One year I lost 8 pounds on a family ski trip. One reason was that I didn't eat every portion of every meal, a trick I picked up from a story on CNN that revealed just how calorific restaurant meals are.

CNN was helpful by telling me information I could act on, or not. But as Ian Mount writes in Fortune Small Business, some cities are rather impatient: They want to require restaurants to put calorie count on their menus.

Why? Oh, the community aspect, you know. My health has become the mayor's business, it seems.

Government fascination with controlling behavior is nothing new--think back to Prohibition, for example. But it's an overstep, a blurring of the appropriate lines between government and civil society.

As the story notes, some restaurants are voluntarily disclosing such information, though it's hard to know to what extent that's happening as a way to appease government nannies who are making noises about requiring it.

Cities with personal dietary police include New York; San Francisco,; and King County (Seattle) Washington.

Of course, these requirements also impose financial costs to restauranteurs, who must pay for nutritional analysis and redo their menus. And presumably they may lose some business once customers find out that the plate of cheesy fries contains more calories than nutritionists recommend for an entire day.

If a businesses wants to use disclosure as a marketing advantage, I say go for it. But with NYC banning trans fats, we may be on a greasy slippery slope to a world in which cities and states create a Department of Approved Food.

Then we'll be transported to the joke about heaven and hell. In heaven, the cooks are French. In hell, they're English. And in modern America, the bureaucrats decide what the cooks serve.