Table of contents for August - September 2015 in Reason

THE STORY OF Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is the story of America. The illegitimate offspring of a cheese puff and a Dorito, the snacks are a triumph of food science. With their finger-staining red pigment, infinite shelf life, sui generis squiggly shape, and well-calibrated esophageal burn, Flamin’ Hots flaunt qualities impossible to find in nature, brought into existence by applying advanced technology to frivolous goals. The creation story of this irresistible snack is quintessentially American, too. Richard Montañez, a longtime janitor at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California, was watching someone cook corn with butter and chile when inspiration struck: Why not add Mexican spices to the famous corn-based puff? Montañez— who spoke no English—whipped up a test batch, designed some mock packaging, and soon found himself convincing the top…

Code enforcement officers in Ogden, Utah, have ordered Jeremy Trentelman to take down the cardboard fort he built in his yard for his 3-year-old son. They say the fort violates city litter laws. In 2008, Rene Lima-Marin walked out of a Colorado prison after serving 10 years of what he thought was a 16-year sentence for robbery. He then completed what he was told were his five years of probation. He got married, started a family, joined a church, got a steady job, and seemed to have turned his life around. Then, last year, he was informed that his release had been a big mistake. He still had 88 years left on his sentence. He’s back in prison now and won’t be eligible for parole until 2054. Officials at Stevenson…

ON MY WAY into work, I usually hit the McDonald’s drive-through for breakfast. My typical order: two sausage burritos and a large Diet Coke (no ice). The menu board informs me that each burrito contains 300 calories. That’s 50 more than an egg white sandwich but 300 fewer than a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel. McDonald’s started posting calorie counts on all its menus in September 2012. The move was partially a response to a proposed 2011 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule affecting chain restaurants and large vending machine operators. Under the rule, calories must be displayed on all menus and menu boards, while other nutritional information— including calories from fat, cholesterol, sugars, and protein—must be made available in writing upon request. The regulation, finalized in 2014, was smuggled…

Don’t get too attached to your movie theater popcorn. A year and a half after issuing a “tentative determination” that partially hydrogenated oils—the main source of trans-unsaturated fatty acids, or trans fats—were unsafe to be consumed in any quantity, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is set to effectively ban the use of nearly all trans fats in food. (The ruling won’t affect the “naturally occurring” trans fats in meat or dairy products.) So if you’ve ever experienced a craving for such delicious junk-food delicacies as donuts, frozen pizza, coffee creamers, or canned cinnamon rolls, or fast-food fare like the Wendy’s Baconator or Domino’s extra-thick pan pizzas, get ready for a mouthful of disappointment: They are all products that currently rely heavily on trans fats. Once the FDA rule is…

■ The Claude Rains Award for total transparency: Mike Huckabee, for his forthright declaration that “I didn’t kidnap the Lindbergh baby, I didn’t sink the Titanic, and I wasn’t standing on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963.” He also denies ever having tasted Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine. ■ The MKULTRA Award for a veiled bid to run the CIA: Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon: “I could take an 85-year-old man and place depth electrodes into a certain part of his brain followed by an appropriate electrical stimulation and he would be able to recite verbatim a book he read 60 years ago.” ■ The Don-Draper-on-Acid Award for political advertising: In the 2010 U.S. Senate primary in California, Carly Fiorina portrayed her opponent as a…

Apex (Angry Robot) caps Ramez Naam’s rumbustious, idea-packed transhumanist trilogy. The first novel, Nexus, was the 2014 co-winner of the Prometheus Award for libertarian-themed science fiction. The trilogy features a merry band of young technologists led by Kaden Lane who create an ingestible nano-drug called Nexus in 2040. Worried that Nexus, which links minds telepathically, could be abused by governments, Lane and his friends want to make it available to everyone. As the trilogy develops, all hell breaks loose with agents of the U.S. government’s Emerging Risks Directorate seeking to eradicate Nexus and hunting its creators across the globe. Apex opens as a posthuman artificial intelligence driven insane by Chinese government torture is on the verge of provoking a nuclear war between the U.S. and China. One of the book’s…

AMERICAN CORPULENCE hit new highs in 2014. According to a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey, 27.7 percent of all U.S. adults now qualify as obese, a gain of more than two percentage points since 2008. Such metrics might suggest we’re eating everything in sight, but nothing could be further from the truth. At every link in the industrial food chain, we’re leaving perfectly edible fare on the table. Overplanted crops rot in fields. Disfigured cucumbers are culled at packaging facilities. Bunches of bananas, lost in the crowd, fail to make lasting connections with consumers in the highly competitive meat market of the Whole Foods produce section. And even the butternut squash that makes it into your refrigerator or onto your plate at the Olive Garden is far from sure to make…

GUSTAVO ARELLANO is the editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, where he delights in “exposing fake libertarians, making fun of the real ones for loving Ayn Rand too much, and watching Mexican libertarians take over the county, one taco truck at a time.” He’s also the author of the award winning syndicated column “¡Ask a Mexican!” In “Drop That Snack!” on page 18, the 36-year old Arellano explores the way municipal nanny statism limits innovation (and tastiness) in the marketplace for food. In “Why Does Cadbury Taste Worse in America?” (page 35), reason Associate Editor SCOTT SHACKFORD, 43, unpacks how government regulations are keeping certain chocolate treats out of the hands of consumers. In “Battlefield: Cake” (page 76), he explains why florists and photographers have…

“Let’s give it up for the Secret Service. I don’t want to be too hard on those guys. You know, because they’re the only law enforcement agency that will get in trouble if a black man gets shot.” —Saturday Night Live cast member Cecily Strong, during her White House Correspondents’ Dinner remarks, April 25 “I’m not an upstanding citizen. I’m the evil that goes bump in the night in this city. Whoever don’t know my name, know my face. But goddamn, can we at least get due process? Send me to jail for life, if I’m a criminal. I don’t want anyone to get hurt tonight.” — Yusha Hasim Al-Fahd, a Baltimore gang member who helped form a barrier between protesters and police during the Freddie Gray riots, quoted in…

IN APRIL, the high-class Mexican food chain Chipotle announced that it was going GMO-free. That is, the company would no longer use ingredients derived from modern biotech crops. Chipotle says it sells “food with integrity.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines integrity as “the quality of being honest and fair.” In making this decision, alas, the company is being neither honest nor fair about the safety and environmental benefits provided by modern genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Chipotle offers three “key reasons” for rejecting genetically modified ingredients. The first: “We don’t believe the scientific community has reached a consensus on the long-term implications of widespread GMO cultivation and consumption.” As evidence for this statement, the company notes that “in October 2013 a group of about 300 scientists from around the world signed a…

“WHAT WE’VE WITNESSED in the past 25 or 30 years is just incredible,” says Geoffrey Zakarian about the food and restaurant revolution in America. As one of the country’s most visible and influential restaurateurs, chefs, and food personalities, Zakarian is uniquely qualified to discuss the proliferation of top-notch restaurants and exploding interest in new forms of culinary expression. If our national cuisine was once bland and derivative, he observes, it’s now the global center of experimentation and innovation. Zakarian is an Iron Chef on Food Network’s Iron Chef America series and he’s a regular judge on the channel’s massively popular Chopped, in which contestants whip together a three-course meal using mystery—and usually incongruous—ingredients. (In one typical episode, participants were asked to create an appetizer using watermelon, canned sardines, pepper jack…

Halfway through the second season of HBO’s Silicon Valley, wannabe tech entrepreneur Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) dresses down a nosy neighbor intent on alerting the cops to Bachman’s unlicensed commercial activities. “Do you know why your shitty house is worth 20 times what you paid for it in the 1970s?” Bachman rants. “Because of people like us moving in and starting illegal businesses in our garages. [That’s] why Silicon Valley is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the world.” It’s a fitting statement of purpose for this show, which celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of friends trying to launch a revolutionary tech company called Pied Piper. They court investors, haggle with employees, and wage unfriendly competition with corporate giant Hooli, a fictitious Apple or Google clone that fights dirty. The Pied…

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum’s La Galerie d’Absinthe serves up a profusion of artifacts associated with the herbal liqueur favored by debauched artists and denizens of the night. A mismatched assortment of glass cases overflows with the silvered paraphernalia the drink’s classic presentation requires, as well as hundreds of dusty bottles, newspaper clippings, labels, and even elaborate fountains designed to dispense the high-proof beverage. The exhibit celebrates New Orleans’ proud history of scoffing at vice scolds, including a decidedly damp Prohibition period and an uninterrupted tradition of absinthe consumption— even during the decades “the green fairy” was banned in the United States. The bright, informal museum (which shares space with the Museum of the American Cocktail) is located in a pleasant airy loft. But Bourbon Street tourists take note:…

Death by police Riots in Baltimore Ed Krayewski ON MAY 1, following the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged six police officers with a series of crimes ranging from official misconduct to murder. Gray reportedly ran when officers made eye contact with him on April 12, and cops pursued him. He was then arrested for allegedly carrying an illegal knife and placed in a police van, where he suffered a spinal injury and went into a coma, dying one week later. In her indictment, Mosby said the knife was legal to possess, but at least one officer’s attorney insists that it wasn’t. The indictments the grand jury returned don’t include false imprisonment charges, reflecting uncertainty over the knife. Demonstrations for Freddie Gray…

IN MAY a federal appeals court said police do not need a warrant to look at cellphone records that reveal everywhere you’ve been. Two days later, another appeals court said the National Security Agency (NSA) broke the law by indiscriminately collecting telephone records that show whom you call, when you call them, and how long you talk. That looks like one victory for government snooping and one defeat. But both decisions highlight the precariousness of privacy in an age when we routinely store huge amounts of sensitive information outside our homes. The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” But the Supreme Court says it does not protect our papers once we entrust them to someone else. In a 1976 case involving bank…

RAW MILK GOOD NEWS The Texas House passed a bill to liberalize the rules governing the sale of raw milk. The legislation would allow door-to-door and farmers market sales, as well as the direct-from-farm sales that were already permitted. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Dan Flynn (R–Canton), explained that “it all comes down to free enterprise. These farmers deserve to make a living off selling their product.” Last year, bills expanding consumer access to raw milk were introduced in 25 states and the District of Columbia; California also passed a law loosening regulations on goats’ milk. BAD NEWS In April, Democratic West Virginia Gov. Earl Tomblin unexpectedly vetoed a bill that would have allowed herd sharing—in which raw milk drinkers become part owners of a cow housed at a dairy.…

SAY WHAT YOU WILL about the 2016 presidential race, but the candidates are almost twice as good as those in the 2008 election. This is an objective fact, which I established using the pioneering methodology of essayist Paul Greenberg, who added up the prices of all the 2008 campaign autobiographies and then divided by the total number of pages. That yielded an average value of about a nickel a page. I did the same thing with the seven 2016 autobiographies published so far and calculated that they’re going for about nine cents a page. It’s morning in America! Having read—God help me— precisely 2,026 pages of this stuff, I can tell you that no sane person would pay nine cents a page for it. But more surprising than the price…

“We’re not asking, we’re demanding: Give us the vote!” says David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oscarnominated Selma. The film celebrates King above all for his commitment to the practice of non-violent protest. He is repeatedly shown imploring his followers to “disturb the peace” but rejects the more radical tactics of people like Malcolm X. Selma appeared on Amazon’s instant streaming service in late April—just as chaos was unfolding in Baltimore. When Freddie Gray, a black 25-year-old, died of a spinal injury a week after being taken into police custody there, protesters flooded the streets, eventually becoming violent. Throughout the proteststurned-riots, Gray’s stepfather, Richard Shipley, like King before him, called for composure. “I was so hurt and ashamed that they were apparently attempting to use [violence] in…

Ben Yagoda’s perceptive book The B-Side (Riverhead) laments the passing of the era of the “Great American Songbook,” a period that lasted from 1925 to 1950. While his bemoaning of the end of the “standards” period is insightful—rock ’n’ roll was not to blame, he argues convincingly—he also delivers sideways insight into the constant evolution of pop economics as well as pop aesthetics. In 2013, 1.26 billion digital music tracks were sold. In 1917, over 2 billion songs’ worth of sheet music were sold. Foreshadowing the arguments over music pirating in the 1990s, unauthorized performers of popular songs in the early 20th century argued that they were doing the copyright holders a favor: Their public performances helped to boost sheet music sales. A giant industry built on selling recorded sound…

Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough, Penguin Press, 608 pages, $29.95 BEGINNING IN 1969, a small but noisy segment of the radical left turned to bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings, jailbreaks, targeted assassinations of police officers, and other acts of violence. At the outset of Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough claims that the “most startling thing about the 1970s-era underground is how thoroughly it has been forgotten.” His reconstruction of that period’s activities profits from the journalist’s extensive and revealing interviews with activists, their attorneys, and former FBI agents. The result is a comprehensive account of the lifestyles, motivations, and actions of the militants who went underground during the 1970s and ’80s: the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army,…