Cracking down on toxic food

If injecting donuts with an industrial solvent somehow improved their texture, it wouldn't necessarily follow that adding solvents to donuts should be a matter of individual choice.

There are many reasons to applaud the city of Boston for banning trans fats, and to hope that other regulatory agencies do the same. But what often gets lost in the discussion is that most trans fats are substances unknown to nature.

The proper analogy is not If we let them ban trans fats, the next time they'll ban cheeseburgers. It's Why should trans fats be allowed in food when other poisonous industrial substances are not?

Trans fats are created through an industrial process: pumping hydrogen into vegetable oil, a process that produces an artificial fat that doesn't spoil as quickly as natural fats. Trans fats raise the level of bad cholesterol and lower the good. Scientists say trans fats are more dangerous than any natural fat.

Want more proof? Michael Graham, who traveled to New Hampshire yesterday to deliver tubes of lipstick to Barack Obama, thinks trans fats are just peachy. I rest my case.

Photo (cc) by Duncan Cumming and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Explaining Dapper O'Neil

The Phoenix's Peter Kadzis says farewell to former Boston city councilor Dapper O'Neil, who died earlier today.

Kadzis, who understands Boston's neighborhood politics as well as anyone, manages the difficult task of explaining Dapper's unique appeal while refraining from paying him tribute, writing that O'Neil "began his career as a political joke, and he ended it as a municipal embarrassment. But along the way, he won the affections of legions of blue-collar Bostonians by tirelessly defending their interests."

Unlike, say, the late Jimmy Kelly, O'Neil did not grow in office. His nasty exterior masked a nasty interior. But I'm sure he was loyal to his friends and nice to his neighbors, and they're entitled to miss him. No doubt Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, who wrote a column about the ailing Tom Finneran today that was hateful even by Carr's standards, is penning a tribute to the Dap even as we speak.

The two Jimmy Kellys

Jimmy Kelly: Good man, not-so-good public official. An interesting take by Susan Ryan-Vollmar in this week's Bay Windows.

A new Boston blog

Joe Heisler, the host of BNN's local-access cable program "Talk of the Neighborhoods," has unveiled a blog called — get this — "Talk of the Neighborhoods."

Heisler's a former community journalist in Boston, so he knows his way around a keyboard and the city. He's already put up a sharp post on the race for president of the Boston City Council. But Joe! Put in a few more paragraph breaks, will you?