Living dangerously
Pe tronella Wyatt
There hasn't been much in the news recently to cheer about, eh what? Apparently, we lack vaccines against chemical weapons. a terror exercise is to he staged at Bank Underground station, our Home Secretary was in danger of contracting cancer due to a faulty oesophagus, male film stars are not as good-looking as they used to be and a rape judge has said that women are not safe in mini cabs.
I would like to comment briefly on the latter, as I am eminently qualified to do so because I don't drive in London. The judge is right. Women are not safe in mini cabs. No, by God. This is not, however, because they are likely to be raped or battered but because they are unlikely to reach their desired destination.
I have yet to meet a mini-cab driver who knows where three of the major London streets are. For some inescapable reason they never appear to carry maps, so you find yourself directing them from the back seat, become distracted for a moment and then realise you are shooting off to Dover when you asked to be taken to Waterloo station. The other danger, now, is being gypped out of all your money as these mini-cab firms have hiked up their prices by around 30 per cent, blaming the congestion charge.
However, there has been something to get happy about. Scientists and doctors are now having doubts about whether organic food is good for you. This is of so tremendous a relief to me that I can hardly express my excitement and joy. For years I have been dragged into organic-food shops with their dowdy interiors and their peculiar smell of of weird pulses and grungy women. I never liked the look of the food either. Not only is it twice as expensive as non-organic produce hut much of it ought to have pride of place in a Hammer horror film.
The vegetables and fruit in particular look as if they are going to climb down from the shelves and attack the helpless shopper. The oranges are bruised, misshapen and often have a sort of bulbous protuberance somewhere about them. The apples are battered and the bananas almost black. The carrots and potatoes resemble mutants, and I refuse to discuss the beans out of simple good taste.
As for the soya milk they force upon one, it must be quite the most revolting drink in the world. I once went on an organic-only diet for a week and finished up with spots and blurred vision. Those women in the papers who claim to feel better afterwards are fibbing. I only felt better after my first drink — non-organic alcohol.
One of the ideas behind organic food was that it would help prevent cancer while treated food helped cause it. I suspect that treated food has actually kept down cancer rates rather than the opposite. What can be healthy about vegetables growing in insanitary conditions and got at by poisonous bugs? It is particularly irresponsible of some of these organophiles to suggest to cancer patients that they forgo conventional medical treatment entirely and drink organic vegetable-juice instead. To this date I know three people who have died following such a course. I am not claiming they wouldn't have copped it anyway but in a hospital they might have had more of a chance.
And do the organophiles believe that cancer did not exist before the 20th century? Probably the reason people died much younger than they do now is because they had no option but to eat organic food. In history books one is always coming across cases of young women and men with atrocious stomach complaints and fatal cancerous tumours. Middle-aged people suffered similarly. Consider poor Napoleon who died of stomach cancer. Too much organic brioche, perhaps? There were more incidents of food poisoning, too, and not merely among the poor. Local records show that numerous people died from what they ate and in country villages this cannot be attributed to murder.
Go back to the ancient world, particularly Rome, and start believing in the cock-up theory of history not the conspiracy one. Forget everything Robert Graves suggested about the Empress Livia poisoning her family, including Augustus (with figs) or Claudius being bumped off by his wife with a plate of treated mushrooms. The number of food-poisoning cases are indeed suspicious but were they really all assasinations? Could it have not been organic food? Having observed organic figs and mushrooms I would not be at all surprised.
I hope now that we can slowly have done with this silly fad and return to proper supermarkets with proper treated foods. Yes, treated with pesticides and preservatives and all those things that have kept us healthier than our ancestors and contributed to our glorious longevity.
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