Trans Fatsual

Shed a tear for food and raise an angry burger-clutching fist against stupidity. The FDA, with all the ham-handedness we have come to expect from it, has declared that naturally occurring trans fats, the good kind that makes butter and meats and baked goods and stuff taste so yummy, is not to be allowed in food that claims itself to be artificially trans fat-free. Huh.

What that actually means is that natural wonderful butter must now be jettisoned in favor of nasty artificial and possibly dangerous palm oils and trans margarines to be allowed to infest prepared foods.
This makes NO sense. The FDA could easily have constructed the labeling laws to allow for the minuscule amounts of natural trans fats that go into these things to mke them taste so good.
But noooooooo. Because they’re blockheads. Or headcheese. Or just jerky.

It gets worse. In New York City, this now could be interpreted to mean that food with even naturally occurring trans fats is against the recently enacted city law that ALL trans fats are strictly verboten, everywhere, in anything.

What might this mean for the gorgeous and now apparently illegal beef and ham and pork that I am accustomed to buy at my beloved East Village Ukrainian and Polish butchers? All of which contain naturally occurring trans fats and are therefore now in the eyes of the NYC penal code unspeakable and illicit instruments of fatty doom.

I have no idea. But it looks like Prohibition to me, and we all saw how well that worked out…

Will we henceforth be directed in furtive (or frankfurterive) whispers to secret meat speakeasies, where a special knock and a well-connected password (“Zbigniew sent me!”) will allow us to score interdicted ham off the bone or sub rosa soppressata?

Will there be skanky-looking (but well-nourished!) overcoated dealers hanging out in Tompkins Square Park (“Hey, hey, check it out, check it out, got your kielbasy here, primo cut, no fake trans fat!”), or that one can call and arrange for a private buy, just as one once did for pot or coke or acid (“Gimme a lid of real butter, thousand grams of ground beef, couple dozen tabs of bacon. And make sure it’s all got a good natural fat count!”)? Old times, old times.

Pray to the Fat Angel for our deliverance from the demons of over-zealous governmental meddlers! I’m off now to my butchers to stock up while I still can.
FDA, New York City Council, may you choke on your trans fat-free croissants, and may you die unHeimliched.

Freakin’ food police. Now you can’t even call them “pigs.”