At last, a cure for gluttony– just rip out your kitchen, like I have

IADMIT I’m not just a food Nazi, I’m a food Taliban extremist. My views are so restrictive I’m Pol without a Pot. Because I don’t cook, ever. I’ve just had my kitchen removed from my Georgian house in the Dales: the ultimate exercise in self-denial; like a tummy tuck, but performed by men in overalls, not green scrubs.

I firmly believe hot drinks are a sign of weakness. Never mind the man hours wasted by smokers standing idly outside shops and offices (BTW, why do I have to step into the street to circumnavigate these work-shy people outside pubs, when surely they should be the ones in the road, potentially given a quick, clean death as opposed to a long, slow one from lung cancer?). What about the time wasted by people who sip tea, cradling a mug with hands that should be rebuilding this country?

It was revealed last week that animal protein causes cancer in the under 65s: not just the protein in meat, but also that found in dairy products. As a vegan who only eats eggs from my own chickens – who are allowed to retire rather than being gassed at 68 weeks, which is the norm – you might think I’m thrilled at this news. The thing is, I’m not.

I don’t abstain from meat and fish because I want to live to be 100; I have very little interest in my own health and wellbeing. I abstain because I’m worried about something other than my own mortality: The poor creatures who lose their lives for us.

I’m such an animal lover that I believe giving up red meat because you care about yourself is not even valid. A healthier human is a serendipitous byproduct of enlightenment, not the driving force.

WE’VE long been warned about the amount of sugar in fruit juice: apple juice contains more sugar than cola. But now even the fruit itself, with its inherent and good-for-us fibre, is under attack. Last week, dentists warned children should no longer be given an apple as a snack, not only because of the sugar content, but because the acidity rots their teeth.

Even I think this is ridiculous, a bridge (ha ha) too far. Guilt-addled middle-class mums will latch on to these new diktats with zeal, but I do wonder what on earth is deemed acceptable in children’s lunch boxes. My friend once put a small bottle of San Pellegrino water in her son’s box, and was told by the school that a glass bottle was too dangerous, while a plastic one was not a good idea either!

On the one hand, we have gluttony (why are there now Giant Buttons? Whatever was wrong with the old-fashioned, small, button-sized Buttons?), and on the other, the fear that eating an apple will give you diabetes and a need for veneers, while millions of children starve to death because of our addiction to feeding plant matter to meat animals.

But I admit it’s worrying that the sugar in apples has risen by 50 per cent in a decade: I remember in the 1960s a Cox’s apple, along with a Ski yogurt, were mouth-puckeringly sour. The Coca-Cola I used to sip in my local Wimpy Bar in the 1970s has little in common with the sicklysweet concoction on sale today.

This doctoring of food – the chicken of today bears little relation to one raised 50 years ago, hence the need to add fish meal to their food to satisfy the Government’s lust for omega fatty acids in our diet – is all about maximising profit, of course, rather than our health.

But even so, whatever happened to restraint?

As my dear old mum used to say, as she stalked me at Christmas with a tin of Quality Street: ‘Just one won’t hurt.’