13 Feb 2014 Listen: National Center’s Almasi Shatters Chuck Schumer, Food Babe Claims Over Pennsylvania Airwaves

After the Subway sandwich chain buckled to the criticism of the “Food Babe” blogger and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) rushed to the cameras to demand a ban on the harmless food additive azodicarbonamide, I had the honor of appearing on WSBA in York, Pennsylvania to help set the record straight.

In a morning, drive-time interview on February 11, host Gary Sutton asked: “Whatever happened to freedom of choice?”

I replied:

They don’t want you to have it… In this case, you can’t even say it’s junk science that they’re using because they’re not using science at all.  It’s just fear and lies.

https://youtu.be/zm6HbJFyRmA

In dispelling the scare tactic that azodicarbonamide – a product used in very small quantities to bleach and condition bread dough but has also been used in the production of rubber products such as yoga mats – is toxic because of its many diverse uses, I noted:

Lots of things are used in lots of products.  Vinegar is used in cleaning products.  Citrus products are used in cleaning products as well.  Corn!  I put corn in my gas tank, and yet I feed it to kids.  Why are we not banning corn?

And, responding to Sutton’s facetious comment about “our so-called betters… out there looking out for us poor fools,” I commented:

It really is infuriating to think that we’re in a society that benefits from the fact that we can now get food in good quantities from exotic places.  We can get things that are out of season in our neighborhoods.  I mean, I can’t go out in my backyard and get a banana here in the DC area – I can’t get pretty much anything in my back yard at this time of year because of all the cold weather.

But we can do that now.  Why?  Because of preservatives like the one we’re talking about banning.

We can just… We can go down the street and get a Subway sandwich – a nice, cheap, nutritious sandwich.  And we can do that because of these chemicals [the Food Babe] wants to have banned.

In the second segment of the 25-minute interview, I called people such as Schumer and the Food Babe “flat earthers”, pointing out: “They don’t want to accept that there is better living through science.”

Discussing how liberal food activists and their supporters and enablers like to point to government regulators and science in pretty much every other circumstance but this one, I noted that this “smacks of hypocrisy.”

Noting that both of us possess the ability to be question the government while food radicals do not, I said to Sutton:

I feel I can be critical of the FDA.  You feel that you can be critical of the FDA.  They shouldn’t be, and – yet – here they are saying that the FDA should be changing their science.