Why are people so chippy about fast-food outlets?
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Version 0 of 1. Further vindication, were any needed, of the role of kitchens in modern elections, appears in the shape of a Cambridge study recording a soaring number of fast food outlets. Within an 18-year period, in Norfolk, their number rose by 45%, growth being greatest in the areas of highest deprivation. Never, if this pattern is representative, has there been a more urgent need for leaders who are, like David Cameron, confident with salads, familiar with the juiciest cuts of meat, determined always to fit work around family mealtimes. But as the report’s authors are not the first to observe, role models may no longer be enough to stop poorer Britons eating themselves sick. Planning restrictions on the number of fast food outlets are one proposal for controlling a section of the public that appears as deaf as ever to exhortations about the relative cheapness of home-cooked stews, compared with injuriously fatty takeaways. Almost 10, increasingly obese, years have passed since David Cameron made his famous stand against cheap chocolate. “As Britain faces an obesity crisis,” he said in 2006, the same year that Jamie Oliver attacked irresponsible feeding by parents, “why does WH Smith promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?” It was a mystery. But presumably its then chairman, Robert Walker, who is now a signatory to the pro-Tory business leaders’ petition, had his reasons. Later, the young moralist became more inclined to spare WH Smith and to scold the susceptible. “We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’,” Cameron objected in 2008, “instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise.” After his government reached its friendly accommodation with the food and drink industry, his health minister, Anna Soubry, was to add that some members of the non-Ocado classes didn’t even bother with kitchen tables.“They will sit in front of the telly and eat,” she revealed to stunned Telegraph readers, in the exasperated tone that seems to overtake so many public servants when they address the recalcitrant, impoverished and overweight. The government’s anti-obesity adviser, Professor Susan Jebb, has recently regretted the number of British people masticating openly in the street, in defiance of healthy eating practice, for all the world as if the inhabitants of, say, Norfolk, imagined themselves carefree visitors to one of those vibrant street food markets you read about in travel articles on Singapore. Or, indeed, to London’s Borough Market, where, the Lonely Planet guide enthuses: “Takeaway stalls supply sizzling gourmet sausages, chorizo sandwiches and quality burgers in spades, filling the air with meaty aromas.” But everything in its place. When in Norwich, and all that. “When I was small,” says Professor Jebb, “eating or drinking on the street was really, really bad form.” Maybe one of those new local public space protection orders could help enforce a return to the glorious period of snacking ostracism that prevailed at some point between the street food stalls of Pompeii and the arrival of a Greggs in every British high street? Meanwhile, the question will not go away: why can’t “they”, after all the years of political wiggings and entirely well-intentioned abuse, be more like Anna Soubry, Professor Jebb, the yet more influential Jamie Oliver? The answer can’t invariably be – although it may explain much of the resistance – that they once spent three hours (minus shopping and cleaning up) making, say, one of Jamie’s nutritious, 15-minute meals, only for one of its beneficiaries to confess, pushing her plate away: “I’m not that big a fan of coriander.” And it is not as if “they” don’t know the consequences of eating greasy crap from sub-Borough Market takeaways, any more than George Osborne,who visited a Britvic factory last week, is unaware that its Fruit Shoots, a child’s drink containing four teaspoons of sugar, are incompatible with his 5:2 diet, or that anyone believes that Coca-Cola, through its sports sponsorship, actually promotes “health and wellness”. Some celebrated passages (in defence of something “a little bit tasty”) in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier confirm that bourgeois feeders were urging better habits on the poor long before the dissemination of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, to the point of sharing shopping hints. Given it is probably too late for women to return to their kitchens and thereby recreate the era when nobody ate rubbish in the street, it remains a token of faith for nutritional campaigners that, if only everyone learned to cook – and bought a proper table, obviously – Blytonesque mealtimes would duly resume and cheap neighbourhood takeaway outlets would melt away, leaving space for, well, something more healthy, like neighbourhood food banks. Allowing for the number of competent family cooks for whom routine food preparation ranks, after a few years on the job, as barely more appealing an activity than kettle descaling, nutrition missionaries must still resolve the obvious difficulty, even for motivated individuals not on zero-hours contracts, of finding time and energy to cook. Though there may be no substance to the malicious rumours about leisured gastrocelebrities who exist on, say, fast food from Wagamama, both personal experience and the noted resilience of the swankier-end restaurant trade, even during the recession, suggest that discerning umami bores can be almost as determined to eat out as the poorly remunerated residents of Norfolk. Currently, the Chiltern Firehouse having had its moment, we are urged by upscale gluttons to order £80 steaks at the more fashionable Kitty Fisher’s. Having eaten his fill at this “wonderful neighbourhood restaurant” of, among other things, “salt cod croquettes beautifully fried” and “new potatoes [that] come draped with melted Tunworth cheese”, the restaurant critic Tom Parker Bowles said he would find “any excuse to go back”. If, given the fabled difficulty of getting a table, it might be difficult to argue for an official warning against such obesity-inducing appetite, it is hard to understand why the poor dietary habits of less privileged individuals should be considered so much more amenable to statutory and moral correction. It must be possible, supposing they had the money, that many fast-food patrons in Norfolk and elsewhere would instantly reform, abandoning their energy-dense fish and chips and pizzas and sugary drinks to drool over, if not the classy bread and butter (“smoke, umami, dairy, crunch” – Parker Bowles) and wine at Kitty Fisher’s, something less offensive to nutritionists. As it is, given the wiliness of the modern grazer, who may well be acquainted with convenience foods and drinks stocked by nearby supermarkets, a purge on fast-food outlets looks rather less promising, to this non-expert, than the imposition of nutritional standards on prepared food and drink itself, along with restrictions on advertising. The likelihood of such legislation from any Conservative administration can perhaps be gauged by the inclusion in last week’s business endorsement of some of the industry’s biggest names. |