A sick society
The six year old grandson was here yesterday.
As usual, he was scrounging for food and drink. I gave him a pack of biscuits which Herself had bought and decided she didn’t like. I don’t blame her – they are like a solidified sample from the bottom of a guinea pig cage.
Anyhows, he helped himself to a fistful and came sidling up to me.
“Which are the healthier?” says he, “These ones or the ones with the cream and strawberries in them?”
In other words, why was I pawning him off with the guinea pig ones when there were others he preferred!
“Does it matter?” says I with a raised eyebrow,
He gave me that look he gives when he’s not sure whether I’m being serious, which in fairness I am usually not.
“I suppose these ones are healthier because they don’t taste as nice?” says he.
“Do you eat biscuits because you are hungry, because they taste nice or because they are healthy?”
He shrugged, which is his usual response, but I knew I had given him something to think about.
But it has come to a sad state of affairs when a six year old actually thinks in terms of health when he is given a biscuit? Six, for fuck’s sake! I suppose I can’t be too surprised as every fucking packet of edibles these days comes with screaming headlines – “The Healthier Option”, “Enriched with Vitamins”, “Low Salt”, “Low sugar”, “part of a Calorie Controlled Diet”! Since when did food become medicine? If I want extra vitamins I’ll go to the chemist and buy some, but the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised to see the pharmacy stocked with breakfast cereals. Already they are stocking up on sweets. I even saw a pack of fruit pastilles recently that was pure sugar, e-numbers, colourings and flavourings advertising itself as “One of your Five a Day”..
I was raised on a diet of streaky rashers, dripping toast [ and toast with sugar on!] and all the things that are supposed to be Death in a Packet. I never heard the mention of vitamins back in those days and to refuse food because it was “unhealthy” would have meant I starved.
I despair for the modern generation. They seem to be doomed to a life of reading ingredients and worrying themselves into an early grave over what they are eating.
In the meantime I shall continue in my quest to teach the grandkids that sugar and salt aren’t poison and that there’s more to life than health.
And if they become worried about their weight I’ll just encourage them to smoke more.
Grandad,
And despite now being told that almost all the food we were brought up on is basically poison – here we all are and, according to the government, so many of us ‘survived’ all that deadly food, we’re becoming a ‘burden’ on society.
As I typed the other day, after we’d been pondering our advances towards the ‘end game’, people are divided in their belief as to whether there is life after death. Prohibitionists and puritans on the other hand, are unanimous in their believe that there should be no life even before death.
With regards food, I do like the quote by one Joseph Leonard.
“Never eat anything whose listed contents cover more than one-third of the packaging.”
Personally I never check the contents, as they really are for the criminally obsessed. Mind you – I just checked the milk carton [to pour into my sweetened tea] and there’s a fucking list with all sorts of “information” on the side. I know they process the fuck out of milk these days but it’s still just milk, for God’s sake!
Grandad,
Sorry about that comment but it seems to have used a lot of screen due to line breaks. I ‘composed’ the comment in a processor then pasted here; would that mess with the line breaks?
No sweat. Only an extra couple of blank lines and I don’t charge rental by the acre [though that’s not a bad idea?]
I hope you don’t use Word?!!
Grandad,
No Sir; No Word. I use SoftMaker Office. Not bad at all. Small and fast. Oh, and there’s a Linux version. An earlier version, 2016 at the moment, is available for free.
Hmm. Have installed it. Looks okay, though like OpenOffice it seems a tad weak on spreadsheet graphs. Thanks for the tip. I’ll play around with it.
As kids we had toast with both sugar and cinnamon, slightly caramelised and liable to burn ones tongue and mouth. Proper cinnamon, back in those days, not the chemically flavoured and scented dust they sell nowadays.
Trouble is that kids are not miniature adults: they need fat to grow as well as carbs, calcium and who knows what else. Milk and cookies bred what must have seemed a race of giants to us Brits in the run-up to D-Day.
My memories are all of dripping toast [salted], sugar on toast, a concoction I used to make – cocoa powder mixed with sugar, roast pork [delicious crackling], streaky rashers [didn’t know what a back rasher was until I left home], and from the sweet shop, penny bars, lucky-dips and gobstoppers.
How the blind fuck am I still alive?
I’m not normal it seems, I’m fucked, apparently. And I didn’t even know it, until the man from the Yes Ministry told me so.
https://www.makehealthynormal.nsw.gov.au/
Tried the test and I too am fucked. Maybe I misconverted from the old money to new, but I’m underweight and hitting red on just about every score. The only question I had trouble with was “On average, how often do you consume food you would characterise as unhealthy?” I put in 0 because I don’t consider any food to be “unhealthy”.
I took the quiz just out of curiosity and though my water and vegetable intake didn’t meet requirements and I don’t do any vigorous exercise (I couldn’t convince it that I’m disabled so no vigorous anything), I’m not doing all that bad. Like yourself, I don’t consider foods like bacon, sausage and such as bad.
Since when did food become medicine?
I guess since Hippocrates said something along the lines of ‘let food be thy medicine’. I agree, it’s strange for a 6yrs old to think in terms of health before eating a snack.
But I disagree with your idea that reading ingredients is doom. Due to a combination of factors (misguided ‘public health’ policies, cost saving and others), there’s plenty of ‘fake’ foods in supermarkets today. Or over-hyped, overpriced junk like breakfast cereals.
Sugar and salt are not poison per se…the dose makes the poison. If children start their day with a ‘healthy’ breakfast of cereals and orange juice, snack 5 times a day on processed, sugary junk and drink plenty of Coke, it won’t take long till at least some of them will turn into low energy, obese teenagers.
I didn’t say reading ingredients was doom, just for the criminally obsessed. If you suffer from some kind of allergy it’s fair enough, but otherwise the numbers are meaningless. If something contains [say] 5 grammes of salt, what is that supposed to mean to me? If it was a 10 gramme bar of chocolate then I would expect it to taste pretty salty, but apart from that? I don’t know what “recommended daily allowances” are supposed to be, and I don’t want to know as they are a generalisation, and aren’t specific to me. Unless there is a specific reason to avoid some ingredient then I will continue to ignore those lists.
The problem with kids nowadays is far more likely to be down to a lack of exercise rather than a bad diet.
The problem with kids nowadays is far more likely to be down to a lack of exercise rather than a bad diet.
That’s the nub of it. A combination of TV, video games, mobile phones, paranoid parents who believe there’s a paedophile behind every bush, just waiting to pounce on their precious one, and who don’t trust their kids to cross the road.
My childhood was just one big outdoor adventure. I only went home to eat and sleep. Not today’s kids, alas. It’s why we’re seeing the snowflake generation, with their ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger alerts’. They just haven’t had the opportunity to learn how to fend for themselves like we did.
Nisakiman,
So true and I’m sure you can relate to this wot I found years ago and had the foresight to save. In fact, like me, you may be able to go yet further back…
http://foggy-mirror.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/and-then-there-were-childhood-dayz.html
Beware the sugar-free sweets in the chemist’s shop. They likely use sorbitol which can loosen the bowels somewhat alarmingly.
Aye. Their creators are in league with the toilet paper manufacturers 😀 “Quid pro go”
Just taken that health survey with dire results. I’m 78, and have discovered I’ve been dead for forty years and counting. Wonder if I can get a tax rebate?