Obesity is the most successful pandemic since the bubonic plague

And for the first time in the history of pandemics, it’s completely manmade. Plus a recipe for my world-beating, downsizing Apricot and Gin Mincemeat.

We get fat because we don’t pray enough… REALLY???

Following the news – from a well-known former Prime Minister – that the country has got fat because the Church of England has not been doing its job with proper spiritual assistance (to think I’ve wasted years of my life on diets, when I could have carried on quaffing cake and kept myself svelte with a bit more praying), this week’s instalment of My Bumper Book of Food-Giant-slaying about how the Food Giants created a world-beating obesity pandemic is particularly timely.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t because they banned praying.

To read previous instalments, please click here, here, and here.

This week’s recipe:

As Boris was not fully informed on the causes of putting on weight (Truss’s lettuce was more on the mark), and we are about to launch into the Christmas calorie-fest, if you would like to put a little dent in the Food Giants’ Christmas Bonus, I have included my world-beating, downsizing Apricot and Gin Mincemeat. Before you do a runner, I can absolutely guarantee that it’s completely delicious – and you don’t have to be on a mission to lose weight to think so – and it’s really, really easy to make.

My Bumper Book of Food-Giant-Slaying: Chapter 3

The Food Giants put their obesity vectors everywhere

The Food Giants didn’t create a world-beating obesity pandemic by sitting around waiting for it to happen.

The success of the obesity pandemic is hardly surprising: the Food Giants have created the most magnificently effective obesity-vectors – but the obvious things – high levels of sugar and fat and practically zero fibre – you can see clearly on the label (so long as you have a good microscope to read it).

But the Food Giants have even better Eat-More tricks up their capacious sleeves, which you might want to know about– in case you ever want to get your own obesity pandemic up and running.

Brain scanning

Realising people’s responses might be subjective when testing new products, the Giants put people in a scanner to see which version of a substance made their brain light up like a Christmas tree as it hit the ‘bliss spot’. Nothing makes an obesity vector more effective than a bliss spot.

Measuring how much people eat

But just to be on the safe side, when they’re testing products on people, they measure how much they eat, and how quickly they eat it… and choose the version they eat most of in the shortest time.

There are no flies on the Food Giants.

Vanishing calorie density

But the absolute fairy on top of the Christmas tree is a fantastical invention: Vanishing Calorie Density. And it does exactly that: after the initial crunch (we humans like ‘crunch’), the substance vanishes into thin air – but not its calories. The utter brilliance of it is that it feels as if you haven’t eaten anything at all – completely disrupting the link between eating and satiety.

I experienced this alchemical feat the other day: I’d just cycled 8 miles and then walked for an hour or so, and I was hungry. A friend put a bowl of some snack or other within dangerously easy reach; it was meant for sharing but I don’t think anyone else got a look in. Frankly, I was embarrassed that I could’t stop eating another and another and another… but however many I ate, I didn’t feel I’d eaten anything – although I’d consumed a great many calories.

Disguising the vectors as food

And of course the vector coup de grace – and one that demonstrates just how good these Giants are – is that they’re categorised as food.

But that’s not enough on its own

But even with all that genius to get the vectors in tip-top condition, and clever-dick chemists pouring sugar into cans of fizzy water, turning corn into syrup and injecting it everywhere, and blanketing the world’s food chain in thick layers of chocolate, the pandemic would never have infected almost 3 billion people, or kill nearly 3 million every year, without efficient and effective vector-delivery.

And here the Food Giants have surpassed themselves: the vector delivery-model deserves a Nobel Prize for services to death. Instead of relying on the vagaries of mosquitos or fleas – or worrying that people might use masks to prevent air-borne infection – the vectors are placed in every possible location: schools, shops, service stations, restaurants, cafes, bars, hospitals, sports facilities. And there’s nowhere on earth too remote – one of the Food Giants sent them on a boat – disguised as a food shop – up the Amazon to peoples that had never even heard of a KitKat. Or obesity.

The Food Giants put their obesity vectors into everything

And any time we are not in the physical vicinity of weight-boosting substances, the best Oxbridge and Ivy League brains are paid handsomely to come up with messages to remind us, on television… billboards… social media… magazines… newspapers… how much better our lives would be if only we ate more of them.

The Giants – often backed up by government – make it quite clear that consuming their obesity-in-a-bag is entirely a personal choice, and if we catch obesity, it’s our fault.

But they don’t leave our personal choice up to chance: they spend billions on marketing strategies, and they don’t waste their money.

They create dense forests of junk-food jungles filled with product placing, nudge techniques and advergames; personal choice doesn’t stand a chance.

Advergames are a brilliant new thing to boost infectivity: KFC teamed up with Gamify to create a shrimp-zapping game with vouchers for KFC as prizes. It increased sales by over 100%, and was so successful that they had to cut short the campaign as they ran out of supplies.

Magnum’s game, Magnum Pleasure Hunt uses the whole internet to hunt down ice cream; M&Ms more modestly used Connect 4 to increase infection rates. Even just thinking about this game makes me want to go out get a family-sized bag – and I never much liked them.

And the less high-tech vector-delivery methods are equally effective:

For example, until recently I lived in a small rural town, where for much of the year, my local Co-op displayed chocolate, sweets and crisps in 16 different locations: whether you were looking for apples or loo paper, they were sitting next to a pile of chocolate bars. I remember a gaggle of 12-year-olds hovering around the crisps, clutching their pocket money; they reckoned they had enough for 2 bags between them – and then one of them spotted that for almost the same money they could buy a multipack and get a packet of crisps each.

Imagine if the crisps had been hidden or there were no special offers on multipacks, the Food Giants might have lost the opportunity to add them to their tally, because the vectors need repeated exposure to really take effect.

Another time I watched a mum and her four-year old at the check-out. After coming face to face at every turn with Cadburys Cream Eggs… Crunchies… Curly Wurlys… Mini Eggs (hanging off every shelf)… Mars Bars… Chocolate Buttons… the small child was screaming as if its heart would break because it wanted chocolate NOW.

The child was responding exactly how the shop hoped it would – demanding chocolate until its mother said yes – but it looked like it was just being a brat. And the mother, despite going well beyond any call of parental duty in her resistance, looked like she’d raised a brat.

I don’t know what the shop thinks about the tantrums of children, but with its rent, rates, wage-bill, and shareholders to pay, it relies on indulgent mothers – or anyone else – giving into their product-placing ploys. Luckily for them, not many mothers are quite so heroic in resisting herculean screaming.

Some shops go even further in their obesity-enabling: when you get to the till, the cashier points to a chocolate bar the size of a small lawn and asks if you’d like to buy it for a pound; the staff are required to do it with every customer, regardless of weight or age, or they don’t get a bonus.

It would probably be better for the nation’s health if shops let drug dealers hang around at the check-out offering cut-price cocaine.

Service station

Filling your car up is another opportunity for the Food Giants to spread their germs: queuing to pay, you shuffle past a 30ft-long wall of chocolate; in the unlikely event you have resisted picking up your Mars-a-day by the time it’s your turn to pay, there are probably bags of doughnuts grinning enticingly beside the till.

At many fast-food and restaurant chains, sugar-in-a-can drinks and pudding and are included in meal-deals, but you have to pay extra for vegetables or fruit.

Meal deals – look, no vegetables

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, the vectors come at you thick and fast: even Vodafone helps them out with texts on Thursdays, offering obesity-in-a-bag morsels for the weekend.

And on top of the almost infinite opportunities to boost your weight, it’s remarkably difficult to find food on the go that’s not UPF – and if you do, it is often more expensive and not substantial enough to fill you up. Unless you are a self-control superhero, the chances are that halfway through the afternoon you will succumb to a Mars Bar, especially if it has been winking at you all day from a vending machine.

But it doesn’t have to be like that: motorway service station in Switzerland

We don’t all succumb to the marketing wiles, but if we manage to get safely home and slam our front doors against the onslaught of chocolate, chips, and pizza, we are unlikely to be dreaming about boiled carrots for dinner.

However, although the drive towards global obesity has been total a masterpiece, the Food Giants are reluctant to take the credit. They’re not unique in this: if asked about malaria, the average mosquito would look at you blankly and say ‘look mate, I just needed to suck a bit of blood. The obesity manufacturers say much the same, and strenuously deny they have anything to do with people getting fat.

.

To be fair, as I have already said, their aim is to get our money not make us fat – and the economic imperatives are serious: in Britain alone, the food industry contributes billions to the economy (about £28bn) and provides hundreds of thousands of jobs. Many shops rely on selling high volumes of obesity-in-a-bag to remain viable, especially given the structure of business rates and sky-high rents. The hospitality sector needs us to eat up our pudding and drink buckets of wine or people’s livelihoods disappear – and the government would be hard put to cope without all the tax revenue. Economically speaking, it is our patriotic duty to eat ourselves fat.

Except that the cost of dealing with the consequences is £260bn a year – nearly 10 times the contribution to the economy.

But the most extraordinary thing about it – even more than the staggering costs and hideous suffering and death toll – is that for the first time in the history of pandemics (another first) absolutely nothing is being done to curb the spread of the vectors or cure the afflicted.

The world didn’t respond to malaria by letting mosquitos swarm wherever they felt like it, and they didn’t blame people for getting ill from the bites. And we have seen from Covid what governments are prepared to do and spend to prevent a massive death toll.

As this is a manmade pandemic, it’s entirely within our grasp to stop it – there aren’t even vaccine-resistant viruses to do battle with

So perhaps it’s time to liberally douse the Food Giants with DDT, and start to limit where, when, and how they can peddle their wares.

This is not about limiting our freedom and personal choice to eat what we want; it’s about limiting the freedom of the Food Giants to do everything in their power to persuade us to eat things that make them money.

And imagine how many people might have survived the Covid pandemic if they had not been fattened up for profit.

Apricot and Gin Mincemeat.

Mince Pies do not fit easily into a downsizing life, but this staggeringly quick and easy mincemeat will help: it has no fat and about half the sugar of most, and is still really delicious. Be cavalier about the exact mix of dried fruit: in extremis, scrabble around in your larder and use anything you find that the mice haven’t got to first. When you make your mince pies, it helps to roll the pastry out really thin. And makes them much nicer. No one’s life is improved by thick, soggy pastry.

100g dried apricots

500g dried mixed fruit

100g dried figs

Zest and juice of an orange

Good grating of nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground coriander

200g soft brown sugar

150g gin or brandy

Roughly chop the fruit – I do it in the food processor, using the pulse button – put it in a bowl, add all the other ingredients and mix well. And that’s it.

Ideally, leave it covered for a few days to allow the flavours to meld, but if you need it today, use it today.

If you have any left over, put it in jars for next Christmas, having first sterilized them by whacking them in a hot oven for 10 minutes.

As well as putting it into mince pies, I also put it into semi-freddo to make a Christmas pudding ice cream.