The Food and Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies and Petty Tyrants

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo and James T. Bennett

Written in a lively, engaging style, The Food and Drink Police is a thoroughgoing examination and critique of the efforts of government agencies and private organizations (including the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Food and Drug Administration) to regulate the dietary habits and choices of private citizens. Irreverent, yet always informed, the authors...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560003855
• ISBN13: 9781560003854
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 170 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Hilarious and right on target; skewers the lunatic nannies

This book is so badly needed. It shows the racism, elitism, paternalism, and hypocrisy that infuses the demands of those who want to run our lives and tell us what to do, what to eat, and how we should think. The authors have an incredible way with humor. Once I started the book, I could not put it down. What is very impressive is the huge list of footnotes that provides solid documentation for their research... This book is scholarship and was published by a University press. Well Done!! A must-read for everybody who is tired of the endless pontification and preaching.

Thoughtful, thought provoking, amusing, and alarming

If you are one who thinks the government had your best interest at heart when it took on the cigarette industry, you need to read this book because you'll find out here that the federal tobacco wars were only the beginning. Sugar, salt, fat, wine, beer, distilled spirits, and beef are all on the chopping block of federal nannies who want only what is best for us. And it's all "for the children." Bennett and Dilorenzo make an important contribution to the national debate over what role--if any--the federal government should play in providing for the happiness which Americans derive from their personal choices of food and drink. The authors skewer federal bureaucrats and their private sector "non-profit" cronies who use taxpayer money to try forcing their own self-righteous world views on all citizens. They show with bitter humor that prohibitions on food and drink will follow in the wake of recent success against tobacco companies. I'll put this slim, entertaining, alarming volume right up there with James Bovard's Lost Rights as a book which thoughtful Americans should read. If citizens don't start reining in their representatives in D.C., the executive branch bureaucrats will be free to continue spending our tax dollars to make us all miserable. And thin. And free of alcohol, beef, and pleasure. An important book.