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| Article5
February
2001 | Eat, drink and be merry
...even if they tell you that tomorrow you die. | | by Sandy Starr |
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During January's scandal over the wide variation in death rates in UK hospitals, the West Midlands town of Walsall received a slating - from its own doctors.
| Dr Sam Ramaiah, director of the Walsall NHS trust, has long been waging a campaign against the 'curry and couch potato' lifestyle of the locals. 'Fewer people are dying from heart disease', he said. 'We are making improvements, but the improvements are slow to be recognised because we are starting off from a much lower level.' (1)
| I had a stomach-churning image of one of Dr Ramaiah's patients being marched disapprovingly off to the health food shop after a consultation, when all he wanted was fish and chips and a pint.
| It's not that I want to romanticise grease. If everybody could afford cordon bleu and had developed a palate for fine wine, it wouldn't be a tragedy. But whether you're into fried Mars bars or herb salad, surely everybody but those with life-or-death dietary requirements should plan their diet around what they like eating. Food and drink are far too important a part of life to be dictated by a little thing like health.
| With my decidedly middle-class background, I've never quite known why I grew up to be such a philistine when it comes to food. Perhaps I'm overcompensating for my teenage years, when I joined the animal rights movement and became a vegan. (Definition of vegan: no food allowed except for fruit, vegetables, cereals and nuts (2).) After over a year of this, I became mature enough to separate my morals from my mutton roast, tucked into a fat kebab and never turned back.
| Even when more sophisticated fare is on offer, I like my food cheap, processed and greasy. Very greasy. One of God's own sweet mysteries, when it comes to pork pies and sausage rolls, is what's in them and where it came from. And I like it that way. Especially when the meat has that bright pink hue that you know belongs to no part of any specimen in the animal kingdom. You can almost see the red colouring powder being flung into the pork vats, with the dog food equivalent being churned in an almost indistinguishable vat nearby.
| No meat or fish is truly complete without batter - and here, Scotland is miles ahead of the rest of us. With the battered haggis - the perfect marriage of batter, sheep's stomach, offal, and whatever else - the Scots have developed not knowing what's in your food into a fine art. Sometimes, I suppose, you can take this philosophy too far. My taste for the unrecognisable on my plate does get me into trouble at the family Christmas dinner, where I take my mother's immaculate roast potatoes, turkey, garlic-fried green beans and gravy, and reduce the whole to a brownish, homogenous paste with the underside of my fork before proceeding to eat three helpings. This might turn your stomach - but it delights mine.
| As for drink, I always found the idea of calculating one's consumption of alcohol units the best way to kill the mood of an evening. When the school nurse tells you there are two in the average pint of beer, and then that you're only supposed to have 21 of them a week (14 a week if you're unfortunate enough to be a girl), you stop listening pretty quickly. Similarly, when the dietician reminds you that each pint of beer is the calorific equivalent to a Mars bar, you follow the initial horror by deciding that what you don't remember can't hurt you.
| There are those who make a decision to curb their food and alcohol intake for the purposes of their appearance. This is absolutely legitimate, so long as you aren't hypocritical enough to bring health into the equation. The Weight Watchers school of dieting is pious and boring - I preferred it when Hollywood actresses such as Jennifer Anniston started following the controversial 'protein power' or 'no carbs' diet. What a great idea! Skip the bread, pasta and beer; hit the chicken, ice cream and vodka. Some people say you'll wreck your organs a bit , but you can worry about that later. These people have the good guts to diet for their beauty, not their health (3).
| The philosophy I'm outlining isn't masochism, just good living (combined with my complete absence of discrimination or taste). Fortunately, I am not alone. The USA's Centre for Consumer Freedom, an alliance of restaurateurs, has taken a firm stance against 'the growing fraternity of "food cops," health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats, and violent radicals who think they can decide better than you "what's best for you"' (4). (And, as restaurateurs, they have the discrimination and taste that I lack.)
| Everything in life can be interpreted as a risk, but that can just make life not worth living. As a chronic asthmatic, I choose not to smoke - asthma makes me feel bad enough as it is, and that's my bad luck. But I defend my decision to be a committed passive smoker, for the simple reason that I respect the right of others to smoke in public (as opposed to in quarantine) - and that, in my experience, the non-smoking sections of pubs are no fun at all.
| As for my figure, I'm now considerably rounder than the skeletal vegan I once was. My youthful metabolism still lets me accommodate my colossal food intake with a modest (but slowly growing) paunch. I'm perfectly aware that in 10 years or under, I'm likely to wake up unable to see my feet, and get out the vitamin pills and lettuce. But that's another day. For now, I'm off for a pie and a pint.
| (1) Facts behind the figures that damn Walsall, Jeevan Vasagar, Guardian, 15 January 2001
(2) See the Vegan.com website
(3) See the WeightWatchers website; Eat yourself thin on cream? Fat chance, Lucy Atkins, Guardian, 9 November 1999
(4) See the About us, on the Centre for Consumer Freedom website
Read on:
In praise of bad habits, by Dr Peter Marsh
spiked-issue: Eating
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