By Peter Galuszka
Here’s something that 
No kidding! It’s a Libertarian nightmare. Big Apple is telling you that you can’t have that Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew or Sprite you want a 16-ounce cup or larger at a local fast food joint, movie theater or even street vendor.
Big Mike wants to keep you slim and trim.
You have to give Bloomberg credit. He’s just arrogant enough to take the straw by the horns and do something about obesity that’s plaguing all Americans and New Yorkers. He has a point on this. Americans are too super-sized and we all end up paying with higher health premiums and other issues due to their lack of control.
But a lot of this has to do with marketing by the big drink makers and fast food firms that have been pushing larger and larger portions for decades. Movie houses, in particular, make most of their margin on that large buttered popcorn and huge drink for twelve bucks or more.
I like movie popcorn as much as the next idiot, but I do remember when I was a teenager in the late 1960s. If you went to McDonald’s after class, you got a reasonably sized Coke and a small fries. Double quarter-pounders with cheese did not exist.
Bloomberg does put his money where his mouth is. The only reason I quit smoking for the second and final time was because I was transferred to New York and worked in a skyscraper. Office smoking was banned so I had to go 39 floors to the street to inhale. Later Bloomberg cheerfully dumped Philip Morris from its traditional Manhattan digs by harrassing the firm about using its products in the cubicles. They ended up moving to Richmond.
Yet not all is free and easy in the Old Dominion. I remember flying to the states during an overseas assignment and driving down I-95 to visit relatives in North Carolina. I stopped at a Denny’s in Virginia somewhere and was told that the General Assembly had decreed that I could not order my burger medium rare. It was the law.
Does anyone remember that? Help me out Utopians! It’s your kind of outrage!