If You Ask Me: Food, Inglorious Food

Celebrity diets, ‘miracle’ weight loss drugs and our increasingly strange relationship with food are bad for our mental health, says Flo Whitaker

If you’ve ever wondered what happens inside those vast warehouses located beside motorway junctions, I’ll tell you. They’re ready-meal factories, sandwich assembly lines and coffee roasting businesses. In a few generations, we’ve gone from a nation that subsisted on bread, spam and powdered egg, (yet still managed to produce spitfire-flying teenagers), to a pathetic, unfit herd who apparently can’t go ten yards from their front door without ‘grabbing’ a sandwich, a latte and an ‘energy’ drink – whatever that misnomer is? 

At a party, (I occasionally socialise, despite my nickname, ‘The Eternal Flame’, a.k.a. ‘Never Goes Out’) I met a pleasant, but utterly bonkers woman, who gloomily surveyed the extensive buffet and declared there was nothing she could eat, on account of her 'healthy eating plan' – and did I know that carbs, sugar, fat, dairy, alcohol, tea, coffee and tap water were 'bad for you?' 

I was tempted to ask how she felt about fresh air, but, by now, she was informing anyone within shouting distance that she treated her body like a temple. “Oh, really?” said my companion, selecting another sausage roll. “I treat mine like an amusement park.” 

Some people have restricted diets because of genuine medical necessity and we should all strive to cultivate responsible attitudes regarding diet and exercise, but those well- intentioned members of the worried-well brigade are in serious danger of shuffling into early anxiety graves. Perhaps they should stop catastrophising and start living?

By the way, I’ve eaten two chocolate biscuits while writing this. I’ll take my chances.