Being in the hospital is bad enough. Woke progressives want to make it worse, by taking away your comfort foods like bacon, and making you eat more plant-based foods. Reason Magazine reports:
People will want to stock up on comfort food and snacks before visiting their loved ones in D.C. hospitals, should a new bill from City Councilmember Mary Cheh become law.
Cheh’s Healthy Hospitals Amendment Act of 2022 would prohibit hospitals in the city from serving bacon, sausage, and other processed meats, and mandate that they expand their offerings of plant-based meals and healthy beverages…..
The legislation is based on a 2017 resolution from the American Medical Association calling for hospitals to eliminate processed meats, promote healthy beverages, and provide healthy food at reasonable prices.
The outright ban on processed meats—defined as meats that have been “been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation”—is complemented by a number of regulations to nudge people into picking healthier drinks.
Cheh’s bill would require that 75 percent of drinks in hospital vending machines, cafeterias, and cafes be non-sugar-sweetened beverages. Waters and sparkling waters would also have to be placed at eye-level in vending machines, or in the highest-selling position in the vending machine. Sodas would have to be placed farthest from eye level or in the lowest-selling position….it seems unlikely that tighter regulations of hospital menus will do much to improve patient health. People typically (and hopefully) aren’t in hospitals for very long, so any health gains they reap from cutting out hot dogs will be pretty fleeting….There’s also an unintentional cruelty to Cheh’s bill: Hospitals don’t have a reputation as fun places for a reason. If you’re a hospital patient, something is probably seriously wrong with you. If you’re a visitor, there’s probably something seriously wrong with someone you care about.
People in physically and emotionally taxing circumstances could probably use some comfort. Ready access to a side of bacon could provide that comfort, even if it’s not exactly the meal the surgeon general would recommend. And people dying of cancer should probably get to pick their own beverage of choice, even when not strictly “therapeutically necessary.”
Not everything progressives want is good for your health. Earlier, in the name of “equity,” progressive bureaucrats in Washington, DC provided a $766,000 grant to open an IHOP in an “underserved” community that already has plenty of restaurants, and has wealthy progressive yuppies rather than low-income black people — even though IHOP’s menu is full of sugary and fatty foods:
The new franchise, an IHOP press release announced this month, “contributes to the revitalization of an underserved community,” but don’t start getting visions of some blighted inner city core. The “underserved community” is Columbia Heights, which is anything but “underserved.” It’s been a local shopping mecca for nearly three years now and one of Washington’s more desirable neighborhoods….The new IHOP is part of the DCUSA shopping center. Nearby are Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, Best Buy, Giant, Starbucks, Staples, FedEx Kinko’s, Five Guys, Potbelly’s, Chipotle, and Commonwealth Gastropub, just to name a few. The nearby Heights restaurant serves a “goat cheese sun-dried tomato burger,” but you might have to wait 20 minutes for an outdoor table.
A few blocks to the northeast are Meridian Pint, with an impressive selection of foreign beers that go for $7 to $8 a pint, and Room 11, where you can spend a day’s pay on microscopic portions of savory jamon Iberico, olives and Rioja wines.
How did this community become the taxpayer’s beneficiary? Butch Hopkins, CEO of the Anacostia Economic Development Corp., explained to me that his organization had applied for and received the $766,000 grant from HHS last year, to invest in the new restaurant in exchange for a minority equity stake.
