There is a piece this morning by a Food Technology Lecturer (whatever the hell that is) who does us all a great service by pointing out (rather pedantically for the slower of us) the difference between food and diet. He makes the comparison with weather and climate - and not a bad comparison either. A single pie is as fine as a pottle of chips is as fine a bottle of Coke is as fine as an organic nutburger. The problem would be if you ate just pies and chips and Coke and nothing else. Presumably you wouldn't look so flash if you just ate nutburgers either - and you'd have considerably less fun in the process. For starters you would be surrounded by the sort of people who do eat nutburgers all the time and that in itself would be cruel and unnatural punishment. So the problem is not what the Tuck Shop sells but what the kids chose to buy from it. These choices could be made healtheir if the kids' parents (or in 30% of cases parent singular) told little Johnny that a bit of moderation in all things is a good idea. A pie as part of a balanced diet is OK.
But that is not our all controlling Government's way is it? Without asking us they decree that pies are to be banned. The best we can hope for is a pie 'four times a year' on Governmnet nominated Pie Day. Paradoxically this pie ban is a good thing because it is looking like another straw on the back of the camel of the nation. The Government tells us that we cannot smack our kids, that we cannot cut down trees on our own property, have to ask them permission to make any alterations to our own houses and then have them inspected to make sure we have done them to their satisfaction (oh, and you can now pay us for the privelege) and now they tell us what our kids are allowed to buy with our money.
I sense that, at last, the great unwashed have had enough of being told what to do. And told by who? Intellectual titans? A coterie of natural successors to Bertrand Russell? No we are being told what to do by a band of failed school teachers, career political activists, sociology lecturers and Keith Locke. Except for those terminally 'lifetime Labour' wallahs who would still vote for them if sticking your head in a gas oven was actually on the Labour manifesto I feel that come next September enough of the rest of the country will have the common sense to get rid of this pack of uselss pratts. Even those long term beneficiaries (two three generation types) who wouldn't bite the hand that feeds them shouldn't be too worried. Any new administration wouldn't dare stuff up their cosy lifestyle paid for by yours and my taxes. Well they wouldn't for a week or two.
Mr Food Technology Man also does us another favour in pointing out the myth surrounding 'natural' and 'additives'. You know the drill. If you can put 'all natural ingredients' on a food ingredient list one mouthful will have you looking like a supermodel, performing like an Olympic athlete and living to 124. By contrast should you eat anything that contains 'additives' or, God forbid, GE ingredients you will be covered in boils and pustules by teatime and should give up buying boxed sets of CDs. This is of course complete bollocks. Just because a thing is natural does not mean it is good for you. Hemlock is natural but I wouldn't suggest stirring that into your smoko cuppa. Cow turds are natural - fancy some spread on your toast? China lives on MSG (and little else I sometimes think) but you don't walk into the killing fields once you go North of Hong Kong. Do you really think Unilever put preservatives in their food with genocide in mind? Do those blokes wearing white coats who walk around green houses putting bits of frog DNA in tomatoes do it so that the denizens of Foxton all grow seven fingers? Of course they don't.
Those who howl at the moon and would have us eat everything produced as it was in the fifteenth century are just plain bonkers. We can do that if we still had the population of the fifteenth century to feed and were prepared to put up with standards of living (and a life span - I would have been in my box about ten years ago) comensurate with those times. We live in the twenty first century and have to adjust our lives accordingly. Farming and horticultural practices of today are vital or the world would starve. And who would starve first? The CEOs of Mighty River Power, Fonterra and Unilever? Would they buggery. The first to turn their toes up would be the poor and the 'victims' of the world. The very people who are running around telling us that the current way of the industrialised (read pragmatic) world is evil. Funny that.
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