If you want to be seriously fat, it helps to be seriously poor.

Wes Streeting thinks throwing injections at the problem will sort it out.

Wes Streeting wants to give fat people who are unemployed and living in deprived areas, weight-loss injections so they can lose weight and get back to work.

I would like to applaud loudly his desire to do something constructive about the crippling obesity endemic in areas of deprivation – most people just look disapproving and mutter darkly about self-control – but I can’t quite bring my hands together.

If he’d really grasped how poverty supersized obesity, I don’t think he would think it was solvable with a course of injections.  And does he know that they’re fat because they’re poor, not poor because they’re fat.

It’s a new thing, this incredibly successful marriage between poverty and obesity: not long ago poor people were thin; starvation was a real possibility;  being fat was one of the best ways to let the world know that things were going well. But now, if you want to be seriously fat, it helps to be seriously poor.

So how has poverty got so good at making people fat?

The first thing you need if you want to get properly fat, is a big appetite – you’re   never going to make it big if you just pick at your food. Some of us just have the genes for it, but there are other ways you can supersize hunger.      

Stress is really good because it raises cortisol, which can make you very hungry indeed – and makes you want to eat cake not carrots.   And here, poverty is an absolute winner: there are few things better at creating stress than trying to live on not enough money.  It’s like trying to cross the Atlantic in a kayak:  a moment of inattention or poor judgement over even  tiny expenditures can soon add up to more than you have, and you start to take on water;  there’s always a possibility you could be short – for food, for rent, for the electricity meter – by the end of the week. 

Every week.     

And the thing about crossing the Atlantic in a kayak, is that unlike all the people in the ships or the sturdy, seaworthy boats, you have practically no chance of getting to the other side: you will almost certainly spend the rest of your life surrounded by water, under the constant threat of being overwhelmed by the next big wave.

And  while you are battling to keep afloat, half the world looks on resentfully because you’re being kept in the lap of luxury at the taxpayers’ expense.  Or if you are one of the very many working poor, a head office in the Cayman Islands might decide to relocate your poorly-paid job to somewhere in the world where they can pay someone even less – and then there’s the five-week wait before you get universal credit that someone who went to Eton came up with because they couldn’t imagine a life in which there wasn’t a few thousand in the bank for emergencies.

So if, while you’re frantically paddling or clinging on for dear life – or lolling around in the slough of despond – a chocolate bar in a red, shiny wrapper floats by, who would not grab it for the chance of a few moments of pleasure.

As George Orwell put it so very elegantly:

‘The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. […] When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. …. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated.’

And with this perfectly primed, ravenous market in mind, the Food Giants fill the surrounding sea with their most seductive wares: sweets and crisps and chocolate and cake and chips and fried chicken, hiding the waves and the rip-tides,  and providing limitless  opportunities to palliate the endless misery.  And for the first time in history it is cheap enough for the poverati to grab it by the fistful, and consume shedloads of calories in the blink of an eyelid.  Which fulfils the second necessity for becoming obese: an abundance of cheap, constantly available, calorie-dense, addictively delicious food.   

And as to worrying about getting fat, being ill, dying young – why would you want a future that involves giving up one of the few things that makes your existence bearable. And you will get fat – and probably ill – if the only thing between you and total despair is a family-size bar of chocolate.

There are other make-you-ravenous factors if you are poor: shift work plays havoc with your hunger hormones, and boredom makes everyone peckish – and here poverty really delivers:  juggling life and death decisions over the cheapest loo paper is not quite as entertaining as going to the theatre, dining out, new clothes...  hobbies… holidays… friends you can afford to go and visit… and living in a nice house.

The cherry on top of the iced bun is the fact that healthy food is often expensive and not easily available, and takes skill and time – and equipment – to prepare.  If I had to cook a family meal without decent  knives, a good peeler, a food processor, a colander, a salad spinner, saucepans, frying pans, several chopping boards, and a decent-size fridge … and if I had no idea how to make food delicious  – and  thought the electricity meter might run out half way through cooking the casserole – I’d head straight for the chip shop.

Trying to sort all this out with an injection is like deciding to cure the ills of smoking with chemotherapy.

And expecting people to take responsibility for their health but do nothing to stop the Food Giants throwing everything in their billion-dollar arsenal to lure people into buying  their highly addictive, hyper-fattening substances is not only futile, it’s cruel.

And given how many millions of people we are talking about, very, very expensive.