c •
By Digby Anderson Imperative cooking: gourmet nutters
WILL the new Food Standards Agency be hijacked by nutters? Can the ministers involved, Messrs Dobson, Rooker and Jowell and the academic whose report helped form the idea of the agency, Profes- sor Philip James, maintain a firm line between serious concerns about food and the bizarre obsessions promoted by food cranks? They intend to put consumerists on the Agency as well as scientists. Are they aware that many of those who claim to speak for consumers simply speak for crank minorities? There is nothing wrong with food cranks, of course; their antics are highly amusing. But if the ministers naively let them join the Agency, it is they, the min- isters, who will wind up with egg on their faces, which will also be amusing.
Food, for some odd reason, has always attracted more than its fair share of crack- pots. Best known in the 19th century was Sylvester Graham, the 'Peristaltic Persuad- er', who was against meat, coffee, tea, alco- hol and the 'solitary vice', which caused diabetes, jaundice, acne and bad teeth. He was a bran man. So was Dr John Harvey Kellogg, who advocated application of car- bolic to the clitoris to allay excitement and circumcision without anaesthetic so that the pain would discourage vice. Graham's followers were mocked for their appear- ance: 'Looking like a full-blown bladder after some of the air had leaked out, kinda wrinkled and rumpled like, and his eyes . dim. He puts me in mind of a pair of kitchen tongs. All legs, shaft and head and 110 belly, a real gander-gutted creature, as hollow as a bamboo walking-cane and twice as yaller.' Dr Petr Skrabanek, from whose Death of Humane Medicine these examples are taken, shows the continuity in nutty food ravings from antique times to our own food fascists, the advocates of the 1,095 egg-sized potatos a year. It is not lunacy to be a vegetarian, though You will miss the best dishes in the best cuisines in the world; it is manic to want to commandeer the might of the state to make everyone eat cardboard. Quite sensible People can dislike sweet things — I don't much care for them myself. One can even think, while remaining quite sane, that some children should eat fewer sweets. But it is barking to want Leviathan to engineer the entire population into eating no more than one and a half boiled sweets a week. Balanced minds can view the rise in the number of people gravely obese with some worry, but you have to have something missing to imagine state healthist propa- ganda is going to do anything to reverse it, especially since obesity has really taken off during the decade in which the propaganda has taken off.
What makes a food crackpot a crackpot is not just the extreme eating 'policies' he advocates, but the mindless zealotry with which he advocates them. He is loony because he is paranoid about dietary dan- ger, seeing it as the greatest threat to the nation, a vast conspiracy to cut a couple of weeks off his miserable fibre-sodden life, and requiring ten-year state dietary plans to correct it. He is out of touch with reality; to him ice-cream means just calories and heart attacks; he is humourless, tunnel- visioned; he thinks he represents ordinary consumers, though their obstinate refusal to amend their behaviour in accord with his obsessions would tell any sane person oth- erwise.
There are a number of these crackpots about, some descended from the political crackpot generation of the Sixties, others genuinely believing that sugar or butter are poisons, yet others hungry for power. Unfortunately, they do not necessarily look cracked. They do not foam and dribble. Politicians, who by profession have a high tolerance of nutters, can easily be taken in by them.
The reason for the Food Standards Agency, insofar as it has one, is to handle public health crises such as an outbreak of E. coli or BSE. No one chooses to eat E. coli-infected meat. These are genuine public health matters. Eating sweets is not. It is voluntary and chosen. The crack- pots want to widen the agency's remit to include these quite different matters, notably the conversion of the reluctant nation to eating 1,095 potatoes a year. Some want this done by state propaganda, though this has not worked on diet, or indeed on smoking, in the past. Others, showing their loony-Marxoid past, argue for controls of advertising, packaging and labelling of foods, a sort of Stalinist state food information bureau.
It is manifestly barmy, poignantly barmy, just after Henley Centre research has shown that 'the public puts its faith' most of all in such brands as Heinz and Sainsbury's and least in politicians and journalists. And what will happen, of course, is that soon there will be another E. coli or BSE out- break. The public will demand explana- tions, and it will be found that the Agency has done nothing about such things, because its time and money have been devoted to trying to make us all suck fewer boiled sweets. What a hilarious humiliation that will be.
As for the bizarre sexual experiments, I can let you have the results Tuesday fortnight.'
Previous page
