I’ve just heard the bad news from Burnt by the Tuscan Sun. The Italian government has recently decided that Italian orange or lemon drinks will no longer be required to include the actual fruit juice.
How gosh darned American of them.
I love(d) the taste sharp lemon taste of Italian Limonata. It even had pulp. What it didn’t have was that incredible cloying sweetness that sodas in the US evidently have to have. When I order one at an Italian bar and the waiter returns a perfunctory “Sprite va bene?” I shake my head so vigorously I sometimes hurt myself. Not on your life, sister…
But then there is the curious paragraph in Burnt:
As a staunch capitalist, I think this is wise. But, as someone who loves the pure juices without having them tainted with sugar, corn syrup and all of the other insidious ingredients which creep into American beverages, well, it’s a travesty. And the outcry has been huge.
(I feel a Beppe Grillo rant coming on)
Wise? Why? Certainly you can make more money by serving people industrial waste and left over donkey urine in place of the lemonade they think they’ve ordered. That’s just plain stealing. I really don’t get why people stand up and cheer when government sits back and allows industry to lie so that it can sell cheap knock-offs of good things in order to increase profit from people who have to lower their standards of living to provide that profit. Why should that be called “the free market?” You know the one I mean. The old one. The one that had unlimited buyers, unlimited sellers, and the buyers knew what they were buying.
Here’s the thing. You can sell lemon soda. Nobody’s saying you can’t. We just expect it to contain lemon, that’s all we ask. You can also sell sugared donkey piss. Just say what it is and put it on the market. Nobody’s stopping you.
A market in which you don’t know what you’re buying with your hard earned money is not a free market, it’s a thieves market.
Take American genetically modified “food.” The industry doesn’t want you to know if what you buy is or isn’t genetically modified, so they throw great gobs of their profit at lawyers and lobbyists who work endlessly to defeat truth in advertising laws to hide their work from you the consumer.
Why? Because you might decide (erroneously, to those who cook the books) not to purchase their frankenfood. And that would be wrong. Does this government enforced over-ride of your opinion—right or wrong, correct or erroneous—bother you? Just a bit?
I’ve heard the arguments from folks deathly afraid of a “nanny state” in which the government protects consumers by setting rules about what can be done to food. But when the government steps back and lets industry lie, well then, folks, you have yourself a nanny state by proxy. And let me tell you, I can think of nothing worse. If you don’t like a government nanny state, you can vote the bastards out. But if government builds a wall between consumers and an industry so devoid of new ideas it has to put all sorts of crap into your “food” in order to make an indecent profit—well folks, that’s a proper nightmare.
What kind of nightmare? Corporatism. Mussolini’s “Corporate State”.
You want that? Ok, then.