My quote of the day comes courtesy of some bureaucrat (or possibly some committee of bureaucrats) at the US Department of Agriculture on the requirements for Grade A fruit cocktail:
Peach. The texture is typical of diced peaches prepared and processed from at least reasonably well-matured fruit and the units may range in tenderness from slightly firm to slightly soft but possess fairly well-defined edges;
Pear. The texture is typical of diced pears prepared and processed from properly ripened pears or from pears of moderate graininess and the units may range in tenderness from slightly firm to slightly soft and may have slightly rounded edges;
Pineapple. The units are practically uniform in ripeness with fruitlets of compact structure, are reasonably free from porosity and are practically free from hard core material;
Grape. The units are reasonably plump and reasonably firm; and
Cherry. The units are reasonably firm.
Until I read this profound statement from our fine regulators at the USDA, I was totally unaware that fruit cocktail with porous pineapple fruitlets or soft cherries could not qualify as Grade A fruit cocktail. I am also now pretty sure that as a child I consumed some canned fruit substances illegally masquerading as fruit cocktail. As the Department of Agriculture makes clear, cherries must comprise not less than “2 percent by weight of drained fruit” and not more than “6 percent by weight of drained fruit” in order to meet the government definition of fruit cocktail. There were never enough cherries, and I suspect that most of the cans of fruit cocktail I consumed as a child failed to meet that 2 percent cherry threshold.
Here is the full 21-page set of regulations for fruit cocktail in case you are interested. (If you are in fact interested, you are probably either a Del Monte insider or just really bored with the lockdown.)
While I find the fruit cocktail regulations humorous and ridiculous, these are precisely the types of regulations that cause me to worry about the future of freedom in America. Apparently, we have a regulatory state which sees fit to use government power to regulate the shape of the peach slices which can be canned and then labeled fruit cocktail. This is exactly the type of regulation that crushes innovation, consumer choice, and competition to the advantage of Big Fruit. How can we reasonably consider ourselves free if the regulatory state seeks to interfere in even the smallest minutiae of American life?
Even worse, we have millions of Americans who are so fearful of free markets and consumer choice that they are eager participants in this soft tyranny. These are the Americans who think that absent the heavy-handed regulatory state, our cans of fruit cocktail would consist of nothing more than rotten pears, maggots, and swamp water. There would be no cherries at all! These bureaucracy worshipers actually think that closing the Department of Education would mean the end of schools or eliminating the Department of Agriculture would lead to mass famine. They don’t seem to trust freedom and markets.
Had these people been in charge, George Washington’s camp at Valley Forge would have been closed down by some 18th-century version of OSHA. The pioneers would have been forbidden from building their log cabins by some 19th-century incarnation of the EPA until a comprehensive environmental impact study on prairie dog habitat had been completed. And the Wright Brothers would have been put out of business by an early version of the Department of Transportation for misuse of bicycle parts.
We need a major retreat of the regulatory state, and I say we start by making illegal mixes of fruit cocktail.
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December 20, 2020 at 04:45AM
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