As arguments for EU membership go, portraying Britain as a pot of cold baked beans isn't a good one

It takes a particular sort of mindset - that famously self-hating mindset of the English intellectual middle classes - to produce a visual metaphor like this one



This, we're told is Brexit. On the one hand a wonderful collection of foods from across Europe. on the other, cold baked beans. Now I understand the motivation of those who produced this, trapped as they are in the mythology of British food - we don't produce anything edible and that without Europe we'd, well, be stuck eating baked beans. This feeds the "Europe Good, Britain Bad" message that excites a certain type of enthusiast for the UK staying in the EU. And it acts to wind up people like me, a moderate eurosceptic, by displaying Britain as an austere, dreary, uncultured place made better by access to the goodness of Europe.

It's better, think this group of fanatics, to trash the thousands of great British foods so as to make a cheap point about Brexit. At the core of this, however, is the dislike of Britain - especially the English part of Britain - that the intellectual middle class has cultivated. Over there, you know, the roads are better, trains smoother, food better, drinks classier and women prettier. The clothes are better, the language cooler and, let me tell you, there's this little place just off the Rue St Martin that serves divine little pastries and coffee, you don't get that sort of place in England.

Forget about the possible damage done to Britain by Brexit, let's consider instead the actual damage done to Britain, to its image and standing in the world, by generations of smug intellectuals telling us we're a dull, grey little island with nothing to offer (while making sure Jolyon and Miranda get to go to our brilliant public schools, then to the best universities in the world and to live in London, the world's greatest city).

Much of the attacks on people who voted to leave the EU is couched in these terms. Any enthusiasm for things British - let alone English, that really is beyond the pale - is dismissed as the ignorant babbling of stupid people. Snarky little comments are made about how these are uneducated provincial people who wouldn't understand about the sophisticated stuff you only get in grand European capitals. We're all fat ignorant thickos who should just follow the lead of the shiny clever Europeans - a lead that has trashed Greece's economy, is destroying Italy and created a migrant crisis while blaming it on everywhere and everyone else.

I don't know about you but I'm proud of my culture. Not is a "remember the Empire" way but in seeing the bit of the world where I live as a fine place not as cold baked beans. I re-read Roy Porter's 'Enlightenment' recently and was reminded that Britain was, more than almost anywhere, the place where the ideas that shaped modern, liberal Europe were born. And not just the coffee shops of London but the Scottish Enlightenment of Smith and Hume, Birmingham's Lunar Men and the practical, creative engineers of Yorkshire and Lancashire. I'm proud of this contribution to a better world.

I'm proud of British food - we've escaped from the idea that it is uniquely bad (it never was but those middle class intellectuals with their creamy French cooking thought it so) and now have as rich and varied a choice of great local food and drinks as anywhere in Europe. Hundreds of different cheeses, better meat than Europe, great beer, some of the best sparkling wines, and shops and markets filled with fresh local produce. But I also love those sneered at working class dishes - parmo, rag pudding, fish and chips, the sausage roll and the steak pasty. Nowhere else has food like this and they are the poorer for not having it.

And yes I like morris dancing, village galas, home made jam and cake, folk songs and vintage tractors. When you fly back into Britain you look down and see that it really is a green and pleasant land, the best mapped, most networked, most accessible green and pleasant land in the world. For the cost of some decent boots, an OS map and a packed lunch you can spend a day tramping over hill an dale, along the rivers and canals enjoying nature in a landscaped shaped by generations of Brits.

So I will continue to get angry at those who belittle my country, who dismiss it as a small island of not much consequence. There's an argument about trade and our relations with those European neighbours - let's have it. But let's not make that argument about British culture, let's not dismiss that culture, our traditions and history as a pot of cold baked beans.

....

Government should try to fix poor people's economic circumstances not fix their diet

A fascinating interview on Vox with three US sociologists who look at (and have a book about) the mythology and misunderstanding around home cooking - not least that for the first half of the 20th century most American upper middle class families employed a cook. At the heart of their observation, based on a close study of nine families is that Michael Pollan's contention - “We’re going to have to fix our diet before we fix the whole economy.” - doesn't reflect the actual lives of less well off Americans:

But in a lot of cases, there are other, non-food problems that are making it really hard for them to feed their families the way they’d want to. In one of the more extreme examples, there’s Patricia, who is living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a hotel room. She doesn’t have a kitchen. So yeah, she’s heating up frozen pizza — she doesn’t have a stove. And it seems like, no, “fixing our diet” is not going to fix this.

This is an extreme case but one of the researchers explained:

A lot of people in the study had their own houses. But a lot of people in the study didn’t have basic kitchen tools. Their stoves wouldn’t work. They’d have pest infestations. The electricity would get cut off, or the water, for a period of time. A lot of people didn’t have tables or enough chairs for everyone to sit down. So really basic things of this kind of image of what dinner can look like and how you should do it didn’t map up with a lot of the experiences of the poor families in our study.

So when we talk about bad diet, reliance on instant food, not sitting down together as a family - not, so to speak, meeting that middle class ideal - we forget that this lifestyle requires more than just the ability to cook, it needs also the resources to do that cooking and enjoy that dinner. Shouting at poor people about "junk food" is bad enough but when the government plans to deliberately make that food more expense we are actively making the lives of the poorest less tolerable.

Right now the UK government is consulting on a set of restrictions for HFSS food promotions (usually and lazily tagged "junk food" by the media) that includes bans on 'buy-one-get-one-free' offers and limits to advertising. The effect of this approach is likely (along with things like the sugar tax) to just make it harder for the less well off to feed their family. This research reminds us that we need to fix the economic circumstances not fix their diet.

....

In which a posh grocery company discovers it sells junk food and McDonalds doesn't.

Chris Snowdon provides an insight into the evidence-free attacks on food advertising:

"...children's 'exposure' to HFSS food advertising has fallen by 37% since 2008 and that the average child sees a mere 11.5 seconds of it per day."

Those people who want to blame a mysterious and mythical thing called the "obesogenic environment" for children being fatter (and in particular advertising) are completely misinformed and, in promoting the myth, are misleading the public.

Doesn't stop 'em though:

Recent early-stage analysis of advertising data for May 2018, also done by the charity, found that on ITV1, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky One, around half (49 per cent) of all food adverts shown between 6pm and 9pm in May 2018 were advertising HFSS products. And that fast food and delivery brands accounted for more than a quarter (27 per cent) of those HFSS adverts.

Now this is truly shocking until you realise that (as one right on company discovered) HFSS covers everything from butter, bacon and cheese to home delivered pizza. And let's also remember that most children aren't ordering take-outs.

The causes of obesity are far more complex than "look at those adverts for junk food" but the media narrative focuses almost entirely on this message. Part of this is because public health people want there to be a convenient scapegoat for fat kids - it is not acceptable to point at parents and say "stop stuffing your kids with snacks and get them running about more". Even though eating too much and exercising too little is absolutely the biggest contributor to the rise in obesity. The poor fat people are victims of evil marketers and sinister food scientists - the advertising sucks them in, they cannot resist.

Of course this is nonsense but it plays to the other parts of the fussbuckets' narrative - snobbery. The "bad" foods are all foods that are enjoyed by the less well off - hence the shock for companies selling to posh folk when they discover that there's a whole loads of HFSS in artisan cheddar and fair trade unprocessed sugar. They thought it was all about McDonald's and cheap pizzas from the freezer shop:

Naturally, we were pretty shocked that a picture of some fresh groceries with a healthy mixture of fruits and vegetables, dairy, eggs and cupboard staples would flout TfL’s new junk food rules. But it turns out that TfL score foods individually according to a nutrient profiling model created by the Government. It’s a pretty crude measure and means that foods you would still think of as junk, like fizzy drinks with artificial sweeteners or low-fat fried foods, could in some scenarios comply with the new regulations.

Proof that anti-obesity campaigns are mostly about snobbish attitudes to "junk food" (defined as the sort of food common people eat) and nothing much really to do with reducing the weight of kids. But it's a delight that the pompous elitists at Farm Drop were really put out:

Last year, the fast-food chain was allowed to run a Happy Meal advert during children’s television and it passed the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA’s) standards for healthy food, which are the same standards TfL are now using for the junk food ban. According to the ASA, a McDonald’s Happy Meal is not a junk food product because 80% of the mains, and 100% of the sides are non-HFSS. But swapping out sugar for a sweetener or fruit for chips, doesn’t detract from the fact that this is still a fast food company promoting meals with fried foods to kids.

You have to laugh!

....

The New Puritan Left - fat, poor people must be stopped from eating so many burgers

Ban it! Tax it! For the children! Climate change! Obesity! Cancer! What about the animals!

Hardly a day passes by without the boundaries of fussbucketry being pushed a little further. It began with fags and (I speak as an ex-smoker here) it was hard to argue that smoking wasn't bad for our health. Or rather the heath of those people actually smoking. Now, however, the New Puritan, "ban all the good stuff" has reached into every corner of our lives with its relentless message about "health", "climate change" and "ethics".

In an edition featuring, in huge black type, the words "The Return of Fascism", the New Statesman lives up to its front cover with a spectacular piece of food fascism:

What does need addressing is the excessive consumption of this potentially carcinogenic product, which not only causes cancer and life-threatening illnesses, but is damaging our environment, antibiotic effectiveness, and the NHS.

Indeed, it is the excessive consumption of meat that we should be acting to reduce.

Consuming just 50g of processed meat (a hot dog, for example) a day raises the risk of developing bowel cancer by 18 per cent over a lifetime. With the average UK adult consuming 70g a day and one in four now obese, the burden of meat consumption on the NHS is real. More funding is needed.

In these few short sentences, the left's full embrace of a controlling fascistic agenda is captured - health, environment, government, NHS and obesity stirred together creating a toxic mixture of statist absolutism. And the solution, just as with booze and sugar, is to tax meat. Make it so those chubby working class people can only afford meat on special occasions (like it was in the old days) while telling them it's for their own moral and physical good.

There was a time when I'd engage with what the left laughingly call "the science" of all this but I now realise that this is just a a circle jerk of self-referencing literature produced mainly by sociologists, left-wing journalists and 'public health' organisations astroturfed by big pharma 'philanthropy'. Suffice it to say that telling people eating bacon gives a slightly increased risk of bowel cancer is fine, saying that eating a hot dog a day will doom you is hyberbolic nonsense. No-one denies that cow farts contribute to the world's production of greenhouse gases but it is simply a lie - a huge lie - to claim (on the back of deforestation not bovine flatulence) it's the second biggest source of those bad gases.

But enough of all this - it's not about science, it's about the ideology - nay, the cult - of health. Our collective obsession with how minor variations in diet might just be increasing our mortality risk. We've no real way of telling whether this is true or not since removing confounding factors from epidemiology is nigh on impossible, especially when it comes to diet. The cult, at least in the UK, has an ally in our health system - the cultists tell us it's our fault that the NHS is under pressure. We are too fat, too drunk, smoke too much and generally live such dissolute lives the poor, desperate nurses and doctors can't cope. It's rubbish, of course - it's still our fault but because we're living too damned long not because we're fat drunks with a smoking habit.

You're not going to die because you're eating meat. And neither is eating meat some sort of terrible, irresponsible and unethical idea despite this being what the cultists want you to think. Cows aren't destroying the planet - rice farming alone produces more greenhouse gas than the entirety of the world's livestock farming. And killing and eating other animals is an entirely normal, reasonable and ethical thing for humans to do (as, for that matter, is wearing their skins on our feet and our backs). I know there are some folk who've adopted some sort of self-denying, bunny-hugging philosophy and that's cool (and unhealthy), but they are not better people than us carnivores, they are not more ethical, and they're not saving the planet by doing so.

We - the meat-eaters - need to start challenging the health cultists, the vegans, the swivel-eyed environmentalists and the tin-pot little fascists in government departments churning out policy at the behest of these ghastly fussbuckets. And, in doing so, we need to start pulling apart the offensive idea that it's in any way ethical to use taxes as a sledgehammer to get people to change what they do. Not only are these taxes regressive - it's not well-paid newspaper journalists or academic sociologists who won't be able to afford the meat after you've taxed it, it's the poor. Just like minimum pricing for booze and the sugar tax, what we have is a sneering attack on the ordinary family. It's not grass-fed, wagyu steak that the fussbuckets hate, it's the burger (just look at the picture the New Statesman use), the hot dog and the bacon sarnie from the roadside caff at 5am on the way to lay concrete or clean out sewers.

It has become received wisdom among the great and good (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that the real problem facing our world is that people are living bad lives - we are all, in the eyes of the New Puritan Cult that has captured too much of our government, sinners against the twin gods of heath and the environment. Of course, the great and good don't speak of themselves here but of others, of the great unwashed majority who like cheap food, enjoy a drink and have the audacity to enjoy themselves in an manner not approved by those great and good. Calls for a tax on meat ("we don't want a ban" - the prohibitionists cry of old) represent the endeavour of a minority to impose their bigotry on the majority, the very definition of fascism: fat, poor people must be stopped from eating so may burgers.

....

When life is hard, cheap pleasures hit the mark.

This from Grace Dent is the sum of it (do read the whole article)....

I will never view eating Heinz macaroni cheese cold from the tin as anything less than heavenly. If I had a gun to my head and was asked to choose between 10 courses of Michelin-star fine dining at Claridge’s or lying under a blanket on the sofa eating sour cream and onion Pringles, I would go for the latter. The thing that well-to-do food experts will never truly get is that, for millions of people, life is very hard and, via a million tiny ingrained cerebral signifiers, processed food is very cheering. You know these brands and they know you.

Food, drink, sweet treats, crap telly and fags - cheap pleasures as we used to call them when we were promoting Christmas hampers and researching the potential customers. Not is a bad way but in respecting the fact that when your life is tough, arguments about how your life will be shortened by that pizza, cheap bottle of white wine and 20 Silk Cut really don't wash. Public health folk and foodie wibblers need to start here rather than with trying to ban stuff and wagging stern nannying fingers at stupid poor people.

....

You want to make food more expensive? For the children? Give us a break.

It is a rare consensus when all the leaders of Britain's political parties get together to agree on something important:

Among other proposals, they call for the tax system to be “used to make healthy food cheaper and discourage unhealthy choices both at home and on our high streets”.

The leaders also say the levels of sugar, calories, salt and fat in junk food should be lowered overall, while more training should be given to medical staff to help people with nutrition.

In a world where there are a thousand problems ranging from poverty and family breakdown to murders and robberies, all our political leaders can manage to agree on is that food should be made more expensive. And who does this affect - has somebody mentioned to these sanctimonious fussbuckets that it will be the poorest in society who will be hurt most by this policy?

We're told that we need more expensive food because obesity is one of the greatest health challenges of our time. Bigger than AIDs, more challenging than cancer, more cursed than malaria, more frightening than dementia. Yes folks, you need to pay more for your food because, damn it, you're all a bunch of lard buckets and the government needs to force you to eat properly. It's for the children.

Yes. The Children. Those children whose mums and dads won't be able to buy as much food as they did before because a self-righteous bunch of snobbish know-alls marshalled by a fat TV chef have decided this will be good for you. I know they'll tell you it's only "junk food" but this isn't true - it'll be bread and cheese and butter and bacon and cereals and burgers and orange juice and...over half of what you buy to make up a balanced diet for you family is what these tinpot health dictators call HFSS (high in fat, sugar and salt). And these jumped up nannies want it all to be more expensive - so your children (who almost certainly aren't fat) don't turn into obese whales and die before you do.

Worse, the plans aren't just about making the everyday food you feed your family more expensive, they'll make it taste less good by forcing the manufacturers to take out the sugar, salt and fat that gives it the great taste.

There is no obesity crisis. It is a manufactured moral panic based on flimsy (I'm being kind here) evidence that we're all getting fatter and fatter. We aren't - we're on average a bit heavier than we were in the 1980s but this is not unhealthy (it could be argued it's actually healthy). The figures are skewed by an ageing population - middle age spread is, as we all know, a reality - and haven't risen for a decade.

I'm probably shouting into the void here but we really need to tell Jamie Oliver, Hugh Thingy-Wotsit, Channel 4, the BBC, leaders of political parties who'll do anything for a cheap headline in the Guardian (every snobby fussbucket's favourite rag), and the massed hordes of public health campaigners to go take a running jump off a very high cliff. We don't need a load of rules telling food manufacturers what they can and cannot put in what they sell (other than ones to make sure it's safe). We don't need a bunch of prissy middle-class media sorts going around telling ordinary people - on the basis of no knowledge or expertise - what they can and cannot buy to feed their children. And, above all, we don't need a load more new taxes designed specifically to make food - food ffs, the basis of life - more expensive. Just leave us alone will you.

....

"You're fat and your food's a joke" - elite attitudes to out-of-town dinners

So you head off to the big city from rural America. Anything is better than the dull world of backwoods Indiana - you even write a screed saying how dreadful the old place was. And then you find out what people in the shiny city think of folk from your backwood:

Friends at work one day called her over to ask about Cracker Barrel. “It’s just like a chain restaurant we go to treat ourselves,” Ms. Cronkhite said.

A co-worker jumped in: “It’s this really white-trash restaurant that overweight Midwesterners go to.”

Then came the invitation to join some friends at Butter. The San Francisco bar is decorated as a sendup of rural white America, complete with the front end of a Winnebago RV. The menu included such cocktails as the Whitetrash Driver, vodka and SunnyD; Bitchin’ Camaro, spiced rum and Dr Pepper; and After School Special, vodka and grape soda.

“It was, all of the sudden, in my face,” Ms. Cronkhite said. “Things at home we thought were nice or parts of our culture were treated with open scorn and disdain and like a joke.”

This attitude is commonplace (and not new either) - here's Aesop from about 600BC:

A country mouse invited his cousin who lived in the city to come visit him. The city mouse was so disappointed with the sparse meal which was nothing more than a few kernels of corn and a couple of dried berries.

The disdain of city dwellers for the culinary choices of folk from the sticks is reciprocated but there's still a tendency to see those upcountry, working class dishes as an ironic joke, something a bit naff or, worst of all, unhealthy, unpleasant muck. There is a snooty distaste from our metropolitan elite for Wetherspoons, Harvester and other pub eateries selling Sunday lunches, cheap steaks and jumbo fish all washed down with beer, cheap white wine and Coca-Cola. We're better than that is the tone and you're fat is the message.

To some in that metropolitan elite all this is just a bit "Brexit-y" - scotch eggs, corned beef, cheap lager, sandwich spread, spam, value baked beans and, of course, salad cream:




It's not, however, about Brexit just that leaving the EU acts as a sort of conduit for some of that snobbish disdain - typified by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown using 'shops filled with pie and chips' as a sort of anti-Brexit dog whistle, a position so snobbish that Iain Martin's conclusion is the best antidote:

This shows that Vote Leave missed a trick in June 2016. If they had promised on the side of their bus that Britain post-Brexit would have “shops full of pies” I suspect that Leave would have won the EU referendum by a bigger margin. If chips were also provided, it would have been a landslide among British men.

....

Precisely.....

From the Daily Mash:

THE middle classes have confirmed that they do not eat takeaways, even when buying food at an establishment and removing it to consume elsewhere.

Responding to concerns that the increase in fast food shops is fuelling an obesity epidemic, middle class people have explained that the Thai, Korean and street food outlets near them are different because they are fancier.

Almost the entirety of government obesity strategy and all of that from campaign groups is predicated on food snobbery. Nasty, smelly stuff that poor people eat is bad for them. Interesting, diverse stuff we eat isn't.

....

"You will eat want we tell you to eat" - fussbucketry on our TVs

The clip starts with one person presenting how standardised packaging for "junk food" would look - this is accompanied by "ewwww" sounds from the others round the table as they agree they'd never eat something packaged like that. "But I wouldn't eat it anyway" giggles one of the participants.

None of the people round the table 'debating' the subject - "Junk Food: should it come with a health warning" - is is any respect an authority. No nutritionists are present, no-one who understands advertising, not even a public health professional. Instead we've a bunch of TV presenters and journalists who proceed to demonstrate just how much they loathe the choices of a lot of ordinary people out there in the real world.

We see James Caan, he of Dragons' Den fame, exclaiming "yes, yes" at the idea of banning Burger King and KFC. And Rachel Johnson, Remainiac extraordinaire suggesting that parents are incapable of resisting the pestering of children to buy a "bottle of water and a Cadbury's for a £1 in WH Smiths". Not, of course, that station forecourt booksellers are the favoured haunt of mums with screaming kids in tow.

For me this three minute long clip sums up so much that is wrong with our society, with government and with the punditry that sets the tone. "We can't afford...", "one in eleven children...", "Our NHS..." - a collection of ill-informed, evidence-free comments from people who've no idea at all what it's really like to raise a couple or three kids on a low income but who are ready and eager to condemn the failings (or what they see as failings) of those in this circumstance. All summed up by the first presenter (my apologies for not knowing who he is apart from being a vaguely familiar TV presenter sort) saying "people are making the wrong choices" and that we have to educate them into making the right choices (by telling lies about cancer, heart disease and rotten feet).

What we have is a bunch of privileged - in every meaning of this word - people given a platform to promote an intolerant and snobbish disdain for what other people do. The tone and the comments display a belief that somehow people like those gathered here to 'debate' the issue of "junk food" have some sort of righteous duty to stop other people making what they've decided are the "wrong" choices.

For me this agenda - nannying fussbucketry - is at the heart of the elite attack on the personal choices of ordinary people. The subtext of the debate is that we are not capable of making our own decisions, right or wrong, but must be guided by great and good people who have experience of presenting TV shows, writing newspaper columns and telling bad jokes. Every TV entrepreneur, actress, comedian and writer of columns in weekly magazines must adopt - with passion - a cause that involves lecturing poor people about how they're doing it all wrong.

Whether it's food, drink, bicycles, dress sense, or buying blue toys the great and the good want you to do what they say. They want to tell you that you've bought the wrong sort of car, gone on the worng holiday, visited the wrong restaurant and had the audacity to buy cheap semi-sparkling wine. These great and good believe they know what you should do and what is good for you. Like nineteenth century Methodist preachers they're going to bang on about how you are not living you lives properly.

And, if you're not compliant enough, these splendid folk will campaign for the government to damn well make you do what they want you to do. Moreover, such wonderful people are not to be challenged - fussbuckets like Jamie Oliver are to be given acres of print and hours of sychophantic TV without ever once being challenged on the evidence for the fads and food fascism they're promoting (or indeed the way in which it's used to promote their latest money making scheme).

The little clip I linked to above isn't a debate (although Nick Ferrari does at least try) it's a love-in where a bunch of self-important semi-celebrities outbid eachother as to who can be the most illiberal, the most snobbish and the most patronising about poor people. There's an important debate to be had about diet, food and obesity but conducting it on the basis of "let's ban stuff" and "you'll all get heart disease and diabetes if you eat this stuff" is simply dreadful - especially when this is done without any evidence.

The problem is that the views of such folk - nasty and bigoted views about people not in their high society - influence the decisions made by politicians. We can see the trajectory, the slippery slope, towards advertising bans, sin taxes, mandated school dinners, forced reformulation and standardised packaging. Add in bans on new shops, the removal of shiny branded livery and restrictions on what can be sold to minors and we have the full agenda. Unless we shout at these fussbuckets, these health fascists, expect this to happen, expect a duller world made ever drearier by the pompous nonsense of great and good folk on TV.

....

It's time to close down public health and get our lives back

It has to stop. There is no basis in protecting health. It is quite simply driven by the mission of public health to treat smokers as pariahs, people to be pushed to the margins of society:

The smoking ban should be extended to include all outdoor public areas, according to health experts.

Exclusion zones should stop smokers lighting up in parks, pub and restaurant gardens, at public events and shopping areas.

All university campuses and schools, beaches and sports and leisure facilities should also fall under the crackdown.

Imagine Glastonbury, Reading or Leeds Festival without smoking (of any kind). Consider what will happen to your local when smokers have to move half a street away to enjoy a fag. Those smokers - getting on for a fifth of the population - won't be there. And what happens when a fifth or more of your business goes away? No more local pub. Half the nations festivals and concerts unviable. Empty bars. Closed restaurants. Hundreds of thousands more jobs destroyed by public health.

I'll say it again - there is no health ground for this at all. None. Banning smoking indoors at least had the merit of a very marginal health benefit to non-smokers working in a smoky environment. These proposals from the Royal Society of Public Health are quite straightforwardly an attack on smokers and their right to make the personal choice to inhale tobacco smoke.

I haven't smoked for over ten years but I don't see why those who choose to smoke should be ostracised, excluded and treated like pariahs. In fact I find such an idea to be offensive and the people making it to be the worst sort of hideous fussbucket. The fanatics of public health aren't going to stop until all of the pleasures on their list of sins are marginalised - booze, fags, burgers, fizzy drinks, red meat, bacon, cheese, chocolate, boiled sweets, jam, cheese, cake, cream: all labelled, resitricted, controlled, hidden away, taxed and if they can get away with it banned altogether.

Children will be force fed a grey, dull vegetable diet washed down with tepid water. The legion of tutting health worrywarts will peer over their specs at mums who let their kids have a Happy Meal. We'll be weighed, measured, lined up, checked and made to fill in forms describing, in ever more detail, our bad habits. All so some public health "nurse" can lecture us about eating or drinking the grey uninteresting pap that the Church of Public Health recommends.

None of this is about making our lives better. It's not about our health. It's about an ideology of control. A belief that because the state provides healthcare this somehow gives them the right to tell us how to live our lives, to ostacise us for smoking, to denormalise drinking, to tax sugar, and to force manufacturers to take anything approximating to taste out of the food we buy.

It's time we stopped indulging these nannying fussbuckets. Time we told them to butt out of our lives. Time to point out that whether we smoke, drink, eat cake or go to a burger bar is absolutely none of their bloody business. Time to close down public health.

.....

On efficient farming (and driverless tractors)

This really does matter (although it will cause palpitations in all the locavores, organic food nuts and pseudo-environmentalists):

Globally, therefore, adoption of American farming techniques could increase agricultural productivity so much that a landmass the size of India could be returned to nature, without compromising the food supply to our apparently “peaking” global population – the world’s population is likely to peak at 8.7 billion in 2055 and then start to decline. Last, but not least, tens of millions of agricultural laborers in Africa and Asia will be freed from back-breaking labor, migrate to the cities and create wealth in other ways.

If you are truly concerned about the future of humanity in general, and hunger, poverty and equality in particular, forget about The Hunger Games and embrace the driverless tractor instead.

Absolutely. The problem is that the wealthy do-gooders of the developed West are intent on destroying agricultural efficiency in a mad belief that this results in both a healthier world and a planet saved. Since neither of these things are true, it's time we recognised the benefits of industrial agriculture.

...

Scribblings III: Star Wars, flags, skateboarding, free speech and not blaming smoking

Worse than smoking!

We begin with the weird as Grandad encounters reports of the Star Wars obsessive - this my friends is in a space beyond geekdom or nerdism:

daoku began watching star wars at different playback rates in order to do this but again it only lasted a while.
He then purchased the exact cinema seats that were there in 1977 and placed them in his living room.He purchased 40 shop floor dummies, dressed them in 1970's clothes, placed them on the seats and watched star wars until the small hours.

That is just the tiniest of flavours...

It is good to know that, when you need one, you can find someone who has fine details of flag history and etiquette at his fingertip. James Higham is one such:

The ship is right, the three masts are right and the artist may well have been right in 1776 on the flags, though it seems not.

And, as anyone who has been to Parkhead will tell you, getting the flags (and songs right) is important!

Meanwhile Raedwald, from his eyrie in the Alps, comments on risk (and skateboarding):

Some years ago, skateboarders old enough to buy cheap airfares would gather informally in small groups, take postbuses to the high places and board down the mostly empty mountain roads. Much fun. In the UK, the official reaction would be one of horror; the bansturbationists would emerge in force, the Chief Constable would appear on TV, MPs would demand new laws to ban boarders and local councils would deploy wardens to patrol all the steep roads with powers to seize boards. After all, the UK is a nation where it is now forbidden to roll a round cheese down a grass hill because of 'elf-n-safety.

Here's a couple of those skateboarders.

Among all this frivolity there is seriousness. And nothing is more serious that protecting free speech. The Churchmouse reminds us that there appears to be something of an inconsistency in attacks on speech:

Despite recently supporting a European Commission code promising to take down online hate speech within 24-hours of posting, Facebook has failed remove a group titled “I Want to F**king Kill Donald Trump” to the ire of his supporters.

The group was created on May 14 with a post reading “Donald Trumps Hair Looks Like A Bleached Mop – Gordon Ramsey 2016.” The most recent post is, “What Is Your Weapon Of Choice?” Asking what weapon people would use to kill Trump if given the chance.

Me, I liked Facebook and Twitter better when they defended free speech rather than allowing government and the progressive mob to beat them into submission.

Finally - for this week - Leg iron asked where it all went wrong:

As a smoker, I’m feeling neglected. All the things we used to cause have moved on. We were the Grim Reapers who brought death and decay everywhere we went. Every disease, every illness was our doing. I was having fun with that.

As our intrepid freethinker observes - the fussbuckets are now obsessed with food.

There's still hope - as this outcry reminds us.

....

No Professor Lang, Brexit won't lead to food riots...

****

Tim Lang, Emeritus Professor of Food Policy at City University thinks Brexit could lead to food riots:

But given that the WTO rules are “the lowest common denominator” and the Codex Alimentarius is determined in meetings that are “dominated by big business and lobbies [making] the EU look like the most democratic organisation in the world”, this is far from ideal. The result would be food riots, says professor Lang.

Yes folks, this eminent food 'expert' thinks there'll be food shortages, huge price hikes and general chaos because we'll be outside the CAP and subject to the 'common external tariff'. Here's a sample:

The immediate impact of the decision to quit the 28-member state bloc looks like rising food prices in a country that produces and grows less than 60% of the food it eats and is particularly reliant on imports from the EU for fruit and vegetables.

Speaking to FoodNavigator yesterday, Tim Lang predicted it could take five to 10 years for the UK to become food self-sufficient in food products, if that extreme scenario ever arose. And in the meantime? “People will pay more for food. The British people have voted to raise the food prices," he said simply.

Now, given that Prof. Lang and his pals have been agitating for more expensive food for ages, you'd have thought they'd have loved all this but let's take them at their word. Do they really think those Spanish tomato growers, Italian orange farmers and French wheat barons are suddenly going to whack up the price of the stuff they're selling into one of their biggest markets? Or - as Professor Lang seems to hint - stop selling to us entirely. For a Professor of Food Policy this seems incredibly ill-informed on the basics of trade.

There might be an impact on prices if the pound falls against the Euro. But set against that the UK having better access to non-EU markets in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa - all of which grow the same crops as those Spaniards, Italians and French farmers - and it might be that us having more choice will actually drive prices down for the fruit and vegetables Professor Lang is so bothered about.

We have no need at all - none - to become self-sufficient in food because leaving the EU increases the security of our food supplies by taking us outside the anti-trade restrictions of the CAP and other EU controls. That a Professor of Food Policy doesn't see this should worry us. But then it's Tim Lang and he's nearly always wrong.

....

Care about the planet? Well stop saying local is better then.

****

One of the most common myths of the modern trendy progressive world is that which say 'local' is always better - for the economy, for the planet and for society. If only we 'transitioned' our places into being locally-focused, resilient communities filled with independent shops, urban gardens and local food networks say the advocates - with comments like this ever so common:

The same goes for agriculture, textiles, and many other sectors where returning to local, human-scaled enterprise will lead to less worker exploitation and environmental damage while producing better, healthier products. Nonindustrial practices may be more labor-intensive, but they’re also better for us all. For those of us used to white-collar jobs, the idea of growing vegetables or making clothes may seem like a big step backward toward more menial labor. But consider for a moment the sorts of activities the wealthiest Americans or most satisfied retirees engage in enthusiastically: brewing craft beers, knitting, and gardening. If there’s really not enough work to go around and there are so many extra people to employ, we can always farm in shifts.

This quote is from a book called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and was quoted - as an example of progressive ignorance - by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. What bothers me most isn't the stuff about the local multiplier that are used to justify resilience - we know that's pretty much nonsense - or even the truth that this sort of local protectionism only makes us poorer. No, what bothers me is that the idiot progressives promoting transition towns and putting up these 'back to the land' arguments are completely wrong about its environmental impact.

It simply isn't true that this return to pre-industrial production has less environmental impact than modern intensive agriculture or mass-production of the clothes and tools we need. We know that extensive agriculture uses more inputs than intensive agriculture, which is a pretty wasteful start, but we also know that this sort of farming is more polluting and has a bigger impact on wildlife and the local environment. Yet the 'Greens' and their progressive fellow travellers persist with their myth-making and in denying that the same benefits come from agricultural intensification as come from any other improvement in our efficiency in using resources - it makes us richer, it puts less strain on the planet and it allows time for those pleasant pastimes like home brew beer and allotment gardening.

....

Free range chicken isn't healthier or more sustainable. It's just tastes better and costs more.

I'm prepared to accept that free range chickens taste better. I also know that the way those chickens are bred means they cost a whole lot more than the chickens produced in batteries or other intensive farming methods. But this argument is wrong:

Despite the fact that sustainable poultry production systems deliver huge benefits to the environment and public health, the producers using these methods have no option but to compete on an unlevel playing field. Worse, we are paying for the damage caused by industrial food production in hidden ways, through taxes, in the form of misdirected subsidies from the common agricultural policy, through water pollution clean-up costs and through national health service treatment costs.

Firstly there's no evidence that intensive farming is more damaging to the environment than traditional or organic methods. In fact the reverse is true - traditional and organic methods are less environmentally-friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

So far from there being an environmental benefit from moving away from agricultural intensification, the reverse is true - if we want a less polluting agriculture then intensification is the right choice. This is quite simply because that supposedly "sustainable" system is less efficient. We get expensive food and a more damaged environment.

The public health issues are equally misplaced. There is no evidence at all that organic methods are healthier than methods using modern pest control or fertilisers. - it's just that all those healthy looking chickens scuttling about in feels give us the impression that eating them will be healthier.

So when the Sustainable Food Trust tell you their methods are healthier and have less environmental impact they aren't telling you the whole truth. And, when they call for the system to be skewed to support their methods, what they are doing is making you pay more for food with the only benefit going to the organic farmers' bank balances.

....

Vegetarian propaganda dressed up as science - welcome to joyless food academia

There is an especially joyless tendency in the world of food academia. This is a world where food is made into a problem - causing cancer and other disease, 'promoting' obesity or destroying the planet. And the main reason for this destruction of any pleasure in food rests with a particular sort of vegetarian - often vegan - activist academic:

"We do not expect everybody to become vegan," said lead author Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Program on the Future of Food.

But if they did, they'd live longer and help reduce the changes that are skewing the climate.

"What we eat greatly influences our personal health and the global environment," Springmann said.

Got that folks? You don't have to be vegan but if you want to live longer and save the planet into the bargain then you jolly well ought to be. And the reasons are set out in Dr Springmann's well-funded research:

If everyone ate less meat and other animal products and followed guidelines already recommended for healthy eating—more fruit, vegetables, and whole grains and less meat, salt, and sugar—it would reduce global mortality by up to 10 percent and reduce food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 29 and 70 percent, based on predictions for the year 2050, write Marco Springmann and colleagues in their paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Not, leaving aside that I'm always dubious about research that has very broad ranges ('between 29 and 70 percent') and memorable round numbers ('up to 10 percent'), we need to get into the truth of what Dr Springmann is saying about the economics of food production to understand why he is pulling a whole load of vegan-approved artificial wool over our eyes. The first of this is what we count as part of the contribution from livestock farming - the veggie activists claim anything up to 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gases from livestock farming making it a bigger contributor than the world's entire transport system.

A more measured figure is:

Recent estimates by the United States Environmental Protection Agency [EPA, Hockstad, Weitz (2009). Inventory of U.S. greenhouse gases and sinks: 1990–2007. Environmental Protection Agency] and the California Energy Commission [CEC—California Energy Commission (2005). Inventory of California Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990 to 2002 Update] on the impacts of livestock on climate change in the United States and California have arrived at much different GHG estimates associated with direct livestock emissions (enteric fermentation and manure), totaling at less than 3% of total anthropogenic GHG and much smaller indirect emissions compared to the global assessment.

The problem is that things such as deforestation are being included in the calculation as is the use of nitrogen fertiliser to produce cattle feed when we know that the alternative crop would also use said fertiliser - unless we plant trees (an approach that is possible given farming intensification but not with the extensive organic methods preferred by our veggie academic activists). Indeed levels of fertiliser use in arable farming are significantly higher - up to four times greater - than for livestock farming which suggests that levels of Nitrous Oxide would rise under a shift to a diet based on vegetable proteins.

We're told that, of the greenhouse gases produced by agriculture (Nitrous Oxide, Methane and Carbon Dioxide), Nitrous Oxide is by far the most significant in terms of impact:



So the slightly glib assumption that reducing livestock numbers would reduce emissions is, at the very least, open to question as is the oft-repeated statement about the degree to which livestock is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

Which, I guess, brings us to health and our veggie academic activists who are terribly imprecise with their 'up to 10%':

For their study, the Oxford scientists “used specific food groups” Springmann told Civil Eats. “Each additional serving of fruit and vegetables reduces chances of heart disease and diabetes,” he explained. “Add more meat and you go in the other direction. It’s almost linear,” he said. Such data, Springmann explained, is found in so many studies that it’s now “basically an agreed fact” that high fat, meat-heavy diets are associated with poor health outcomes.

Now there's a bit of a problem here because we're all living a whole lot longer despite this 'high fat, high meat' diet of ours with some of the highest level of longevity being in the very Western nations that are singled out for vegetarian opprobrium. Indeed the problem is that every one of the world's most long-lived societies has above average consumption of meat. We shouldn't be surprised about this because the thing all these countries share is being relatively rich.

It's true that there's a well-established correlation linking eating red meat and processed meats with bowel cancer. But the increased risk is so small that it simply wouldn't show up in overall mortality statistics:

We know that, out of every 1000 people in the UK, about 61 will develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives. Those who eat the lowest amount of processed meat are likely to have a lower lifetime risk than the rest of the population (about 56 cases per 1000 low meat-eaters).

If this is correct, the WCRF’s analysis suggests that, among 1000 people who eat the most processed meat, you’d expect 66 to develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives – 10 more than the group who eat the least processed meat.

The 'scientists' go on to link meat with diabetes, stroke, heart disease as well as the bowel cancer. The problem, as with every claim of this sort is that, while there's plenty of evidence showing high meat diets correlate with diabetes, this evidence show the increased risk is tiny alongside other risk factors such as being obese. And, as we know, the main factor in the increased incidence of diabetes is mostly down to how we define having the condition and longevity plus incentivising medical professionals to diagnose the condition in the first place.

In the case of stroke and heart disease, the problem is that these problems have been declining pretty consistently for several decades despite an increased consumption of meat. The rate of decline may indeed be faster for vegetarians but there simply isn't a case for saying that a million more early deaths would be avoided if everyone became a vegan. Which isn't really a surprise at all since there's plenty of evidence telling us vegans are less healthy:

Vegetarians have twice as many allergies as big meat-eaters do (30.6% to 16.7%) and they showed 166% higher cancer rates (4.8% to 1.8%). Moreover the scientists found that vegans had a 150% higher rate of heart attacks (1.5% to 0.6%). In total the scientists looked at 18 different chronic illnesses. Compared to the big meat-eaters, vegetarians were hit harder in 14 of the 18 illnesses (78%) which included asthma, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis

The truth in all this is that we are able - through the careful selection and manipulation of statistics - to show how almost any individual element of diet is either good for us or bad for us. And this results in the sort of crank science presented in this argument (in the case of Springmann et al supplemented by some equally dodgy climate change science and batty economics).

Our food system is not destroying the planet nor is it making us ill. Agriculture and the food industry it supports is, in fact, responsible for the amazing achievement of feeding over 7 billion people using a declining proportion of the world's land and with ever greater efficiency. And as for diet, the right advice is to eat a properly balanced diet - with or without meat. More to the point - and there's plenty of evidence that this too leads to a longer life - enjoy the gathering, preparation and consumption of all the foods nature and human ingenuity provides.

....

How to respond when your precious theory is debunked. The case of farting cows.

"Who're you blaming for climate change, matey?"

We should stop eating meat because of climate change. All the cow farts, pig trumps and sheep letting one rip are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions thereby leading to the end of civilisation as we know it closely followed by the earth ceasing to be a viable ecosystem for anything more sophisticated than cheese mould. It is of course nonsense - it's lettuce that should bother us:

Lettuce is “over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon”, according to researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University who analysed the impact per calorie of different foods in terms of energy cost, water use and emissions.

Published in the Environment Systems and Decisions journal, the study goes against the grain of recent calls for humans to quit eating meat to curb climate change.

Collapse of the vegetarian's strongest argument (global warming is because we eat meat). Except for the noble soul who has the job of defending the cow fart argument because the funding of his institution depends on it:

The initial findings of the study were "surprising", according to senior research fellow Anthony Froggatt at Chatham House, an independent think-tank which is currently running a project looking at the link between meat consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Froggatt told the Independent it is "true lettuce can be incredibly water intensive and energy intensive to produce", but such comparative exercises vary hugely depending on how the foods are raised or grown.

"We usually look at proteins rather than calories, and as a general rule it is still the case that reducing meat consumption in favour of plant-based proteins can reduce emissions," he said.

Watch that spin there Froggatt old chap! Especially since his argument that these naughty scientists haven't taken everything into account is quickly debunked too:

But surprisingly, even if people cut out meat and reduced their calories to USDA-recommended levels, their environmental impact would increase across energy use (38 per cent), water (10 per cent) and emissions (6 per cent).

Dang and double dang! Poor Froggatt is left with just the weakest of weak arguments - akin to sticking out his bottom lip, stamping his foot and insisting he is right:

"We do know there is global overconsumption of meat, particularly in countries such as the US," he said. "Looking forward that is set to increase significantly, which will have a significant impact on global warming."

We can expect more along these lines - a narrow focus on what the actual animal does (fart mostly) rather than a proper appraisal of the entire production process. It is, sadly, how science goes these days - look at vaping, at sugar taxes, at overweight girls or indeed almost any public health or climate change research and you'll find assumptions, ad hominem, lousy methods and the reliance on simply repeating a given mantra regardless of the actual evidence.  But then pointing at critics shouting heretic has always been an effective tactic in the short run.


....

So why are the poor more likely to be obese?

****

We're most often told it's fast food. But this ain't so:

New data, released by the Centers for Disease Control, show that America’s love for fast food is surprisingly income blind. Well-off kids, poor kids, and all those in between tend to get about the same percentage of their calories from fast food, according to a survey of more than 5,000 people. More precisely, though, it’s the poorest kids that tend to get the smallest share of their daily energy intake from Big Macs, Whoppers, Chicken McNuggets, and french fries.

More evidence that planning controls (and bans) are futile since they simply don't address the problem. And if you think about it for a second, fast food is always less accessible to poorer people for the simple reason that it's a lot more expensive than buying food at the supermarket and cooking it yourself (OK sticking it in a microwave until it goes 'ping').

The answer lies in pleasure. Poverty is a (literally in too many cases) depressing state and when we're down we seek pleasure. Us rich folk have access to a much bigger choice of pleasures than poor folk. And those poor folk opt for cheap pleasures - TV, sex, fags, booze, drugs and - most commonly - the endless choice of cheap food in our shops.

The answer doesn't lie in making food more expensive but in actions to reduce poverty and present better opportunities to the poor. Those health fascists who argue for making food more expensive on public health grounds are simply making poverty worse meaning that more people will self-medicate their dreary life with cake.

....

On the nonsense of our obsession with children's weight

****

There are children with a serious weight problem but there aren't very many of them. Unless of course you rely on a simplistic measure that takes no account of differential rates of development and which places an entirely arbitrary level for 'normal', 'overweight' and 'obese. The result of this - plus the endless bothering in the media about weight - is that children, especially girls, are worrying about their weight. Most of the time this gets blamed on skinny models and the fashion industry which means that another culprit - public health campaigns about childhood obesity - gets away without any criticism.

Here's a comment from the former head of the Food Policy and Research Unit at Bradford University (and Bingley Rural resident), Vernor Wheelock:

"Verner Wheelock, former head of the University of Bradford’s Food Policy and Research Unit who now runs a food training and consultancy service in Skipton, believes the BMI (Body Mass Index) system of measuring body fat based on weight in relation to height is a 'nonsense.'

He says some people with a higher life expectancy are in the overweight category and says it is even more difficult to calculate when it comes to children because they're still growing and there are some muscular children with a higher BMI. "When officials get hold of them they say they have to lose weight, but it's nonsense," says Verner,

He believes there is too much obsession with weight and that many people are given the wrong dietary advice."

What sort of barking mad world do we live in where one day children are being told they shouldn't worry about not looking like a supermodel (and anyway they're unhealthily skinny) and thew next that their BMI places than as overweight meaning they should lose weight. All this is against a background where, as Dr Wheelock points out some overweight people - in particular older people - have a higher life expectancy that people with a 'normal' weight.

....

Friday Fungus: wild mushrooms and the tragedy of the commons

You've got dressed up, hired a cab and are safely seated in that special restaurant for your special occasion. Scanning down the menu your eyes fall on a "mosaic of chicken, wild mushrooms and pistachio nuts - an elegant combination of woody, autumnal flavours packed into a chunky terrine". If you're me, you leap as the prospect of wild mushrooms and place the order for your starter. What you don't do is ask how those wild mushrooms arrived at a posh restaurant in Ilkley. Perhaps it's time to start asking - for the sake of our woodlands and for the sake of us continuing to enjoy the fabulous flavours of those wild mushrooms blessing our palettes.

We're familiar with the tragedy of the commons (although it is often misrepresented):

...each human exploiter of the common was guided by self-interest. At the point when the carrying capacity of the commons was fully reached, a herdsman might ask himself, “Should I add another animal to my herd?” Because the herdsman owned his animals, the gain of so doing would come solely to him. But the loss incurred by overloading the pasture would be “commonized” among all the herdsmen. Because the privatized gain would exceed his share of the commonized loss, a self-seeking herdsman would add another animal to his herd. And another. And reasoning in the same way, so would all the other herdsmen. Ultimately, the common property would be ruined.

So it is with wild foraging for mushrooms.

The New Forest Association (NFA) says there's growing anger over "commercial gangs" invading and filching fungi to flog to posh hotels and restaurants in back-door deals.

Experts have warned the gangs could even kill because pickers who don't know the different species are likely to take deadly toadstools and other poisonous fungi in mistake for edible and safe mushrooms.

Forestry Commission bosses have now vowed to "disrupt" commercial pickers plundering this autumn's crop - but campaigners are demanding an outright ban.

This same story is repeated across our woodlands - from Epping Forest to Ogden Water you'll see evidence of large scale mushroom gathering. How else did you think all those wild mushrooms arrived in all those restaurants? And the easy result of authorities is to introduce a ban:

Authorities in London's Epping Forest have been stopping and searching walkers in an attempt to catch foragers who are stripping the woodland of fungi.

Forest keepers are trying to crack down on the harmful practice after gangs of foragers descended on the woodland in vans to cart away hauls of mushrooms which are then sold to restaurants.

The plants can fetch up to £50 per kilo as the trend for foraged food in upmarket restaurants in London and around the country has sent demand soaring.

The problem is that, as we know too well, a ban would simply drive up the price and make it worth the while to carry on foraging (the downside risk is probably pretty small). Even if we banned restaurants from selling wild mushrooms - imagine the foodie cries of pain - there's still be a market at the restaurant backdoor at an even higher price.

Instead of banning foraging would it not be more sensible (and lucrative) for places like Epping Forest and the New Forest to auction off the rights to crop the mushrooms? Trust me, if you've forked out thousands of quid for something you'll be making really sure people don't arrive and steal it from you. The owners of the rights would back up the local keepers and wardens to stop the poaching of fungi - we'd have an industry interested in a sustainable product rather than a collection of uncontrolled exploiters of common rights.

Despite this, I'll bet you that the choices of authorities will be the ban not the licence.
....