10 December 2015

Bulging With Political Correctness

By Chin Chin

When it comes to natural phenomena, it seems that plates are the main culprits.  Lurking deep in the ground, huge tectonic ones move slowly from year to year, and when they crunch into each other, things happen.  Maybe an edge is pushed up to form a new mountain range.  Or perhaps there is an earthquake and the crack releases large red beetles from the centre of the Earth.  Or there could be the breaking of a gravestone and the release of someone from Transylvania who ought to be just a little more dead than he is.  Anyway the effects are often dramatic, as one might, I suppose, expect when one irresistible and immovable object meets another.

Something rather similar is about to happen in the debate about healthy eating.  Here again plates are central to the debate.  In my case plates of chocolate biscuits certainly figure, but the point runs deeper than that.  We are about to see a clash between two of the great tectonic plates of political correctness.

Let’s start with the health lobby.  There seems little doubt that as a race we are fatter than we used to be and that, through diabetes and other illnesses, this is costing the NHS at huge amount of money.  Even more importantly, the quality of people’s lives is being reduced as, in some cases, are their energy levels and their ability to achieve fulfilment.  Everyone agrees that it’s a bad thing and it should stop.  The question is, of course, “how?”

Some of the answers are fairly easy. The food industry can be forced to cut down the sugar in some of its foods, to change advertising styles and to place warnings on packaging.  Big business is a soft target because it doesn’t have many votes.  The politicians then can pass a regulation or two, claim that something has been done, pat themselves on the back, retire to the bar for a drink or two and reflect on how odd it is that the chairs have begun to shrink.  No doubt they will be replaced by bigger ones as part of the much vaunted renovation of the Palace of Westminster.

I’m sure that tightening up on the food industry will help, but actually we need to go further than that and to promote a healthier lifestyle.  More sport: healthier food.  Now to some extent sport can be encouraged through better facilities but, to make a real change, something bigger is needed.  We need healthy lifestyles to be in fashion, and for slobbing around on the sofa in front of the television all day to be frowned upon.

After all, that is how it was done with smoking.  Yes, there were new rules and to a point those rules drove public awareness, but the real turning point of the campaign was when people began to see smoking as dirty and disgusting and to bring peer pressure to bear on their friends and relations to give it up.

To impel people towards healthy living we need to engender something similar among the public.  To keep yourself healthy has to be regarded as a good thing and a healthy lifestyle praise-worthy.  The charming woman you are talking to at a cocktail party needs to frown when she sees you reaching for a third canapé so that you decline it, saying “no, I really wasn’t going to eat it, I was just straightening it”, a bit like a chess player who has just seen the danger of the move he was about to make.

So there we have our first tectonic plate.  The bossy people from Hampstead and Highgate will frown on unhealthy eating and living and, of course, that on which they frown soon becomes politically incorrect.

The second tectonic plate is the anti-discrimination lobby.  High on their successes in combatting racism and sexism, they are looking for more subjects for their political correctness and fat-ism is next on the list.  Discrimination against people who are fat should be outlawed!  Yes, one can see the force in that. Jibing at them is unacceptable!  Well, it is certainly bad manners and, anyway, insulting words or behaviour likely to cause violence are already an offence if in public.  What though about this quote from Professor Jane Wardle, co-author of a report on fat-ism earlier this year:

“Everyone, including doctors, should stop blaming and shaming people for their weight, and offer support, and where appropriate, treatment.”

Fine on the face of it but a little hard to combine with a campaign designed promote a healthy lifestyle and, presumably, to disapprove of the other sort.  You can imagine the conversation:

Doctor: “I really think you need to lose some weight and should try giving up Mars bars.”

Patient: “Are you saying that I would be better if I was thinner?  That’s fat-ism!”

Doctor: “No, not better, just smaller.”

Patient: “So you’re saying that smaller people are better, are you?”

Doctor: “No, not better. Er,” seeks for inspiration, “happier.”

Patient: “The only time I’m truly happy as when I’m eating a Mars bar.”

Doctor (by now looking at the NHS “avoid fattism” crib): “You would be less of a burden on the National Health Service.”

Patient: “So? It’s what I pay my taxes for.”

Well, it didn’t go too well did it and, after all, the doctor had the advantage of training and an NHS crib.  Just how would this sort of conversation translate to the playground and how would you instruct your child to influence his/her friends with weight problems without straying into something politically incorrect?

Before sinking into a morass of ever more subtle rules, it might not be a bad thing to apply some common sense.  Whether a statement should be regarded as an offence not does not depend upon its content but upon its intention.  Many a wife chides their husband to lose weight as part of a loving relationship.  The words “my goodness you have got disgustingly fat” may be quite acceptable there, or indeed between friends.  Use them to greet foreign dignitary and you probably have a war on your hands.  Use them as a weapon in an argument with a colleague and they are unacceptable and offensive.

Finding a way of promoting healthy lifestyles while avoiding fat-ism is likely to be beyond the wit of most of us.  Being the lazy people we are, we will all soon give up and simply avoid the subject, which will gradually become taboo.  So much for any improvement in the public health.  It will be restricted to what can be done by bullying sweet manufacturers.  Meanwhile as a race we all will get fatter and fatter and fatter.  But never mind, we will all be wonderfully politically correct.