provide food for their children, they
cannot continuously analyze their children or compare them to other
children. Therefore, they will not realize whether they are providing
food for their children that is causing allergies, digestive problems,
acne pimples, or blood sugar problems.
It is better to have a group of scientists conduct experiments on us
than to give everybody the freedom to conduct uncontrolled and
unsupervised experiments on themselves and their family members.
Since there is no secrecy, and the government officials have to post a
document to explain each of their policies, the Meals Ministry must
post a
document to explain and justify every experiment. This allows everybody
to pass judgment on whether a minister is authorizing an idiotic or
dangerous experiment.
Since all of the ministers are of equal authority and are allowed to
reject requests, the other ministers can refuse to participate in an
experiment. For example, if the Meals Minister were to authorize an
experiment in which radioactive tracers are put in food, the minister
that is responsible for producing the radioactive items has the
authority to reject the request to provide the radioactive tracers. The
public also has the option of posting a document in the Suggestions
category to cancel the experiment and replace the Meals Minister.
The City Elders are used to resolve
arbitrary decisions
In a free enterprise
system, the primary concern of farmers, restaurants, and other
businesses that produce food products is to provide food that appeals
to consumers. Unfortunately, most consumers are more concerned with the
visual image, flavor, and texture of foods than they are with its
health benefits or pesticide levels.
We can create a food product that is extremely appealing simply by
combining sugar, salt, oil, and
an artificial flavor. Our emotions for food did not evolve for this
modern era, so the Meals Minister cannot set standards for meals
according to what the public likes the best. He must design meals that
taste good, of course, but his primary concern is providing meals that
are beneficial.
The Meals Minister will frequently encounter issues that require him to
make an arbitrary decision about a food product, such as whether to
produce another variation of a cracker, or whether to raise peacocks
for meat. In a free enterprise system, consumers settle the arbitrary
decisions, but this Constitution requires the ministers to make
arbitrary decisions according to what would be most beneficial to the
City Elders.
The Meals Minister cannot pander to the Elders. Rather, he considers
what would provide them with the best life.
The Meals Minister must set standards for meals according to the Health database
that the Knowledge Division of the World Government creates. He has the
authority to make decisions that are
impossible in a free enterprise system and a democracy. Six examples
are:
Example #1: The
mixing of foods
There are a lot of
"experts" on nutrition who give us contradictory advice on which foods
we should not
eat together. For example, this
expert claims there are six raw food combinations that wreak havoc on our health, such as
avocados with nuts, eating fruit for dessert, and nuts with olive oil.
The expert who wrote this
document frightens us by claiming there are 22 deadly food combinations, such
as milk with fruit or coconut, and chicken with pork.
Our distant ancestors did not have to make decisions about which
foods to eat together because they had a tendency to eat only one food
at a time. For example, when they caught a pig, they would eat pork,
but nothing else. When they found a vegetable or a fruit tree, they
would have eaten a small
amount of that particular item, but nothing else.
Today we gather foods from around the world and mix them together
into excessively large meals. We did not evolve to eat gigantic meals
of foods from around the world, so we should research the issue of
which foods can be mixed
together, and which should be separated by some period of time.
The Meals Minister has the authority
and responsibility to support research into these issues, set
rules for the restaurants to follow, and continuously adjust those
rules as we learn more about ourselves.
Example #2: Oils
and fats
We do not yet know which
oils are best for us. Should we eat lard, corn oil, olive oil, walnut
oil, chicken fat, or the fat from cows milk? Furthermore, we don't know
which processing method is best for oils, such as whether the
extra-virgin olive oil is better than refined olive oil. We also don't
know much about how oils go rancid over time, and whether we should
refrigerate or freeze them.
The democracies allow everybody to claim to be an expert on food, and this results in
thousands of contradictory
videos and documents about foods and
nutrition. Many people believe that they are experts on foods because
they have read a lot of those documents or watched a lot of videos, but
the lack of leadership in a democracy and a free enterprise
system results in us becoming educated from information that is
sometimes false, exaggerated, or idiotic.
Furthermore, the low standards for business executives, lawyers,
judges, and other people in influential positions results in a lot of
deception and confusion. For example, in April
2007, US marshals seized
10,000 cases of extra-virgin olive oil because it was mostly soybean
oil, and the University of California at Davis said that more than 67% of the
common brands of extra-virgin olive oil in California were fraudulent.
To make the issue more confusing, the North American Olive Oil
Association claims
that they test nearly 200 olive oils every year, and only 2% of
them are fraudulent. They also claim that the FDA tested 88 extra
virgin olive oils and that the rate of adulteration was " low".
Who do we believe? Are 67% of the olive oils fraudulent, or is it only
2%? And why isn't it 0%? And is
there any evidence to support the claim that olive oil is
better for our health than other oils? Or is that just propaganda from
the olive oil businesses?
Another confusing issue is what is "organic" food? Is a food that
was fertilized with sewage sludge better for us than food that has been
fertilized with minerals that were mined from the earth?
In a free enterprise system, each consumer decides what to believe, and
each consumer assumes that he has
made the correct decision. In reality, all of us are like blind
men feeling an elephant. None of
us knows what is best for our health, or who is lying to us, or who is
honest but inadvertently spreading lies that they picked up from other
people.
An ad in the
1952 Ladies Home Journal. Is lard a valuable addition
to our diets?
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Many Americans have been frightened to eat lard, but we eat pork fat
when
we eat pork. Is there scientific evidence that pork fat is less
healthy for us than the fat in milk, olives, chicken, corn, hemp seeds,
or
fish?
Many people claim that butter is healthy, but is lard much different
than butter?
Has anybody found evidence that vegans have better health, or live
longer, than the people who eat lard or other animal fats?
Or did the fear of lard come from dishonest,
abusive business executives who were competing with lard?
This
article describes Procter & Gamble's "revolutionary advertising
techniques" to promote Crisco, but were those advertisements truly
"revolutionary"? Or were they "deceptive", "abusive", or "criminal"?
Or did the fear of animal fat come from scientists who noticed that the
people who have had heart attacks had cholesterol blocking their veins,
and who then assumed that the cholesterol was coming from their diet?
If they made that assumption, that is as idiotic as assuming that a
person with constipation ate too much dry food or did not drink enough
water, and a person with diarrhea did the opposite.
Some people claim that "red" meat is unhealthy, including the white
meat of pigs, but if that were true, then scientists would be able to
identify the molecules in the meat that cause trouble, and they would
be able to show that chicken, fish, grains, and other foods don't have
much or any of those molecules. However, no scientist has identified
anything dangerous in red meat.
No society cares about the quality of the information that we are
provided. This allows businesses, citizens, children, and lunatics to
create a fear of a food, and to promote a particular food.
If historians were doing a better job of analyzing human history, they
might be able to determine where the fear of red meat came from.
Perhaps it came from the businesses that produce chickens, or perhaps
it came from vegans or animal-rights activists. Or perhaps it came from
doctors who noticed that some of their patients had fat clogging their
arteries, and assumed that the fat had come from beef and pork because
it had a similar appearance.
For all we know, red meat is dangerous only when we eat excessive
amounts of it. Everything in life has to be held within boundaries. We
need water, oxygen, protein, iron, salt, vitamin A, and other things,
but too much of them will kill us.
In a free enterprise system, every consumer has to figure out for
himself who to trust, and what to believe, but it is foolish for us to
believe that we
are experts on food and health simply by reading some of the documents
that other
people and businesses have provided.
This
constitution makes the Meals Minister
responsible for providing the
public with guidance on foods. He is required to work with scientists
to set policies for food, and to routinely update those policies as
scientists learn more about health issues. Furthermore, the Database
Ministry, and the Knowledge
Division of the World Government are required to ensure that
information is accurate.
This constitution creates an economic system in which scientists are
given projects by the city government,
not by businesses. This allows scientists to study issues without any
pressure to promote a particular food or other item.
Since nobody knows much about health or food, the policies that the
Meals Minister creates for food will always be assumptions. In regards to oils, the
Meals Minister cannot
claim to know which oils are best for us, so he
cannot tell the restaurants that they must use a particular oil.
Instead, he must work with scientists to develop a sensible policy
based on what they know at the time.
For example, one possibility is to require the restaurants to use a variety of oils
rather than just one. If there is evidence that olive
oil might be healthier than
the others, then the restaurants would be told to use olive oil more
often. That type of policy would provide people with a mixture of oils
that is dominated
by olive oil. As we learn more about which oils are healthier, the
mixture would be adjusted accordingly.
Another possibility is to let every restaurant chef choose which oils
he wants to use, but require him to identify those oils in the
descriptions of the meals. Consumers would then choose the restaurants
to eat at. By developing software to keep track of the foods that
people eat, everybody will become part of an experiment to help us
figure out which oils are the healthiest.
Example #3: Sugar
The free enterprise system
provides us with as much sugar as we want, and in whatever form we
want, such as edible
decorations.
It is unhealthy
to decorate food with large particles of sugar.
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There are a variety of decorative sugar items, such as sugar sprinkles,
sugar glass,
and sugar toppers.
Some of them are colored sugar, and others are a mixture of colored
sugar and hydrogenated palm oil.
The decorative sugar items should be classified as unhealthy foods because we cannot enjoy
the sweetness of the sugar unless the sugar particles
have time to dissolve in our mouth, but we do not chew our food to such
an extent that all of the large sugar particles are crushed and
dissolved.
Therefore, we end up swallowing large amounts of sugar particles that
we never
enjoy the sweetness of. This causes us to consume sugar that we don't
get any pleasure from, which is essentially the same as injecting sugar
into our
veins.
If we could determine the " pleasure
per calorie" of our food items, those that are decorated with
particles of sugar would have a low
value. It would be healthier for us
to use sugar only to sweeten
foods, rather than as decorations.
The Meals Minister must work with
scientists to set a policy for the restaurants in regards to the amount
of sugar they can use in a particular food product. That puts
restrictions on our freedom to eat sugar, and the freedom of chefs to
use sugar in
recipes, but the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
It is unhealthy
to
use salt crystals as decorations
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The same concept applies to salt.
The large salt crystals on pretzels, bagels, and other bread
products are visually attractive, but they causes us to consume
excessive amounts of salt.
The Meals Minister is required to experiment with healthier methods of
decorating food products.
The Meals Minister has the authority to prohibit the decoration of
foods with sugar and salt crystals, and restrict decorations to powdered sugar and salt. He could
also allow a less troublesome type of decorations, if there are
any, such as nanocellulose
or gelatin.
Example #4: Chicken eggs
In a free enterprise
system, the businesses that produce
chicken eggs are competing to attract the attention of consumers, and
this results in some of them boasting that they provide their chickens
with vegetarian diets, or that
their chickens are " free
range", or that their chickens don't eat soybean
products. There are also businesses that sell supplements, such as YolkProud, that
can be fed to chickens in order to make their yokes more orange.
The Meals Minister is authorized to work with scientists to determine
the best way to raise
and feed chickens, rather than let consumers or business executives
make the decisions. He must set a policy according to what is best for
our health, not according to
what
consumers are attracted to.
Example #5: Caffeine
In a free enterprise
system, businesses encourage consumers to drink excessive
amounts
of their beverages, some of which have such high levels of caffeine
that we ought to wonder if they created those beverages in an attempt
to make their
customers addicted to it. ( Compare the levels of caffeine at this
site.)
Caffeine does not cause much trouble for us compared to alcohol,
heroin, and many other drugs, but our social environment
would be slightly
more pleasant and peaceful if we could live among people who do not
have any addictions to any drug. Furthermore, producing coffee and tea
is a labor-intensive process, so it would be best to reduce or
eliminate that labor.
Ideally, everybody would be in such excellent health that nobody needs
any type of stimulant, in which case we would design meals and drinks
for pleasure and health, rather than to compensate for genetic
disorders.
The Meals Minister has the authority to set policies for caffeine. He
can experiment with
such policies as limiting the quantity
of coffee or tea that a person can have each day, or requiring the
coffees, teas, and other drinks to have such low levels of caffeine
that nobody becomes dependent upon caffeine.
If we discover that some people have a peculiar medical disorder that
improves with large amounts of caffeine, those people would be allowed
to
have large amounts, but healthy people don't need or benefit from
caffeine, so it would
be best if the restaurants were not causing people to become addicted
to an unnecessary substance.
Example #6: Foods with excessive nutrients
Some foods have extremely
high levels of certain vitamins or minerals that can be unhealthy if we
eat excessive amounts of those foods. For example, liver has such high
levels of vitamin A that it cannot be a primary food source, and Brazil nuts
have excessive amounts of selenium.
The Meals Minister can put restrictions on such foods to reduce the
chances that people eat excessive amounts of them, such as prohibiting
a restaurant from serving large amounts of liver on a routine basis,
and by prohibiting people from promoting liver as a healthy food,
such as this
BBC article.
We might have evolved a dislike of liver to prevent ourselves from
eating an excessive amount of it, as I suggested here, but we
might benefit by having small
amounts of liver once in a while.
Some people eat liver when it is in the form of liverwurst or
liver paste, but those products tend to be just a blend of liver and
fat, and sometimes with meat and spices. I think a tastier version of
liver paste is a blend of liver with one
or more vegetables, such as corn, peas, beets, carrots, cauliflower,
and Brussels sprouts, and with miso paste
for flavor. In addition,
onions, vinegar, and spices can be added, as well as a small
amount of
fat, such as beef fat, lard, olive oil, or hemp oil. That provides a
more
nutritious liver paste, and with much less fat. A small amount of
Stevia or sugar will compensate for the bitterness of the spices and
vinegar.
By
making appetizers with a small amount of that type of liver paste, a
person could get a small amount of liver without being annoyed by the
flavor.
Furthermore, by making the liver paste with oils that don't harden
when frozen, such as hemp and walnut oil, and with miso pastes that
don't
harden when frozen, and with enough of certain vegetables, and with
some Stevia or sugar for sweetening, the liver paste can be frozen into
popsicles for hot summer days. That would provide children with a
popsicle made from vegetables and a small amount of liver.
Food
production is planned
The Meals Minister must
cooperate with the Foods
Minister of the Economic
division, and with the Restaurants
Minister of the Social
division, to plan the type
and quantity of foods for the farms and
ranches to produce. Since the People
database identifies
all of the people in the city, and how much food they ate in
the past, the Meals Minister will be able to plan how much food the
farmers must produce,
thereby
reducing the amount of wasted food.
Bad weather and other unexpected problems will occasionally result in a
shortage of some food items, but nobody would be hungry even during
extreme disasters because there would always be some dry and frozen
foods. Furthermore, if a disaster was so serious
that it actually caused a shortage of food, a city could import
food from other cities.
We must restrict reproduction of the
finicky eaters
Due to genetic variations,
some people
will not enjoy the foods that have low sugar levels for various
reasons, such as being more sensitive to bitter chemicals, less
sensitive to sugar, or having a greater craving for sweet foods.
Regardless of what their problem is, they need restrictions on the
reproduction.
As mentioned several times in this constitution, after we have decided
what type of culture we want, we must ensure that every generation will
accept and follow that culture. If we allow the people who dislike the
meals to reproduce, then every generation will have more people
complaining about the food, and eventually everybody will demand their
own special meals.
Prehistoric humans who had abnormal desires for food were less
successful in life and reproduction. We like certain foods and dislike
certain other foods because of the suffering and deaths of our
ancestors who liked or disliked the inappropriate foods. For example,
the reason we are appalled by the scent of waste products and rotten
meat is because we did not evolve to eat those foods. Our ancestors who
ate those foods were less successful in life.
We are no longer allowing nature to ensure that our children have
appropriate desires for food, or appropriate digestive systems, livers,
or other characteristics. We must now do what nature was doing for our
ancestors. We must decide who among us has the appropriate genetic
characteristics for the next generation. This includes passing judgment
on whether a person enjoys the foods that we have decided to be part of
our culture, and that they are capable of digesting those foods
properly.
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