Get the state off the plate

As well as the piece about parental drinking I linked to a couple of days ago, there’s another excellent article on Sp!ked this week by Rob Lyons about the increasing tendency of the authorities to seek to dictate people’s diets:

Underneath all the dubious scientific claims about food and ill health, there is an instinct among lobby groups, the medical profession, civil servants and politicians to regulate what we do in minute detail. We cannot be trusted, it seems, with even the most mundane decisions about our lives. The existence of prohibitionists and petty control freaks is not new, of course. But the fact that governments now enthusiastically support such groups is a fairly recent development. In the past, politicians would have recognised that some areas were out of bounds for state intervention, and might even have believed, on principle, that maintaining autonomy was the proper thing to do. Now, the lifestyle micromanagers are pushing at an open door to the corridors of power.