The battle against junk food isn’t, in fact, a battle against junk food. It’s against anything that actually has flavour and joy to it. The aim of the campaign being to stop us enjoying ourselves. We can and should see it as a reaction to the success of capitalism. That socioeconomic system, which has shown itself to be the only one which leads to the general run of the people having actual choice over what they eat, the only one that produces more than a sufficiency at trivial prices for all.
But, you know, capitalism is bad. Therefore we must attack the symptoms – that varied and interesting diet for hoi polloi.
Well, OK, but there’s no other explanation that fits this:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] It is one of the British foods that immediately calls to mind Wimbledon and the beginning of summer – but the Mayor’s office has had to ban its own adverts depicting strawberries and cream under its new anti “junk food” rules. The new regulations, which came into force in late February, decree that adverts on the Tube cannot show “junk food”. As well as burgers and sweets, this includes any food that is high in fat, salt and sugar. Examples of banned foods include olive oil, jam, pesto, cheese, Marmite, tinned fruit and honey. [/perfectpullquote]It’s not about junk food, it’s about anything that tastes good. And thus we have this ban on not just advertising strawberries and cream, but on even mentioning them when putting up a poster about the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
Because the people driving this campaign are twats.
The new rules were welcomed by celebrity chefs including Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
And yes, they’re twats too. Both are classically trained. Both would be rather surprised to find out that pommes dauphinois cannot be advertised. That they would be surprised is the twattishness. Because to not think is to be a twat.
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Last week, rushing to finish a batch of leaflets, I spent five hours going letterbox to letterbox. When I got home I picked up a 2-litre tub of ice cream and sank into it. A couple of hours later I weighed myself and had lost four pounds. When fast-acting high-calorie-density foods are outlawed, only outlaws will be able to do high extertion tasks. Is this social engineering to produce a nation of desk jockies and eliminate manual labour?
"Junk food" is itself a falsehood - if it's food it's good. What matters is diet, not any individual piece of food or even any single meal or snack I might eat. Eating a bowl of strawberries and cream is simply not harmful - it is not in any way whatsoever. Depending on what the rest of your diet looks like, it may well be providing any number of missing nutrients and micro-nutrients - it would probably do a vegan a lot of good for example.
Well, that and a half inch slice of roast.