Tanya Gold
There’s only one way to stall ‘fat Britain’, and it’s not this
If implemented, this will put every curry house in Britain out of business
Public Health England, a quango to place fear in the heart of any innocent diner, wants to limit the calorie count of foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants. The draft proposals are floating joylessly around Whitehall, demanding a maximum of a very prescriptive 544 calories per “convenience meal” (that means sandwich, or ready meal, to us) and 1,040 calories per pizza. It places caps on onion bhajis, volau-vents and coleslaw; on dishes of vegetables; on pasta sauces; possibly on your own saliva.
The proposals run to more than 100 pages – now that is a mouthful – and amount to a manifesto for people who do not know how to eat. It is, essentially, a manifesto for dogs, in which you are the dog, and Public Health England is your careful owner. It will, if implemented, put every curry house in Britain out of business, including my own beloved Paradise, in Hampstead, currently celebrating 50 years of serving delicious food to self-aware adults. But possibly not 51 years. Not anymore.
I have been the restaurant critic of The Spectator for seven years and I have seen some terrible things. I have seen nude dining at Bunyadi, a pop-up vegan hole in London, which probably would pass the Public Health England proposals with no amendments to its menu, but which also forces the nude diners to sit in trees, while they are served by topless waiters dressed as elves. I have seen plant-based chocolate milkshakes at an evil west London café called Farmacy, which would also pass the proposals with no amendments, if you could keep the food down, and especially if you could not. I have eaten, or rather tried to eat, a chorizo pretzel at Winter Wonderland (or Blunderland, in this case), an English breakfast stew at Sketch in Mayfair and a haute cuisine turnip at Eleven Madison Park in New York. So, I have seen some terrible things, but nothing I have seen is as terrible for restaurants and the people who seek happiness in them as this.
None of the restaurants that I beg people to spend their money in before they die, just to feel the ecstasy of a perfectly turned dish in wondrous surroundings, would pass the Public Health England test. I do not think that Public Health England understands, at its deepest root, what a restaurant is. A restaurant is not your dining room, transported elsewhere, so you are eating in your own home but by mistake. A restaurant, at its best, is a house of joy, in which you experience the fleeting happiness of something perfect on your plate.
No matter. In this dystopia, we can presumably wave goodbye to Rules, in Covent Garden, and its rib of beef for two with Yorkshire pudding and dauphinoise potatoes, finished, later, with golden syrup steamed sponge and clotted cream or custard. I wouldn’t eat at Rules if it passed the Public Health England test, for what would be the point? I could roast a lean piece of beef in my own oven, and steam my own vegetables, and yearn for the skill to make a golden syrup pudding. I do this almost every day anyway, and I do not pay £100 for it. Who would?
We can say farewell to afternoon tea at the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon at Fortnum & Mason, for I cannot see its cake carriage surviving the world that Public Health England would have it live in. We might as well have lost Claridge’s and the Ritz in the Blitz, for they would not be allowed to serve what they do best. A low-fat scone? What for? And you can forget hog roast and chocolate sundaes, pork scratchings and lemon meringue pie.
It is true that many British children are fat, and will, without intervention, become fat adults, and this has prompted the hysteria at Public Health England and its very precise limit of 134 calories per volau-vent. But I have very rarely seen children dining in Rules, or Fortnum & Mason, or stuffing themselves with vol-au-vents. Or are these proposals only for middle-market restaurants – Nando’s and Pizza Express – and the rich, again, left untouched, which surely is much worse?
Any sentient person will tell you: it is not restaurant food, or even supermarket food, that is the problem. It is not meals at all but treats. It is sugar and television. That is why children are fat – not because they are sneaking out of school to try the tasting menu at Hide Above on Piccadilly. If you want to ban something – and I’m more for hiding than banning – drop a bomb on Cadbury. Or Kellogg’s. Or Nestlé. Discourage them from releasing Easter eggs in January and chocolate advent calendars in October. Or at least hide the sugar at the back of the shop with the dog food. When my son eats three good meals a day – including red meats and homemade puddings – he looks fine. After a children’s party with cake and chocolate, he swells like a raging frog.
It is sugar. I want to type it, repeatedly, like “redrum”, for it is essentially the same thing. Sugar. Sugar. Sugar.
So, don’t blame the restaurants and the ready-meal counters, giving exhausted adults a burst of joy or, at least, a bit of peace on a wet, cold winter’s night. Blame the idiot box of a television in the corner, or the iphone in the hand – paralysing children who were born to run.
If you want them to be slender and healthier, perhaps you could teach them to avoid sugar in its purer forms. Or you could teach them how to cook a varied, wholesome diet for themselves. Like they do in restaurants, for example.