What’s Scots for ‘moderation’? I’ll have a think over a curry and a pint

AS I slurped from a pint of lager and teased succulent morsels of South Indian garlic chilli chicken on to a wedge of naan the other night, it occurred to me Scotland’s relationship with food and drink may be the most dysfunctional on Earth.

My daughter had just told me most of her friends had gone vegan and that she was considering reverting to full vegetarianism after barely a year as a practising pescatarian.

Her vegan friends’ preference is to eat in vegan restaurants where the choice of virtuous fare is as wide as the menu is long, no one is feasting on flesh at the next table and they don’t even have to ask whether the Pavlova cake has been prepared with egg substitute and soy cream. Yum scrum.

One suspects that if they could be nailed to crosses as they nibbled their lentil and chickpea compotes they would be happier still.

Meanwhile, I am confronted annually by ever larger numbers of friends and colleagues embracing Dry January, that peculiarly British act of selfdenial where one takes the most miserable month of the year and makes it more miserable still by depriving oneself for its duration of alcohol.

‘Could you manage a whole month dry?’ they challenge, sceptically between mouthfuls of Highland Spring. ‘You’ll never know if you don’t try.’

It is rather like asking if I could make it on foot to Drumnadrochit on a dreich night if the car broke down at Invergarry – or whether, if the chips were down, I could feign attentiveness through an entire speech by Finance Secretary Derek Mackay.

Probably; possibly. But my car goes. I do not sit on the SNP benches.

The sobering irony is the tipple at the top of most Dry January evangelists’ blacklists is that cheeky, humanising glass of wine of a work-day evening.

It goes down equally agreeably, I understand, for the French, the Italians and the Spanish who actually make the stuff and would be scandalised by the idea of laying off it for an entire month.

Abstinence

Yet they manage somehow to keep their relationship with alcohol on an even keel – as we allow ourselves to be blown from oceans of over-indulgence to seas of self-reproach and abstinence and back again.

Must keeping ourselves fed and watered really be so vexed? We couldn’t just, you know, try year-round moderation and enjoy a little of what we fancy?

Resounding answers to those questions are contained in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, the results of which were published this week.

Yes, the survey says, eating and drinking is fantastically vexed for us Scots. No, we are quite incapable of moderation.

In a country where 65 per cent of the adult population is overweight, nine out of ten of us now believe cheap fast food is too easily available. That is to say it is not entirely our fault for gorging on it but at least partly the fault of those who should know better than to let us loose around it.

We’re Scottish, see? We can’t help ourselves.

Quite how it should be made harder to get at I am not certain. Ten press-ups at Tesco, perhaps, before entering the aisle with the frozen hamburgers? Bouncers at McDonald’s turning away the regulars?

Or should supermarkets just keep the biscuits, the ice cream and the fizzy drinks hidden from view like they do with cigarettes so that no one, least of all the staff, can find them?

More than half of us want restrictions on the makers of tasty treats getting inside our heads in adverts, says the survey. And a whopping 80 per cent think food and drink manufacturers must be bound by laws limiting the fat, sugar and salt they can put in their products.

No self-control, see? Cram your recipes with bad stuff and, like lemmings heading cliff-ward, we will eat it – more than likely become addicted to it, actually. Save us from our weak-willed selves, we cry, or we will glug and chomp our way into early graves. Obligingly the makers of Irn-Bru ceased production of their original, full sugar version of the soft drink this week, sparking a wave of stockpiling by those hooked on the real McCoy. If we cannot mend our ways, the thinking goes, then the manufacturers must amend theirs.

What next? Less sweet sweets? Watered down chocolate sauce? And another thing, say 86 per cent of us. Give us more free weight management courses because, as we have spent the last generation proving, we have no ability whatever to manage our own weight and fail to see how this falls within our remit as Scots in the first place.

Temptation

In short, then, if you want to know whose fault it is that we are fat, it is the supermarkets and fast food outlets’ fault for being there, the manufacturers’ fault for making everything so yummylicious, the advertisers’ fault for leading us into temptation and the Government’s fault for not paying for enough of us to go to WeightWatchers.

Do you know, by comparison, I find myself warming to the vegans and the Dry January pulpiteers. At least they grasp the notion of personal responsibility.

But most of all I warm to my fellow diners in the Indian restaurant the other night. It is January, Scotland’s weather is foul and our moods similar.

A curry (but no starter) and a pint (just one) is an entirely proportionate response.