Opinion – Hands Off My Pork Pie!
Okay, that’s it; enough is enough – this time the food fascists have gone too far. Already you have fully grown rugby players sobbing helplessly because they checked their BMIs and found they were grossly overweight when they thought they were in terrific shape. Virtually any packaged food you can think of now comes in a low fat option because they’ve decided fat is evil and clogs up your arteries and makes your head explode (I might have just made that last one up). All over the country people are resisting the siren song of that bar of chocolate they’ve got stashed in the cupboard because, finally, the food fascists have decided that sugar makes you fat. I could have told them this a long time ago; there are over four times as many calories in sugar as there are in baked potato.
Now, after a study involving half a million people over several years, they have concluded that people who eat lots of processed meat are slightly likely to die younger. This doesn’t sound too bad until you consider what comes under the heading of processed meat. It’s not just pork pies, turkey twizzlers and other such horrendously unhealthy “foodstuffs,” they’re also talking about bacon, sausages and burgers – the staples of the English diet since time immemorial. It gets worse too because, being food fascists, they suffer from an irresistible urge to issue guidelines about how much of the evil foods you are allowed to eat. These guidelines are… wait for it… one rasher of bacon or half a sausage per day. This is patently ridiculous; I can’t be expected to get through the week on three and a half sausages – and what happens if I decide to have a ham sandwich or some spicy meat balls; will I then be expected to get through the week with no sausages at all?
Although the authors of the report were very adamant that we need to cut down drastically on the bacon butties, they were rather vague about why this might be so. A professor from the faculty of Culinary National Socialism at Right On Man University said that it just went to show that meat was evil and we should all live on vegetables like he did, but the food fascists just muttered something about there being a lot of saturated fat and salt in processed meat. I think they might have inadvertently hit the nail right on the head – not with the fat bit because, if you grill sausages or bacon, most of the fat runs out into the pan – but because too much salt is actually very bad for you.
People of my mum’s generation chuck handfuls of salt into everything they cook, probably because proper flavour enhancers such as herbs and spices were not readily available when they started cooking. The processed food industry loves salt as well because, along with sugar, it is a very cheap and effective preservative and it adds flavour to food that doesn’t naturally contain much of it. But salt is also a deadly poison; you don’t need to feed a lot of it to someone to kill them. The problem is that you need some salt in your diet to survive; eating a safe amount is a bit of a balancing act. So how about this for an idea; tell the food industry they can’t put so much salt in everything and forbid my mum from adding extra salt to her cooking.
One interesting thing that came out of this latest piece of research was that red meat is not in any way bad for you; you can pretty much eat as much steak as you like. This directly contradicts our own government’s guidelines on healthy eating which suggest that red meat is evil and bad and shouldn’t be eaten under any circumstances. The only thing I can conclude is that any advice from the food fascists is rubbish and should be ignored. All things in moderation!
Related Posts
Tom Tugendhat lends support to Lifestyle Health Foundation →
TOUCHING THE MUSIC What it’s like to sing music you cannot read →
Sorry seems to be the hardest word … →
Comments