Emetic throwbacks
Last night, as I cracked open my eighth can of lager and shoved the final piece of pizza into my gaping maw, I turned to my partner and said, ‘you know, I think I might be sleep-walking into an obesity crisis‘. Sleep-walking. We sleep-walk into all kinds of things these days - a surveillance society, environmental catastrophe, financial meltdown. It’s terrifying the things we get up to when we’re asleep. Pass me a Red Bull.
In this instance, it’s not my fault I’m a fat drunk; it’s my genetics. It’s not my fault I’m tired and apathetic; it’s society’s for giving me a cushy job and big pies. It’s not my fault I’m a lazy schlub unwilling to get off the couch; my body’s designed for harder times - it’s the latent caveman in me.
I like crisps. Walker’s salt and vinegar to be precise. Very nice in an egg mayonnaise sarnie. Not too often, mind, just the odd bag now and again. Or rather I did, because now they’re shit. Because parents couldn’t stop themselves pushing bag after bag after bag of those cholestrol time-bombs into their swelling offspring, Walkers had to change their crisps by reducing the saturated fat content by 70 per cent. And now they’re shit. Because a swathe of British parents couldn’t stop themselves from abusing their children, my crisps taste like shit.
You know, I quite like my nanny state. Who doesn’t like free cash and having stuff done for them? Why modify your own stupidity when you can carry on before with an easy conscience that someone else is looking after your children’s welfare? As if the stupid, bovine, corpulent parasites that seem to constitute the majority of middle England these days didn’t have enough excuses to continue their mewling, rapacious, whipped cream flecked self-destruction disguised as you’ve never had so good stack it high sell it cheap all you can eat good times.
Telling fat and lazy Britons that they’re fat and lazy because they’re no longer chasing gazelles out on the savannah has to one of the most stupid things I ever heard. It’s as facile as the bit about blokes loving a barbecue because deep down they miss being hunter-gatherers and sitting around a fire in a cave. Can everybody please grow up?
I’m fat and lazy because I eat and drink too much and exercise too little. A child could grasp it - between gobfuls of cake, obviously. It’s a simple case of inputs and outputs. You put in more energy than you burn off and you get fat. Try tweaking the levels of one or the other to get them to match. Bringing our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncles Ig and Ug into it just syphons off a bit more personal responsibility from a population that could do with a big heavy spoonful of the stuff. And then being hit round the head with the big heavy spoon.
Unless, with all this talk of our ancestors’ genetics, the plan to get us all fit and healthy is to release the inhabitants of Chester Zoo and give us each a spear. You can sign me up for that.
Posted on October 18th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
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Filed under Miscellaneous misanthropy |
Amen.
Yet another small part in the state’s attempts to remove all sense of the individual.
And don’t forget who it is who is saying we should eat a low fat diet, not because there’s any evidence that fat has anything to do with it but because “it makes sense”.
And who it is who seems to think that the food industry is doing what it can, when in reality it is pandering to the lowest common denominator with no regard for anything other than the profitablility of the food manufacturing process.
Perhaps if we had a government that accepted it worked for us, each and every individual one of us, it would remove its food standards agency etc away from corporate interests and towards those of the individual. A nice salad of trans fats, anyone? Of course not. But some bit of covenience food dosed up to the eyeballs with trans fats and all manner of other nasties, (which more than likely lead to obesity anyway), is part of a problem with society. No. it is not. Low fat food is simply more profitable.
Corporations don’t get asbos, kids and the over fifties do.
Once you get beyond starvation levels there’s no observed correlation between calorie consumption and obesity levels within a society, whereas there’s a strong inverse correlation between physical activity and obesity levels.
So lazyness and a car-based society - yes; poor eating and the food industry - not so much.
Everybodys a victim - The Proclaimers
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
I demand recompense
For sitting on the fence
Throughout my adult life
You’ve got to put my parents in jail
For raising me in Fife
It doesn’t matter what I do
You have to say it’s alright
And I need you to send somebody around
To tuck me in at night
Because…
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
Well it’s not my fault
That I’m positive
I just stuck a needle in my arm
And nobody told me
That sixty a day
Would do me any harm
My liver’s shrivelling like a leaf
But it’s not the whisky that doo’s it
Call me irresponsible
And I’m really going to lose it
Because…
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
Wear a ribbon for this
Hug a stranger for that
Light a candle to the dead
And soon you’ll forget
That you ever had
A brain inside your head
We value everythin the same
We turn it into farce
So we don’t know a crisis
‘Till it kicks us up the arse
Because…
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
Everybody’s a victim
Seems we’re going that way
Everybody’s a victim
We’re becoming like the USA
I am surprised that you missed the opportunity to post this as a Chicken Nugget.
Take a typical fast food meal. Corn is the sweetener in the soda. It’s in the corn-fed beef Big Mac patty, and in the high-fructose syrup in the bun, and in the secret sauce. Slim Jims are full of corn syrup, dextrose, cornstarch, and a great many additives. The “four different fuels†in a Lunchables meal, are all essentially corn-based. The chicken nuggetâ€â€including feed for the chicken, fillers, binders, coating, and dipping sauceâ€â€is all corn. The french fries are made from potatoes, but odds are they’re fried in corn oil, the source of 50 percent of their calories. Even the salads at McDonald’s are full of high-fructose corn syrup and thickeners made from corn.
Corn is the keystone species of the industrial food system, along with its sidekick, soybeans, with which it shares a rotation on most of the farms in the Midwest. I’m really talking about cheap corn  overproduced, subsidized, industrial corn  the biggest legal cash crop in America. Eighty million acres  an area twice the size of New York State  is blanketed by a vast corn monoculture like a second great American lawn.
Bleurgh. That almost put me off my Rustlers BBQ Rib.
point of order: we don’t use high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener in the UK, and we don’t use (much) corn as livestock feed.