At least once a week, when I open the newspaper there seems to be some fresh new panic about the tsunami of childhood obesity that is crashing on our golden sandy beaches which a generation or two ago were filled with healthy bronzed young men and women who were either training for the next Olympic Games or about to pull on a pair of battered Dunlop Volley sandshoes, borrow a beaten up old wooden racquet and fly off to win Wimbledon.
Even Ronald was demanding to know the GI rating of his lunch. Illustration: Paul Newman
Yep, every time a politician opens his or her mouth (usually on the way to a four course five star lunch at a taxpayer funded Parliamentary Dining Room) they sadly shake their heads, wobble their double chins and lament the rise of the TV obsessed Generation XXL.
If you ask most people who they blame for this sad decline, they would nominate a man who might be best described as Richard Nixon, Colonel Sanders and Hannibal Lector all rolled into one. I’m talking of course about Ronald McDonald. He’s there, supersizing our kids against their better judgement till their belts burst open.
Now, just as Marge Simpson gets her parenting advice from “Fretful Mother” magazine so we in Australia have organisations dedicated to make nice decent middle-class parents anxious about how they are raising their kids. One of these is The Parents Jury which every year runs an on-line survey asking people to vote on which TV commercials are deceptively peddling the worst high-fat high-sugar food to our kids. McDonald’s seems to win an award every year.
But this year I’ve found a much worse culprit - Junior Masterchef.
A quick visit to the show’s website is shocking. One of the contestant’s favourite dish is tiramisu, a dessert groaning under its thousands of calories. Another prefers the rampant kilojoule-fest that are lemon meringue cupcakes. Yet another boasts of mastering French Quarters Cake with tempered chocolate, whipped cream, strawberries and raspberries.
Another proudly notes that for his 10th birthday, he was “lucky enough to go to his favourite chef, Matt Moran’s ARIA restaurant.” Dear god, Matt, won’t anyone think of the children?
So I’m officially starting the Ban Junior Masterchef Society right now. I demand that Channel 10 take this obscene show off TV today. Because all this high-fat food that is found on our TV screens is directly influencing hundreds of thousands of impressionable young minds. And that can only lead to future generations of obese children, spending their lives gorging on the pure fattening evil that is Chilli Mud Crab with XO sauce, Moroccan Lamb Pie and Ricotta Gnocchi with eggplant sauce.
And so I was pleased to see last week there were once again calls for higher taxes on “junk food”. It was reported that Holly Bond from Monash University declared, “‘Junk foods have the same pattern of misuse and the same social costs as tobacco and alcohol. We propose that a tax on junk food be implemented as a tool to reduce consumption and address the obesity epidemic.’’
Hear hear! And I am sure that by “junk food” Holly had in mind exactly the sort of high-kilojoule meals whipped up in the Junior Masterchef kitchen.
What’s that? You think she was only talking about pizza and burgers? Well, maybe, if you’re thinking about the purist Neapolitan style artisan pizzas where the dough is shaped by hand, the pizza is cooked directly on the wood-burning oven floor and the crust is soft and fragrant.
And burgers? Sure, if you mean a $75 wagyu and white truffle one.
Because right now I have to say, sorry Holly, but you’re full of crap. First of all, every cigarette is bad for you. That’s why the economic costs of tobacco are massive. But junk food? If you were hungry, why couldn’t you eat a hamburger? After all, isn’t it just bread, meat, lettuce, tomato and sauce? Which one of those perfectly normal everyday food items is “junk”? Could it be that every expert that looks down their nose at a Big Mac would regard having a focaccia (containing basically the same ingredients) at a hip café as a cultural experience.
Which brings me back to Junior Masterchef. Of course I’m kidding, it shouldn’t be banned. My point is just that the way we look at food has a strong class-based bias to it. In a nutshell it goes like this – Ronald McDonald, evil; Alain Ducasse, genius.
And finally, once and for all, there is no such thing as “junk food”. There are, however, junk diets. Sure there are some people who don’t have the education and life skills to know the difference between a junk diet and a good diet. So here’s a thought – instead of taxing “junk food” (and remember there’s no way to define what that means) why don’t we work with those people in raising their social capital?
Or is that too much like hard work?
No comments:
Post a Comment