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Eating is bad for you
My mother shocked friends by eating butter from a spoon
Those of us who enjoy foie gras over Christmas and the New Year may well find that we shall not be able to indulge in this luxury for much longer. A group of European scientists has just announced that the method of producing foie gras is "detrimental to the welfare of bird". One could say the same thing about killing and eating the bird. Anyway, the European Commission is now considering whether to ban production on grounds of cruelty. Clearly foie gras is a pleasure we shall soon have to give up, rather like throwing donkeys off steeples or fighting bulls - not that I personally shall miss those very much.
Though I have been expecting this for years, I still find it confusing. On the one hand there are the usual stories, regularly reprinted by newspapers when short of more interesting copy, about ducks and geese nailed down by their feet, so that greedy and rascally peasants could more conveniently abuse their livers, so that greedy and rascally capitalist gourmets could abuse their own livers in turn. And I have always noticed that farmers do tend to be thoughtlessly cruel, especially farmers in some parts of Europe who do things to pigs that the British are far too tender-hearted to contemplate. On the other hand, there are reports from time to time that the foie gras birds don't object to this treatment, and flock willingly to their abusers for their unhealthy diet, rather as we ourselves flock towards fast and fatty food outlets, without a thought for our intestines.
Failing any reliable evidence, and thinking the fate of bird-brained geese less important than most other things, I have thoroughly enjoyed foie gras, without a twinge of guilt. I can't help feeling that the anti-foie gras brigade, like hunt saboteurs, are upset not because the goose is having a bad time, but because the foie gras-eaters are having a good time. I can't stand Puritans. They are only interested in guilt, not in pleasure and the generosity that an appreciation of pleasure engenders. It seems to me particularly ignominious of present-day Puritans to attach guilt to food, and to expect others to feel it. Food is, or ought to be, the most uncontroversial and social pleasure - a communitarian pleasure even. But on all sides there are official or semi-official killjoys . We are in the grip of the food fascists. Under cover of telling us what is healthiest, they try to impose eating disorders on us all.
There was a hilariously funny moment under the regime of Nanny Bottomley, when she tried to tell us how many potatoes, and of what shape and size, we ought to eat a week. The Labour Government, if no worse, is no better. Frank Dobson is planning to issue guidelines next year on healthy eating. Guidelines indeed. Never trust anyone who says guidelines. The truth is that no one has the slightest idea about healthy eating. All the received ideas of one five-year plan become the unscientific nonsense of the next, and so ad infinitum.
There was a time when protein was god. Steak, lamb, cheese and lots of creamy milk were what you had to have. Slimmers added lots of salad, and despised those who ate potatoes, lentils and pasta. No one knew about roughage. Then suddenly it was roughage and only roughage. Full fat milk and cheese were for flabby cholesterol addicts, and sugar and spice and all things nice were for trailer-park trash. If you didn't eat roughage, but gorged on red meat and cream, you would get heart disease and cancer. And serve you right. How else could you have had a legendary advertising slogan for cream running "Naughty but nice"? How about "Terminal but tasty" - such is the spirit of our time.
My mother, who had lived through any number of the food fascists' fads, used to say that no one really knew how diet works, or why people get sick or fat. She was ruggedly wrong, as far as any food orthodoxy went, resolutely ignoring all fashion, and pouring salt and cream on her food simply to upset people. She, like me, loved high-cholesterol food (which some food scientists now say has an anti-depressant function) and ate it with conviction. It began after the war, after years of deprivation, when she shocked Californian friends in her new husband's country by eating butter from a spoon, neat. In later life, with coronary artery disease, she cheerfully ate baked eggs with cream, and plenty of red meat and cheese, and even naughtily enraged my mother-in-law by deliberately pouring lots of salt on superb foie gras one time when we spent Christmas with my husband's family.
It is true that my mother died quite young and suddenly of heart disease. On the other hand, her younger brother, who disciplined himself to eat a low-fat diet, denied himself all kinds of delicious food, and remained carefully slim, fit and active, was still hunting in his late sixties. But he too died young of heart disease, a year before his sister, almost to the day. That is the number on our family bullet. My mother was right, of course. We have little control, and still less understanding, about these things. Food science is mostly bogus. One thing we do know is that a bag of crisps contains as much vitamin C as the average apple. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die regardless. Happy New Year.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 27, 1998
Comments:
As the world becomes of an older place to be in and everything around us changes such as fashion changes at least twice a day. I think on a personal level I agree with you. About ignoring the food fascists and eat what you want to eat. As long as you eat with a balance diet and do exercise. Sorry to hear about your family members dying young. But as of a young lady, the age of 16. I would prefer if the scientists of this age would keep telling us that what we eat is bad for us. As I pointed out before everyone is entitled to eat anything they want to eat and not to have anyone shocked by what they eat. Unless it was something very shocking. I clap to your mum because she could do anything she liked and that included eating butter from a spoon!
Posted by: Becky Wong | 1 Mar 2005 19:13:15
i believe that food isnt everytging in life. Some people with syndromes eat all the food off the shelves so there isnt enought for everyone else. Its disbicable. Well your mother must have been a very excitingg person!! Fashion changes so quickly!!!
Posted by: barbra | 7 Jan 2006 18:14:00
