Lori Lightfoot’s sugary drinks ordinance is her latest experiment in tone-deaf meddling. Pop quiz!
Which has more calories, apple juice or Coca-Cola?
Take your time. Weigh the options: pure, natural apple juice, pressed from God’s crunchy red ripe apples harvested from lovely orchards? Or carbon dioxide-infused, artificially colored, sugar-laden soda pop, concocted in dark, clangorous factories?
Bzzzzzzzt, time’s up! Of course, the apple juice is far more fattening. Coca-Cola Classic has 140 calories for 12 ounces, while the same amount of Mott’s Apple Juice has 180 calories. Almost 25% more. Quite a lot really.
Which is only the first reason to shake your head, sadly, after Mayor Lori Lightfoot introduced an ordinance at Wednesday’s City Council meeting let’s call it the Make Our Kids Even Fatter law requiring restaurants selling special meals to kids to favor apple juice over Coke.
The worry, the mayor said at a news conference afterward, is that kids are “reflexively being given really high-caloric, or very high sugary drinks.”
Her solution? Unhappy meals. Of course, the law is more complex than merely swapping juice and soda. There is a litany of city-approved beverages sparkling water, 100% vegetable juice that can go into children’s meals. The ordinance reads like the dietary laws in Deuteronomy.
Conjuring up the specter of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s notorious soda tax. You remember, the summer of 2017, when Preckwinkle told Cook County residents they were too fat, so she would be charging more for the sweet drinks they guzzle.
Everyone recalls the tax was really a money grab disguised as good nutrition (making Lightfoot’s current stunt even worse, as it costs money to enforce and doesn’t collect any). The fiasco is part of the reason the snappish Lightfoot was able to crush the once-respected Preckwinkle in the 2019 mayoral election.
Less remembered is that, besides being ineffectual and insulting, the soda tax was also a bookkeeping nightmare for grocery stores, which suddenly had to categorize every single can of beverage and weigh whether this new tax applies. Now, thanks to our mayor and clerk, every employee at Wendy’s is going to have to suss out what juice box they’re tucking in is that Sunny D or orange juice? Because running a restaurant just isn’t complicated enough.
One wonders what Lightfoot’s true motivation could be. If she actually cared about child obesity, there are useful steps the city could take: encouraging exercise, disseminating nutritional education, that kind of thing. Why take this complex issue healthy living and nibble at the corner of one tiny aspect? The drinks that kids sip in restaurants, which amount, according to the CDC, for 14% of their caloric intake.
Pressed, Lightfoot spat out, “This is the right thing to do!” with the rest of the thought “because I’m doing it” being unvoiced like the g in “gnome.”
So what’s her true motivation? Could this be some kind of unconscious political self-immolation? Lightfoot hates campaigning yet obviously loves the my-way-or-the-highway authority that comes from being mayor. Maybe she really doesn’t want to run again but is too proud to simply quit. So she struck on a strategy of abusing the electorate so it rejects her. Drawing attention to fat kids may only be the start. The next law might regard deodorants. Because your kids stink!
Nah. Based on the nasty mayoral texts peppering aldermen with abuse that the Tribune pried out of the city, it seems clear that Lightfoot is simply bored of ridiculing the colleagues she is supposedly working with and looking for fresh victims. She’s expanding her scope by fat-shaming the children of Chicago. I suppose soon she’ll be popping up at hastily arranged assemblies at school auditoriums around the city, lining the kids up and pointing out their excesses with a swagger stick. “How are you ever going to get ahead in life, Timmy, dragging that enormous keister around behind you?” “How many sugary soft drinks, Sally, did it take to create that spare tire hanging around your gut?”
I’m all for an active government protecting its citizens. But the city makes a mockery of regulation when it starts to fine-tune, particularly in such a sensitive area as weight. How well would this work in your life? You’d never say, “I’d like to eat a second cookie, but it’s against the law!”
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This woman knows NOTHING about NOTHING. Worthless carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
That’s not exactly Lori the loser knows how to keep black people killing black people in Chicago! That is her true skill set. And an absolutely disgusting skill set it is! Who voted for this total ***HAT?
Keep in mind black people made her their mayor. Enough said!
She certainly is a waste of air!
and space… don’t forget that
Thank goodness Beetlejuice can’t procreate! We don’t need any additional worthless creatures roaming the earth. IMHO
This woke woman that has enough forehead,,,for four heads, must be imagining Johnny Appleseed was one of her ancestors, like Pocahontas Karen claims to be Native American. Either that or she has invested tons of her political skimmed money in Apple Orchards in Washington State, now going broke because Joe Biden and Democrats like her paid all the pickers more to stay home, than come to work and pick real fruit. It was their own very forbidden fruit they offer Americans that prompted Jesus to instruct us to Pray “Lead us not into temptation”.
I warned back when Obama began to seize control of our Healthcare that it would end in Government cutting costs that keep people healthy by cutting their freedoms of choice, not only of doctors, but food. When Political party life control gets to the point you have to ask them for permission as to what you can put into you mouth to eat, but indiscriminately put anyone into your private parts for impregnation you begin to realize Democrat Socialists are using the wrong parts of their bodies to do their thinking leaving the brains on permanent work stoppage. For Pathological Power-hungry Democrats it no longer about THE PEOPLE, but the rising costs of their stupidity that make them realize their own bankrupt party destruction is accelerating faster than a large roll of toilet paper spinning ever faster as it approaches the end of its holder.
I think its more, that NO SANE MAN wants to procreate, with “IT”.. Not that she can’t make them.
In a city with a sky high crime rate, record numbers of shooting that include children, and rampant social problems you’d think she could find a great many other issues to address besides whether kids are drinking a sweet carbonated beverage when they go out to eat. Apparently she feels that THIS is where her energy ought to be placed. She is wrong.
THAT would require she actually DOES SOMETHING, for the good of her constituents..
Parents of pudgy children take aim at brainless mayor.
Brainless, bug eyed bigot. There, fixed it.
When it is pointed out that the fruit drinks actually have just as many if not more calories as soda their response is that yes but the latter are empty calories. All of the drinks that have real fruit juice and many have only a small percentage of actual juice however, are pasteurized which means that most of the vitamins are destroyed which is why the producers add artificial vitamin C. So maybe not “empty calories” but definitely “artificial” calories. They also argue that there is a major difference between fructose in fruit juice and sodas but most of the studies suggest that fructose is fructose and what matters is the actual concentration of sugar. Apple juice is one of the worst in this regard which is why it is so often used as a “base juice” in so many beverages claiming to be “all juice” while 100% orange juice has less than half the sugar as Coke. So its complicated but I am sure we can rely on the wisdom of our elected leaders to make the best nutrition decisions for us. (Sarc.)
Hell, most also have MORE SUGAR.!
African Americans vote around 90% for Democrats. I just don’t get it!
Hey, Mayor Lightweight…
Have YOU investigated how much of Michelle Obama’s School Lunch food was THROWN AWAY by the kids SHE wanted to FORCE to eat it (because they would rather go hungry, than eat that ****)?
Which is better? A child who is obese, or a child who is starving (voluntarily)?
Is there any way that her picture could be not posted with the articles? This bug-eyed garbage turns my stomach.