Wonderful conspiracies are afoot today, Toadies. This evening I am going to be rattling on about feminists, government subsidies, Capitalism and laziness. All at once – oh yes.
Have you heard of the Obesity Epidemic? Well unless you’re either clinically dead or so morbidly obese that the folds of blubber around your neck are actually blocking your ears and obscuring your eyes (and let’s not discount the possibility out of hand) then of course you have.
The British are, as ever, trying their best to imitate every desperately awful trend coming out of America like the spineless little lap dogs Tony Blair is we are. In other words we are becoming increasingly, embarrassingly and in many cases amusingly fat. Now Song, by Toad is an intolerant sort of fellow where this is concerned because – despite being an unabashed libertine and egotistically self-indulgent glutton with an utter inability to show even the tiniest fragment of restraint where it comes to imbibing, indulging, scoffing, pampering of any and all sorts – I am not actually all that fat. A little soft around the middle perhaps, but that’s it.
Consequently, if you are fat, I find it extremely difficult to escape the conclusion that is quite frankly your own lazy fault, you spineless, self-indulgent weakling. If, with my incapacity to deny myself, I am not enormously fat, then you’ve really got no excuse. Face up to the lifestyle choices you have made with a bit of courage, instead of whining and trying to blame everyone else.
But, it emerges, the playing field is not as level as you might think. Whilst reading Ed Brayton’s superlative brain food Dispatches From the Culture Wars, I happened upon a post that links to this article in the New York Times.
To cut a long story extremely short, massive subsidies artificially lower prices on certain crops in the US. What crops? Well would it surprise you in even the slightest sense to learn that the crops being supported are the commodity products. The soys, corns and wheats which are used to produce “added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both)”. It is with a depressing inevitability that we read on to discover that the foods which are not being subsidised are the fresh fruit and veg.
So in other words, it is artificially expensive, in comparative terms, to feed yourself and your family properly. Well done, government. Way to represent the people. Hooray for the free market. Actually, balls to that. I would have more sympathy for the free market fundamentalists in our government and the US one if they ever displayed any inclination to actually nurture one. But artificially lowering the price of commodity items and in doing so supporting non-viable or just plain greedy domestic industries is emphatically not a free market. Just ask the Mexican farmers forced off the land due to the artificially low price of imported corn.
Where do the feminists come into this, I hear you asking. Well I’ll answer that the long way round: McDonald’s being sued for causing obesity seems a little rich, to me. If you didn’t realise it wasn’t terribly healthy, then you are just the sort of clueless buffoon natural selection ought to be weeding out of the gene pool – that’s what it’s for, bye bye. And if you knew it was unhealthy but still stuffed your face with the inedible, flavourless sludge on a regular basis anyway, well then it seems rather hypocritical to be blaming McDonald’s for your own stupid decisions.
That said, if you are feeding people what is essentially poisonous in the long term and at the same time blithely insisting that, because there’s a limp bit of flavourless, iceberg lettuce, utterly devoid of nutritional value, you are giving them a balanced meal, then you deserve all the lawsuits you get.
However, a friend I sat next to in my last job once confessed to me that he actually wouldn’t know how to feed his family of four as cheaply as he can at McDonald’s. Not just in a restaurant, even in the home. I was flabbergasted by this admission, and not a little horrified. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the feminist railing against the training of young girls to be wives and mothers appears to be that no-one is learning those skills any more.
Partly because we are complete pigs and partly because our mother was very strict on this, my brother and I have always been able to cook. We could feed a family of four more cheaply at home than we could at McDonald’s. So whatever the sex, if you don’t teach your kids these skills, you are leaving them at the mercy of vast multinationals like McDonald’s and the enormous food conglomerates. Would you trust these steely-eyed, rapacious, amoral fuckwits with anything, never mind the health of your beloved offspring? No, thought not. Christ I wouldn’t even trust the fuckers to stroke a little fluffy kitten without trying to sexually violate the little blighter and charge it for the privilege.
Ben Folds – All U Can Eat
Morrissey – You’re the One For Me, Fatty
Once more we get to Fresh Air time, and this week I have a splendidly hot off the press mp3 from the new New Pornogrgaphers album. It arrived in my inbox just as I was getting ready to leave work, so you can’t get much more news-whorish than that!
Sooo… the BNP are going on Question Time are they? That should be interesting.
