Obese Or Not Obese

‘FEW who have even set foot in a farmhouse would describe the ambience as fresh – earthy, rural, muddy, but rarely fresh.

‘I’m on the Atkins Diet’

But put the word ‘fresh’ on a loaf of bread or a carton of soup and instantly the object becomes more desirable to the shopper.

Only it was very probably not made on a farm.

You knew it was unlikely that the farmer’s wife rose early each morning to slaughter her chickens in a humane, bloodless and gutless way before bleaching their meat, grinding their beaks and moulding the mush into chicken-shapes.

But the chance to buy into the bucolic dream was too great to resist.

However, the Food Standards Agency are hard-nosed scientists, and they, says the Times, have discovered that three-quarters of foodstuffs labelled as ‘farmhouse’ is actually manufactured on industrial premises.

The new study by the FSA also found that words like ‘traditional’, ‘fresh’, ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ are misleading, duping the shopper into thinking the product is something it is not.

The Telegraph carries the same warning to shoppers, and adds ‘home-made’, ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ into the mixer of words designed to fool.

But the food companies should not rush out for a new thesaurus just yet, since the Guardian has seen another report, a joint work by three medical bodies, which suggests that as long as the food contains lots of lovely fat, the shopper will not care a jot where or how it was made.

The report, Storing Up Problems, produced by the Royal College Of Physicians, the Royal College Of Paediatricians And Child Health and the Faculty Of Public Health, paints an unattractive picture.

The report calls on the Government to prepare a ‘joined-up’ strategy to cure a growing obesity problem.

And, as the Telegraph shows, it is problem: 23% of women and 22% of men are obese; 16% of children between the ages of 6 and 15 are obese; and at current rates, by 2020 at last one third of all adults will be obese.

But the remedy is simple, is it not? It is merely a matter of rebranding the low-fat foods as ‘lardy’ and ‘delicious’ and high-fat foods as ‘tasteless low-fat alternatives’.

In five years’ time, we’ll be the fittest nation on earth…’

Posted: 12th, February 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink