Mayor "Nanny" Bloomberg Bans Large Drinks

Yet another reason not to visit New York City...that list just keeps growing!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/nyregion/bloomberg-plans-a-ban-on-large-sugared-drinks.html?_r=2

This story takes my memory back to the last time I bought a 32-ounce styrofoam drink cup. That was in Bethesda, Maryland, in July, shortly after my husband died, almost seven years ago now. A writing client had designed some promotional T-shirts, which I'd schlepped from my home in Hyattsville to the Montgomery County Farm Women's craft market. It was literally ninety degrees in the shade. I was hoping those cool white T-shirts would sell as I sat under a tree and fanned myself with my big floppy sun hat. They didn't.

Before heat exhaustion set in, I walked down the block to a convenience store that was running a sale on large iced drinks. Filled the cup with ice, dispensed something fizzy with electrolytes in it into the cracks between the ice cubes. When you fill a 32-ounce cup with ice first, you're actually getting less than 16 ounces of soda pop even if you start with large ice cubes...which was what I'd bought the large drink for. I drank off the soda pop right away, then kept refilling the cup with water all afternoon. I wasn't overweight, hypertensive, or "elderly" at the time, so I wasn't at especially high risk for heat exhaustion, but I think that large iced drink may have kept me out of the hospital that day anyway. It was a long, hot day, no matter how healthy a person was.

Thanks to local warming, although New York is colder than Washington in winter, it's not less hot and humid in summer. I wonder whether being unable to cool off by refilling a 32-ounce cup of ice, with water or anything else, will be cited as a factor in any deaths in New York this summer?

[Update: Cameron De Smidt wrote a snarkier, edgier, NewYorkier comment here:

http://blastedfools.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/fascists-r-us/

And if you can't "like" it on Wordpress, and want to encourage Cameron De Smidt, you may find it easier to create and use a free account here:

http://connect.freedomworks.org/node/210814/discussions/794470]