Food, Jobs, and Laws

The question that we are presented with is: What are the pros and cons of buying food locally vs. buying food that has potentially traveled a great distance to get to your local store. While there are a great many things to consider on this topic, the thing that currently interests me is in the link between health, food, and the law.

Specifically, should the government be able to enforce rules that make people eat more healthy foods? Things such as sugar taxes, banning trans fat, and eliminating toys from Happy Meals are a few things that have been talked about to push people in the right direction when it comes to healthy eating.

This issue becomes even more complex when we add in the outside players such as foreign factories that make some of the food that we buy. If we were given incentives to buy locally, for example, that would probably hurt foreign workers as much as it helped our own diets.

Is there a happy medium between healthy food, fair laws, and good jobs for all? Can we have our healthy cake and eat it too?