This piece of breaking news sent in by alert reader Michael Fisher: Denmark is banning Marmite.
Alert reader Michael Fisher is outraged.
I, too, am aghast. Or at least I was until I realized he didn't say "marmot." What on earth is Marmite?
"If you have to ask what it is," Fisher writes, "you won't like it."
Marmite, for the uninitiated, is a gooey, savoury food spread that the British like to slather on their toast. The Guardian newspaper calls it "a sticky brown yeast extract," though Fisher's own description -- "roofing tar" -- might be more accurate.
In any case, Marmite falls afoul of a Danish law restricting products with added vitamins. Horlicks, Ovaltine and something called Farley's Rusks have also become victims, according to the Guardian. Ditto for Australians' cherished Vegemite. Even Kelloggs pulled some brands of cereal when the law was enacted in 2004. "What is at issue here is that people in Denmark are not allowed to eat what they want to eat," a Copenhagen shop owner was quoted as saying.
Fisher, who acquired an affinity for Marmite during a dozen years in the U.K., is of similar sentiment.
"I can just about stomach (poor choice of words here) the banning of pesticides, but surely what I decide to poison myself with is my business,"
he argues. "Let's not tell the [government] busybodies about this. Otherwise they'll make me take my beloved Marmite outside to eat." Conjures up an interesting image, smokers and lunch-munchers fighting for the same patch of pavement under the awning as the Mayvember rains lash down.
The Marmite matter raises a good question: to what extent should government be allowed to tell us what we may eat? Will we see Big Brother become Big Mother, standing over the nation with a wooden spoon, enforcing the Eat Your Vegetables Act of 2012?
Governments used to steer clear of this stuff. "The state has no place in the kitchens of the nation," Pierre Trudeau famously declared. (Well, no, but it was probably in his first draft.) Today, the politicians are drifting closer to the dining room, clearing their throats when we reach for the salt, muttering darkly about health costs when we order a Big Whatever.
In January, Los Angeles city council cemented a policy that has effectively banned new fast-food restaurants from poor neighbourhoods since 2008 (note that they didn't try corking the cream sauce in up-scale Chez Cardiaque; apparently only poor people are fat, whereas the rich are merely
"well-fed.") Two years ago the B.C. government restricted the amount of trans fats used in restaurants, bakeries and other food-service establishments. Schools were told to empty vending machines of junk food, filling the slots with raisins and "healthy snacks" made of strips of
compressed compost peeled from truck tires.
This all has shades of the 1980s BBC satire Yes Minister, in which the European Union ruled that the traditional British banger didn't contain enough meat to be called a sausage, so should be labelled "emulsified high-fat offal tube" instead.
Ah, but there's a twist. Denmark now says it has not actually banned Marmite. It's just that foods with added vitamins have to be sold under special licence from the Veterinary and Food Administration, and no one has applied for such a permit.
OK, but that still leaves us thinking that A) it's easier to buy an assault rifle in Texas than Marmite in Copenhagen and B) aren't added vitamins good?
Oh, those wacky Europeans and their opposition to Frankenfoods. You would think they had never seen a 14-kilogram banana with the half-life of plutonium-239.
Still leaves the basic question: Should government tell us what we may eat?
Isn't that Oprah's job?
