For the first time in human history, a superabundance of food is a greater threat to our wellbeing than dearth, and being fat is more likely to be a sign of poverty than of wealth. The grotesquely fat, who are barely able to waddle or to fit into a normal-size armchair, are now a common sight; and our children continue to swell in girth like dirigibles inflated with helium. I confess that my first thought on seeing someone so grossly fat is, what will happen if he ever needs an abdominal operation? The thought is so unpleasant that I cannot fix on it for long.
Almost every day, it seems, we receive fresh warnings of a health apocalypse to come. One has the impression that those who give us the warnings derive a schoolmasterly pleasure from it: for there are few activities more gratifying than crying in the wilderness. If an asteroid from outer space, the Ebola virus from Africa, smallpox unleashed by bioterrorists or global warming do not get us, then obesity will.
A fifth of British children, we were informed this week, are obese, and this means that their life expectancy will be reduced. Very fat people are much more likely to have high blood pressure or to get what used to be called maturity-onset diabetes, but which is now occurring in younger and younger people, even adolescents. Since all the medical conditions associated with obesity reduce life expectancy, and since an ever-larger proportion of the population is now not just plump but grossly fat, the continuous rise in life expectancy that we have witnessed over the last century and a half might be reversed. This can happen: in Russia, the life expectancy of men (though not of women) declined markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, probably due to excessive consumption of alcohol. We might become the Russia of obesity.
Certainly, I have witnessed the devastating effects that obesity en masse (no pun intended) can have upon a society. I visited Nauru a few times in the 1980s. This little island had belonged to Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, but in 1968 it achieved its independence. The inhabitants, who until then had lived on fish and coconuts, at once became immensely rich, with the largest per capita income in the world, thanks to the phosphate rock that was mined on their island. Their sudden wealth encouraged them to idleness, while at the same time (principally, I suspect from boredom) they began to eat and drink enormously — 7,000 calories per day on average. They would drink not a can, but a case of sweet soft drinks.
They grew to enormous size and half of them were diabetic. Their life expectancy plunged. Although as a general rule health is associated with wealth, most Nauruans did not live to see 50. They died of strokes, heart attacks and other complications of diabetes. Many grew so fat that it was difficult for them to have children.
The conventional explanation for the unseemly and unsightly expansion of the British national waistline is the easy availability of high-fat, high-calorie junk food and prepared meals that now form so large a part of the British diet, particularly that of the poor and of children. As usual, it is up to the Government to do something about it, for we cannot possibly be expected to do anything about it for ourselves. This is because we are but putty in the hands of the giant food corporations, who manipulate our desires through advertising and other means, and need therefore to be protected from them by that fearless and tireless defender of the interests of the common man and child, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (O brave new world, that has such ministries in it!)
The first protective measure that the Government has proposed is a ban on the television advertising of junk food, but this will be about as effective as lace gloves in Antarctica. If I remember my own childhood correctly, no one ever had to persuade me to eat a bag of crisps or a bar of chocolate, let alone resort to subtle or underhand methods to do so. I ate crisps and chocolate all on my own, of my very own accord.
The first measure having failed to protect us from the food companies, a severer measure may be anticipated with a fair degree of certainty: taxation. A tax will be levied on those foods that the government nutritionists don’t want us (or should I say you?) to eat.
Now it cannot positively be asserted that such a tax would fail to achieve its purpose, at least in part. It is well known that price often does affect consumer habits. One explanation, for example, of the rise of alcoholism and alcohol-related diseases in this country during the past half-century is that the price of alcohol has halved, at least in terms of the time required to earn it. I once worked on a road-building project in Africa, paid for by British aid, in which alcohol was virtually free to the British workers on the project. The result was that many men who had previously drunk only in moderation became out-and-out drunkards.
But a reduction in the aggregate consumption of junk food brought about by taxation might actually cause the poor real hardship. This is because the poor resemble Economic Man, the mythical creature who makes decisions in an economically rational way, least of all. It was George Orwell who pointed out that the poor desired something “a little bit tasty” rather than something truly nourishing; and I am often surprised by the efforts the poor make, which would be heroic if they were made in pursuit of a worthier goal, to buy the latest expensive trainers for their children, the sartorial equivalent of junk food. (Many parents have asked me, with genuine puzzlement, how their children have turned out so horrible, when they went to such efforts to buy them the latest trainers.)
Therefore, taxing junk food might actually make it more rather than less attractive to the poor. To its immediately and inherently gratifying qualities would be added the attractions of sumptuary spending; and parents would publicly demonstrate their “love” for their children by making sure that they could eat as much junk as they liked.
The appetite for junk food grows with the feeding. One has only to observe the way mothers often ask their children what they would like to eat to understand how a taste for junk food becomes a permanent characteristic. Instead of putting properly cooked food before a child on the premise of eat-it-or-go-hungry, the mother acts more like a waiter at a restaurant, taking orders with flattering but insincere solicitude. It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that the child chooses junk rather than char-grilled vegetables.
In fact, what the mother is doing is avoiding the unpleasant and nerve-racking but very necessary struggle over meals that mothers have often experienced in the past. By giving the child what will bring an immediate end to his resistance, she imagines that she is being kind and considerate, when in fact she is being cowardly and callous. She prefers her own immediate peace and quiet to the child’s long-term good.
A child who is always gratified in its immediate wishes where food is concerned will never develop more sophisticated and adult tastes. Such tastes are not self-generating: they have to be taught, as all aesthetic appreciation has to be taught, and sometime against resistance. Mothers, especially those without the support of fathers, take the line of least resistance: and this explains why an increasing proportion of young adults have childish tastes, and why so many foods and even dishes served in restaurants now have added sugar. Increasingly, we are a nation of Pooh Bears: it is always time for a little something, and that little something has to be full of fat or sugar to satisfy us.
The cause of our poor eating habits lies deeper than mere price. When you investigate how people eat, you learn a great deal about how they live and what they expect of life. Eating, after all, is one of the basic functions and most important pleasures of life. Mothers want to shut their children up, because too many of them consider their children first as fashion accessories and then as a nuisance; increasingly, fathers don’t come into it. Fatty, sweet foods are the equivalent of laudanum (“infant quietness”) in the 19th century. But we have far less excuse for our misconduct than our Victorian forebears. Taxes won’t make us better parents.
Theodore Dalrymple is a doctor
