the fat and the furious; Jeffrey Steingarten takes aim at America's war on trans fats.

Byline: Jeffrey Steingarten

Last December, when the board of health here in New York City banned trans fats from all 24,000 of our restaurants, food carts, and caterers, I became apoplectic. That's what I always become when somebody tries to tell me what I may and may not eat. This time I was not 100 percent apoplectic, because it seems pretty clear that trans fats are really bad for us. On the other hand, what about pie? I do get extremely upset when I think about pie. Isn't a ban on trans fats the functional equivalent of a ban on piecrust and thus upon pie itself? Pie is the key to a contented life. I simply cannot manage without pie. Me, I've been avoiding most trans fats since the mid- nineties, when Walter Willett, M.D., and his colleagues in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health published their first research findings showing that of all the things we eat, trans fats are just about the most damaging to our hearts and arteries. They are quite simply the absolute worst. In my experience, Willett and his team do not issue dire warnings unless their medical conclusions are rigorous and replicable and compelling. But the government is not a medical seminar. We've granted the state a monopoly over physical coercion; in exchange, the government ought to have more than a journal article before it outlaws something, especially when that something is a cornucopia of snacks worthy of a picnic in paradise: pies and pizzas, fried chicken, doughnuts, French fries, empanadas, hamburger buns, cookies and crackers, pancakes and muffins-particularly the versions of these served up at fast-food restaurants. Popeyes is awesome, announced my part-time helper, Jeanne, the other day around lunchtime. There's a Popeyes downstairs from her Pilates class, and on the way home she often picks up a bulging box of fried chicken for herself, her husband, Jay, and their infant son, Oscar. They all find it equally awesome. So we ordered up a box and two buckets for lunch that day, the first from Popeyes, plus one KFC Original Recipe, and one KFC Extra Crispy. Yes, Popeyes is totally awesome, extremely crisp, not greasy, and with an inoffensive-even desirable-deep-fried taste. Both styles of KFC were inferior in every way but juiciness. All three had surely been made with chickens raised in the most inhumane manner-drugged, maimed, jammed together, and waddling in their own poop. But none of that bothers our board of health. The only thing they simply can't abide is deep-frying in oil containing trans fats. I eat fast-food fried chicken only two or three times a year. But I still don't want the government to take away this pleasure. Why can't they supply me with all the relevant information, and let me decide for myself? In Denmark, such a calm and kindly approach reduced the trans fats that Danes consumed almost to…