Case in point: Now, because it has nothing better to do apparently, the Food and Drug Administration wants to criminalize pizza toppings.
Now, whether you like veggies on your pizza, various meats, extra cheese – or whether you’ve sworn off pizza altogether, we have to ask – is it really the federal government’s responsibility to regulate toppings? Apparently someone in Obama’s FDA thought so because a new rule set to take effect seeks to do just that.
As reported by The Daily Signal, the rule, “Nutrition Labeling of Standard Menu Items in Restaurants and Similar Retail Food Establishments” (79 FR 71155), was supposed to take effect May 5. But now the agency has put off implementing the rule for another year.
If implemented, the 105-page rule would put in place amendments created during the Obama administration to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), a piece of legislation enshrined in 21 U.S. Code that establishes national standards for labeling and marketing of food products.
Yes, the government regulates that. (RELATED: EPA A Left-Leaning, Anti-Science Rogue Agency That Functions As A Puppet For The Globalists: Shut It Down)
“The rule would require, among other mandates, that all restaurants and other retail food outlets, such as movie theaters, operating as one brand with at least 20 stores, display a calorie count in addition to other nutritional information for all standard menu items on the establishment’s ‘menus and boards,’” The Daily Signal reported.
In order to explain just how far-reaching this obscene rule would be, Lynn Liddle, executive vice president of Domino’s Pizza, noted the expansive definition of “menu.”
It “can refer to any writing that [is] ‘used by a customer to make an order selection at the time the customer is viewing the writing’” – which could pertain to flyers and any other printed or published advertisements like window signs or online menus, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“We no longer know what a menu is,” said Liddle, highlighting the confusion associated with a rule only a Washington bureaucrat who never has to abide by such arcane nonsense could love.
Indeed, when an executive of a major food company is telling you she can’t even figure out what the word “menu” means under a new rule, there’s a problem.
But that’s what’s wrong with most every rule that Washington’s bureaucracy grinds out. They are often so confusing and ambiguous that they can literally be interpreted any way the agency that issued them wants to. Not only does such vagueness make compliance difficult if not impossible, it gives the federal agency a hammer it can use against the affected industry any time it chooses, depending on the political ideology of the president at the time, since the federal bureaucracy answers to the Executive Branch.
For her part, Liddle said her company agrees with the overarching goal of the rule – to inform customers of the calories they are taking in when eating a product. But she also provided what is unquestionably a free-market solution to the issue: Her company has been providing that information to customers for a decade, and that is no doubt in response to customer feedback and demands in a day and age when more Americans are counting calories and watching what they eat.
In other words, we don’t need a government agency mandating these kinds of things. The market takes care of itself, as Dominos’ publication of its “cal-o-meter” online proves.
The problem with the federal bureaucracy is that, over the decades, it has been expanded by presidents who use it to continually expand their own power. Federal agency rules carry the same weight as laws, and our founders never envisioned that ‘law’ would be made by any government entity other than Congress. (RELATED: Trump’s First 100 Days: Already Achieved Massive Cuts In Federal Regulations)
But then Congress is to blame too, new laws often call for the establishment of a new federal agency that then is permitted to essentially write its own role and function – and rules.
When a federal agency claims to have the authority to distort the term “menu” and force every restaurant in the country to undertake a confusing and expensive effort to publish calorie content – when many are already doing so voluntarily – it just proves once again that Trump’s efforts to reduce the influence and scope of the bureaucracy is exactly the right thing to do.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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