War On Terror, War On Drugs, Jihad Against Junk Food by Ian R Thorpe

Get yer gnashers round that

Governments and their friends who make up the academic elite seem to be very keen to go to war these days - especially against we, the people, who elected them. We have had the war on smoking, the war on carbon dioxide, the war on anti social behaviour and the war on drugs. The war on alcohol is in full swing, now they are talking about a war on obesity.

And what is the purpose of these wars? An excuse to raise taxes of course. A fat tax is one of the proposals being considered. The Thought Police are relentless in their witch hunts against smoking, alcohol and now junk food and obesity as they drive forward their campaign to turn us all into needy, pathetically dependent, infantile conformists. Having virtually demonised tobacco and made progress along the same prohibitionist road towards making alcohol such a social evil those who insist on having a drink will meekly accept the kind of punitive taxes imposed on smokers who refuse to give up their pleasure they are now turning their attention to "junk food". When you hear the words junk food, what image comes to mind? I bet its greasy hamburgers and chips, maybe fried chicken, pizza, gloopy pink milk shakes, bumper bags of salty crisps, king-size bars of chocolate. All those things identified as being full of fat and sugar in fact. Why do we not also think of Porc Calvados served with Dauphinoise potatoes and choux fleur (cauliflower) with bechamel sauce, which is easily as fatty as any similar sized portion of burger and fries, pizza or fish and chips. Why do we not consider that great delicacy so beloved of gourmets, pate de foie gras as junk food. Fois Gras is French for fat liver. Why do we not recoil in horror from fancy chocolate desserts served in expensive restaurants the way we are told we should shun Mars Bars for their sugar content and calorie count? What is it that makes junk food so disgusting to so many people who think they have "more refined taste." Snobbery, that's what. Junk food is not actually a proper scientific term designed to measure a foodstuffs dodgy,
Gourmet chocolate desserts, healthier than ice cream

synthesised or highly processed content, it is the descriptor used when someone wants to express their disdain for the

eating habits of people they consider to be of a lower class, the underclass. Junk food is eaten by all those check shirt wearing, six pack chugging, trailer park dwelling

Americans and their British binge drinking, chain smoking, sink estate domiciled counterparts, who have made a career out of claiming social security benefits. As my birthday treat my family took me to a favourite Italian restaurant last night (and as an extra special treat I was allowed to pay - ell it's the thought that counts.) We ate well, stuffed mushrooms, Gamberttini (garlic shrimps) and Minestrone for starters, two Lasagne, Chicken Cacciatore, Canelloni and Bass in a tomato sauce as main courses. No desserts and two of the starters were split between two people, the portions are not small. A side order of garlic pizza bread. We were all stuffed when we left. The fats and salt in those dishes is no less fattening or blood pressure raising than in a Big Mac and fries so where does the disapproval of people who enjoy what they can afford come from. The reason for writing this is once again as the stories below sensational headlines are telling us there will be an intergovernmental war on junk food, as an as a supranational group of interfering busybodies from the self appointed academic elite experts warn of a growing obesity epidemic, the official busybodies are gunning for the poor. And
Porc Calvados, cream and apple brandy sauce

once again the news reports of an obesity epidemic are accompanied, not by photos of grinning middle-class folk like my family tucking into rich, tasty dishes in a swanky restaurant, but by photos of lardy working class men in ill fitting jeans, and women with muffin tops hanging over too tight leggings, licking ice-cream cones, wolfing down huge pizzas or burgers or slurping industrial quantities of milk shake. Junk food is code word for stuff eaten by them, the lowlifes. The food we the educated and affluent eat is fine. At a time when it is no longer PC to use either of the s-words to describe the lower orders scum or slackers the snobs of the new elite are forced to find other ways to demean those they consider beneath contempt, the undeserving poor, the masses, proles, the great unwashed, to express their fear and loathing of the strange semi housetrained sub species that inhabits municipal housing estates and inner cities.

In a report titled War On Obesity which predicts half of Britons will be obese by 2030, Professor Klim McPherson, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, said the government needs to learn the lesson of tobacco taxation, which has dramatically reduced smoking rates. "A tax wouldn't be unpopular if people knew what the issues are," the Professor told television news crews. "People know obesity is a real problem. People don't know, as individuals, what to do about it. Governments do know what to do about it and if they could persuade people, as they easily could, it would be a popular action." The Professor is talking out of the hole in his or her bottom in saying governments know what do about it because governments haven't a clue what to do about climate change, overpopulation, the debt crisis, food shortages, dwindling oil reserves, the problems of an ageing population and so on ad nauseam. It is ridiculous to suggest governments know what to do about anything. And they are never likely to if they listen to the advice of people like Prof. McPherson. To suggest taxation has reduced smoking is just so wrong in so many ways one wonders what kind of qualifications it takes to become a professor these days. A single figure IQ for a start I'd guess. Taxation has not reduced smoking, taxation has forced smoking underground. Because smoking is so vilified and because taxes are so high it makes contraband smoking products attractive to small time criminals, when official
Revenue and Customs officers destroying contraband tobacco. Only a tiny fraction of the contraband is seized

surveys are conducted people just lie. One independent study estimated that for every cigarette sold legally in Britain another

contraband ciggy is sold, most by shifty looking guys in pubs who keep their retail stock in a sports bag. And then there is the boom in hand rolling that took off around the time the self righteous, moralising do gooders, the anti pleasure campaign and the

we-know-what's-good-for-you fascists takeover of society was gathering momentum under the populist authoritarianism of the Labour government. The experts also propose restrictions on junk food advertising and initiatives to warn children not to spend too much time sitting around watching TV. They claim the initiatives are much more cost-effective than obesity operations and some fat drugs. What is noticeable about the elitist attitudes of these self appointed 'high heid yins' (to borrow a self explanatory Scottish expression) is how close to fascism their assumptions of intellectual and moral superiority are leading them. The science high priesthood along with the psychologists and social engineering lobbyists of the political left seem to be saying "If you do not agree with us you obviously are too stupid to be allowed to think for yourself or exercise free will. Attacking the advertising and propaganda industry is a road to nowhere however and is probably just a sop to the few true liberals still active in mainstream media and politics. Advertising firms buy politicians cooperation with campaign contributions as do the chemical and food processing corporations. Thus we see what is going on. After the failure of the carbon driven global warming scam which was only ever about imposing taxes on our fuel for domestic heating, cooking, running cars, we now see another attempt by governments to tax the most basic essentials of life, this time our food. In the UK food has always been exempt from Value Added Tax (the European sales tax) but here we see creepy, Dr. Evil type scientists working with self serving unelected bureaucrats to impose food taxes by stealth under the guise of combating the obesity epidemic. And what kind of food are the elitists planning to tax? Not my gourmet treats but the kind of things enjoyed by less well off people (don't get me wrong here, I enjoy a burger, pizza or fish and chips occasionally, the point is a tax on such things would not hurt me.) A spokesman for The Department of Health commenting on this latest report said obesity was one of the governments main priorities. "We are encouraging people to make simple changes, such as eating more fruit and vegetables, cutting down on fatty foods and being more active. We have no current plans to impose a 'fat tax', but we

are working with food companies to reduce fat, sugar and salt and ensure healthier options are available." We have no current plans is bureaucrat speak for "We have put it on the agenda for next year."

.Steak fried in butter, served with with mushrooms in cream sauce - not junk food

Every discussion or shock-horror story about junk food is always focused on working-class communities. From Morgan Spurlocks film Super Size Me, in which that brave, well-educated New Yorker from the posh Park Slope area of Brooklyn dared to descend into the poorer areas and living 'like poor people do' on nothing but McDonalds meals, (the ugly elitism of this project was so blatant - does anyone apart from smug, self satisfied twats like Spurlock really think poor people live solely on Burgers and Fries?) to fat tongued, mockney* posh boy Jamie Olivers various self promoting wars on unhealthy school dinners, never venture beyond poor communities. They never knock on the doors of five-star restaurants that serve up deliciously fatty grub or raid the homes of people who scoff fine steaks washed down with 100 bottles of wine. They will never attack those chefs who cannot make a sauce without putting in very generous amounts of butter double cream. The whole point of the nonsense notion of junk food is to make a moralistic distinction between what We The Good, Right Thinking People eat (good, interesting, exotic food,
Fish and chips - junk food

cosmopolitan food) and what They The Scum eat: trashy, uninteresting, fast, microwaveable

crap. My Boeuf Stroganoff, the cream, brandy and mustard sauce made with butter and double cream is food fit for the elite. When fat boy down at the cheap end of the road goes for a curry with his mates, though the sauce is made with butter and coconut milk, it is disgusting junk. Why? Because I talk posher than what he does and live in a bigger house, that's why. One story that captures well the unpleasant truth of the anti-junk food campaign was the time during Jamie Oliver's first school dinners crusade when two mums pushed portions of chips through the school railings at Rawmarsh School in Rotherham. They said they were sick of their children coming home from school hungry, having refused to eat the rabbit food served in the lunch hall under Jamie Olivers instructions. And so they decided to smuggle in chips for their kids to feast on instead. The women were depicted as the scum of the earth. They were sinner ladies, the press said, like day trippers feeding animals at the zoo. All because they dared to ignore the Gospel According to St Jamie. Now Oliver was labouring under the misapprehension that because he was a celeb with his own TV show kids would eat couscous at his bidding. Having brought up children of our own, my wife and I could have told him any self respecting child would eat cold Wombat vomit in preference to couscous. The expression of snobbery through the issue of food has a long history. As John Carey showed in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, in the early twentieth-century writers and thinkers who were allergic to working-class folk frequently attacked the tinned food consumed by less well-off people. Tinned food offends against what the intellectual designates as nature: it is mechanical and soulless, said Carey. The left wing intellectuals saw tinned food as an offence against the sacredness of individuality. And so it is today. For all the
A child's typical response to salad

spouting of medical statistics and health facts in the jihad against junk food, really it is driven by an elitist view of certain types of food as soulless, unnatural, too easy and too cheap. It is not a matter of taste to these people but a matter of class and class hatred, cunningly disguised as a health campaign. The very last thing they would want to see is the working class eating salads, vegetarian pastas, home cooked stews and casseroles (as many do it must be said,) that would undermine the carefully constructed sense of superiority these affluent professionals depend on for their self esteem. Ironically things have switched and it is now the intellectual left who in an evangelical frenzy to spread science worship among the masses are now sneering at those who advocate natural and organic food production methods and in their enthusiasm for science and Genetically Modified Organisms appear to be suggesting nature is incompetent and we should not even think about eating anything that has not been meddled with by scientists, fed antibiotics, sprayed with deadly toxins and generally optomized not for human consumption (nature does that) but for corporate profitability and political power games. It would of course be irresponsible to close without saying this article does not intend to encourage people to eat badly. A varied diet and moderately sized portions ought to be enough to keep our digestive system in good shape, stave off obesity and and keep the waistline under control. Moderation is the key. It's OK to pig out sometimes but not every day, it's OK to be self indulgent but don't let it become a habit. A burger is delicious occasionally but do you really want to eat the same every day? And most of all, never let the prejudices of elitists dictate who you are. But as far as is practical within your means, go for natural, traditionally grown foods. *Mockney, a middle or upper class person from South East England who pretends to be a working class Londoner (Cockney)

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Curry night at Adils, a very reasonably priced Balti restaurant in Birmingham, England