[City Journal] "It Is Forbidden" . . . Are ketchup packets next?

https://www.city-journal.org/california-to-restrict-condiment-packets-napkins

It Is Forbidden
From ketchup to construction materials, California lawmakers’ impulse to ban is inexhaustible.
Kerry Jackson
December 1, 2021
California
Politics and law

There is nothing so useful, so convenient, so inoffensive that it can’t be banned in California. Los Angeles, the largest city in a state that started the fast-food boom, has decided that condiment packets should be treated as a suspicious substance. They haven’t been banned outright, but customers can get ketchup, mustard, relish, and other spreads in their takeout orders only if they request them. The ordinance applies to restaurants with 26 or more employees (apparently a magic sum in the Golden State). It also forbids workers from handing out napkins and plastic utensils with takeout orders unless customers ask for them. By April 2022, all L.A. restaurants will have to comply.

Two months later, the entire state will come under the same limitations. The recently passed Assembly Bill 1276 prohibits “a food facility from providing any single-use foodware accessory or standard condiment, as defined, to a consumer unless requested by the consumer.” The law will apply to both dine-in and takeout orders.

Somehow, we are told, California’s inexhaustible urge to ban virtually any item humans have found worthwhile will help the world avoid the disaster of man-made global warming. “If we are to overcome the extreme climate challenges we face, we will have to alter or otherwise transform all our habits relating to fossil fuel products, including plastics, and our essential natural resources, like forests,” said L.A. councilman Paul Koretz, who coauthored the city’s ordinance. (Note: California produces only about 1 percent of global greenhouse emissions.) Or perhaps the ban will just help clean things up, since Californians are evidently careless and unrepentant litterbugs. “Plastic utensils and condiment packets create unnecessary trash, pollute waterways and harm marine life. CA is changing that!” tweeted assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, co-author of AB1276, last month.

Condiments, napkins, and plastic utensils are joining a lengthy list of consumer products already banned or restricted, including single-use plastic bags, plastic straws, Styrofoam food containers, sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered automobiles (to end by 2035), new gas stations (in Petaluma and Novato), natural gas connections in new homes (which began in Berkeley), and plastic shampoo bottles in hotels.

Just as rust never sleeps, neither does the political impulse to forbid. In Los Angeles, for instance, the city council’s Public Safety Committee has approved a plan to expand Fire District 1, a tract that includes many of the city’s high-density commercial zones. The move “would effectively ban timber and wood-frame construction in much of the city,” says Pacific Research Institute fellow Nolan Gray. The prohibition would include “many rapidly growing neighborhoods near transit,” forcing developers “to use concrete and steel, building materials that come with substantial added financial and environmental costs.” The stated intent is to improve fire safety, but the move will provide no clear benefits while raising construction costs, Gray says. A Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety review determined that expanding Fire District 1 would raise building material costs by at least 10.6 percent and possibly as much as 47.1 percent. The sharply rising home costs that are sure to follow will price even more people out of a housing market that’s already among the nation’s most expensive.

Unlike most California prohibitions, the building-material ban isn’t a vehicle for virtue-signaling. According to Gray, it’s “being advanced by and for business and labor interests in the concrete industry, which has aggressively promoted the measure as a way to ban competition.” This comes as no surprise, since California policymaking is often shaped by powerful union interests. But bans are bans, and those who must live with their consequences don’t much care what motivates them. For them, the hassle is the same.

Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
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it never ceases to amaze me that (a) people read the shittty posts I post; (b) analyze the shittty posts I post; and then (c) respond to the shittty posts I post

 

you know what the difference is between a business making a business decision on its own and the government passing a law to force a business to do something the government has decided is a good thing?

 

you know what's hilarious? New York banned single use plastic bags at grocery stores in favor of reusable bags and then covid happened. oops

Spoiler

The Plastic Bag Ban Backfires

Spoiler

The Plastic Bag Ban Backfires
Reusable bags are notoriously dirty and may spread the virus.

By The Editorial Board
March 16, 2020 7:01 pm ET

New York’s environmentalists have terrible timing. The statewide ban on single-use plastic bags took effect on March 1, the same day New York confirmed its first case of coronavirus. To protect the public, officials in the Empire State and elsewhere should immediately suspend their plastic bag bans.

Much remains unknown about Covid-19, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it “may remain viable for hours to days on surfaces made from a variety of materials.” Reusable shopping bags may harbor the virus and could facilitate its spread in grocery stores and pharmacies that remain open even as workplaces, schools and restaurants shutter. Yet in California, New York, Seattle and elsewhere, plastic bags are banned and shoppers are urged to rely on reusable bags.

Experience shows the risks. In 2013 millions of American piglets died amid an outbreak of novel swine enteric coronavirus disease, and after an investigation the U.S. Department of Agricultureconcluded that reusable feed totes were the most likely root cause. The feed bags are often made of the same kind of material as reusable shopping bags.

In 2010 several Oregon teens and adults fell ill after attending a soccer tournament, prompting an investigation by Kimberly Repp of the Oregon Health and Science University and William Keene of the Oregon Public Health Division. They traced the sickness to a reusable grocery bag, “which had been stored in a bathroom used before the outbreak by a person with a norovirus-like illness,” they wrote in a 2012 study for the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Soccer players and chaperones contracted the virus after touching the contaminated bag or eating cookies, chips or grapes carried in it.

Researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University surveyed grocery shoppers and randomly tested their reusable bags. “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half,” they wrote in their 2011 study, funded in part by the American Chemistry Council and published in Food Protection Trends. No wonder, since the majority of shoppers said they rarely or never washed them.

Americans are embracing extraordinary precautions to slow the spread of coronavirus. Until this pandemic passes, state and local officials should discourage shoppers from bringing their potentially virus-laden reusable bags out in public. Restore single-use bags, including the plastic kind.

 

yes and I know when government is likely to be too intrusive also

 

you know what else is funny? last year when covid happened all the restaurants I went to removed the ketchup squirt bottles and replaced them with . . . ketchup packets.

 

I can't help how other people spend their miserable lives

 

and if other miserable people respond and create a discussion in a debate and discussion forum, is that not a good outcome from a utilitarian perspective? why do other posters always obsess about my character? that seems like a waste of their lives

 

that was your characterization, not mine. If I cared I would dispute your characterization . . . but ultimately you are free to believe what you believe. 'murica