25 August 2016
Fit to be Fat
A matter of choice.
by J.R.Thomas
Mrs May has done it now. In office a matter of weeks and she has put her lovely kitten heels right into a dangerous place. She has upset Jamie Oliver! Has the woman no sense at all? Does she not realise that he is the nation’s food icon, devoted to get us all eating better – and less. Mr Oliver is outraged that the government has fudged (slightly unfortunate phraseology) its previously expressed intent to put a tax on sugary drinks and indeed cut back its planned expensive publicity drive to try to curtail your intake of even more enjoyable but naughty products. No government health warnings now on packets of sausages, no more instructions to shopkeepers to keep the Mr Kipling cakes in a locked cabinets, no employment of roaming bad-eating Tsars to slap your fork from your hand as that seventh slice of pizza heads for your eager taste buds.
Mr Oliver wants us and especially our children to eat less sugar and fat. Or, to get down to detail, less sugar and fat if bought from, say, Sainsbury’s, or those omnipresent paradises with the golden arches. He doesn’t seem to mind quite so much if your urge for a fat and sugar rush is consummated at, say, a growing bistro chain called “Jamie’s Italian”. Jamie’s Italian will be happy to treat you to Pork Scratchings (free range, £3.25), or Deep Fried Squid (£6.45), followed by many varieties of pasta, or Steak and Frites if you prefer (£25.95 though) and then an Epic Brownie (£5.75) – chocolate brownie and salted caramel ice cream, all the naughty ingredients Mr Oliver is campaigning against in one tempting delicious dish. (Not hugely Italian either, do you think, but we won’t digress.)
Which is a bit odd, as Mr Oliver is the owner and guiding spirit of Jamie’s. Mr Oliver the entrepreneur and chef is, like most bistro and restaurant owners, anxious to prosper and be able to feed his family (five cheerful photogenic children as any lifestyle magazine will reveal). Are the Oliver children allowed free rein at Jamie’s? Our detailed researches are unable to produce a definitive answer, but we do hope so, it all looks so delicious.
But, never mind Jamie, what is Mrs May up to? Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne, men with slight podge problems themselves (well done George who got very nicely trimmed down – maybe a diet book forthcoming now he has extra time on his hands?) were all in favour of improving the nation’s health, and that of its children. Obesity among children is increasing enormously – up five fold since the early 1970’s, we are told by those who measure such things. One child’s obesity is another’s cheerful plumpness, of course, but there is no doubt that we are as a nation getting fatter. But actually, not all of us are getting fatter. In Chelsea or Primrose Hill, Mr Oliver’s home territory (or, we suspect, in Maidenhead, Mrs May’s) the general run of the population is looking pretty svelte, an adornment to any Mediterranean beach and able to pursue their fashion shopping frenzies at the S and XS end of the rail. It is a bit different in Glasgow and Middlesborough, to take a couple of towns at random. The shoppers there tend to be clustered at the XL and the XXL and, heaven forfend, XXXL ranges. The children are rather noticeably comfortably padded; as are their parents. Sales of double fried chips and saveloy and that unbelievably wonderful delicacy, the deep fried Mars bar, continue to do well, as does the northern and Scottish sugary drinks business.
Sadly, so does the heart attack business, and deaths from weight-related causes in the northern half of the country are much higher than in the south – and life expectancy noticeably shorter. Obesity, or health issues linked to too much eating of the wrong sort of thing, and too little movement, is a problem, and is also a class and regional and lifestyle problem.
Hence Mr Oliver’s concern. We will not belittle him (though his menu at Jamie’s does rather invite it); we do not doubt that he is sincere in his concerns and emotionally driven to try to do something about improving the health of the nation’s children by finer dietary habits. He began his campaign ten years or so ago, when he focused on what was served in the canteens of the nation’s schools. An unfortunate combination of child appetites and constrained budgets meant that most school kitchens could economically only deliver lots of fatty greasy high carbohydrate food. Even when salad and fresh green vegetables was available it somehow just did not cut the mustard. Jamie though managed to persuade some schools to serve nutritionally improved offerings– fresh fruit, poached fish, that sort of thing. Cue angry children, a rapid drop in the intake of school meals and an uptake in packed lunches containing all sorts of nutritional naughtiness, and parents throwing packets of fish and chips over school fences to their grateful children.
Which is maybe what Mrs May is up to. Not throwing food parcels to Mr May, he is a City banker and we all know how well they eat. What Theresa is up to is perhaps what she set out when she arrived at No 10. She said that she wanted to concentrate on the interests of ordinary people and the less fortunate. She has seen the voting patterns in the Brexit referendum and could spot the correlation between burger eaters and “Leave” voters. And also, Mrs M is a great believer in taking responsibility for one’s actions. If you know overeating will kill you younger, and you can see that happening to your larger friends and relations, and the warnings are clear and unequivocal, but you still go on eating too much of the wrong things and preferring watching boxed sets to sweating in the gym, well, why should the government stop you? However young or old you are as you shuffle off the planet, it is likely to be expensive to the NHS, but probably in fact more so if you live to a great age with much-need of treatment and special care; so the early-exiting overweight, like smokers, may well be doing their fitter purer brethren a financial favour. If you want to eat badly, carry on. It’s a free country, after all. Why should the rich southern joggers dictate life styles to those who merely shrug and settle down further on the couch?
Mrs May knows that, or at least feels that, one of the lessons of the Referendum campaign is that ordinary folk do not like to be talked down to by southern elites. Told to eat more Spanish lettuce, the natural instinct of many voters is to eat another Slough-made Mars bar. This is one of those win-win-win-win political dream worlds – treat the voter with respect; cut public expenditure by not running hectoring publicity campaigns; cut long term NHS costs by less treatment of the very old – by having less very old; help the nation’s farmers who can grow more sugar beet and produce more butter.
The only downside, perhaps, is that those larger voters may not be around for quite so many general elections to record their grateful thanks by putting you in for a fourth term. Or, indeed, may struggle to get to the polling stations because of weight and lassitude problems. . But if freedom means anything it must be the right to eat at one sitting all four fingers of a KitKat. A brave new sugary world awaits us all.
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