We eat far more healthily than we used to, but Public Health England is working steadily to reduce our freedoms and extend its powers
We are returning to food rationing. That may seem a lurid claim, but it is hard to know how else to describe state-imposed ceilings on the calories of ready-meals, takeaways and even restaurant servings.
This week, The Daily Telegraph exposed plans by Public Health England (PHE) to decree a permissible calorie content for various food portions. The proposed limits are ludicrously specific, presumably to lend them a spurious sense of scientific authority: convenience meals are to be capped at 544 calories, restaurant main courses at 951 calories, onion bhajis at 134 calories and so on.
No other country sets such maximums. Yet Britain, which led the world in the assertion of personal freedom against state power, now proposes to put its citizens on a diet. Why? Are we under siege? Are we losing a war? Are convoys struggling past U-boat wolf packs to bring us precious Canadian grain?
Nope. The notional justification for this loss of liberty is to “combat the obesity epidemic”. Note the fauxmedical language. Obesity, as far as we know, is not spread by bacterial infection. It is a consequence, rather, of personal choices. The word “epidemic”, suggesting a contagious disease, is being used here to soften us up for more government control.
Yet even if we understand epidemic simply to mean “something spreading uncontrollably”, it is hard to justify in this context. It’s true that the proportion of fat people in Britain has risen since the Seventies. Around 25 per cent of adults, and 15 per cent of children, are now technically obese. Over the past six years, according to the Health and Social Care Centre, obesity rates have levelled off in adults and dropped slightly in children, but we can all agree that they are too high.
What, though, caused that rise? PHE takes for granted that it is to do with calories. We are invited to assume that we are eating more, or at least more unhealthily, than we were a generation ago. But are we? If, like me, you are a child of the Seventies, cast your mind back to what kids used to eat. We were raised on Angel Delight, Monster Munch, Flying Saucers and all manner of gloop. What are now seen as common-sense nutritional norms were regarded in the Seventies as outlandishly hippy.
In fact, according to the British Heart Foundation, “overall intake of calories, fat and saturated fat has decreased since the Seventies. This trend is accompanied by a decrease in sugar and salt intake, and an increase in fibre and fruit and vegetable intake.”
Yup, you read that correctly: we really are better at eating our greens than we used to be. Official figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs show that our daily calorie consumption fell from 2,534 in 1974 to 1,990 in 2012: a decline of 21.5 per cent. Over the same period, we cut our intake of sugar by 16 per cent and of saturated fat by 41 per cent. In other words, PHE is bringing the full force of state power to bear on a trend that is taking place anyway.
How can we be getting porkier if we are eating more healthily? There are lots of explanations. We are, for example, less likely to walk or cycle to school. More of us now work at desks, rather than in manufacturing or agriculture. Central heating is far better than it was in the Seventies, meaning that we shiver away fewer calories than our parents did.
Such details rarely matter to quangocrats, though. Their objective, always and everywhere, is to expand their remit and increase their budget. The officials at PHE may or may not be physically chubby, but they surely qualify as fatcats. A report published this week by the TaxPayers’ Alliance showed that 241 PHE employees are now on six-figure salaries, and the
We don’t want rules on our own diets. But we think that others, perhaps poorer than us, need a bit of bullying
number earning more than the Prime Minister has doubled over the past two years.
The question is not why PHE keeps demanding preposterous restrictions. Dogs bark, ducks quack and quangos agglomerate power. The question, rather, is why the rest of us put up with it. Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs has been waging a one-man campaign against the nanny state, standing alone like Horatius at the bridge. But where are the rest of us? Are we so infantilised that we accept – no, that we demand
– government rules on what we are allowed to eat?
The answer, I think, reveals an ugly strain of snobbery in modern Britain. No, we don’t want rules on our own diets. But we think that others, perhaps poorer and less educated than ourselves, might need a bit of bullying.
What comes into your mind when I say “junk food”? I’m guessing it’s not duck à l’orange or Eton Mess. Our objection, in other words, is not to high-calorie food per se. It’s not olive oil we want to restrict. It’s chips. Or at least chips of the sort you get at KFC. When they’re cut in thick chunks and piled artfully on our plates like a game of Jenga, that’s different.
PHE is doing what the Fabians were doing more than a century ago: seeking to coerce the poor into giving up their vices. “English working people everywhere, so far as I know, refuse brown bread,” lamented George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. “The English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year.”
More than 80 years have passed since Orwell penned those panicky lines. Life expectancy has continued to increase for working people in England as for almost everyone else. We are, by any normal measure, healthier than we have ever been, yet we continue to believe, like every previous generation, that we are on the verge of some new and terrible health crisis.
In fact, the crisis is not sanitary, but democratic. We have a Conservative government, most of whose ministers want to tilt the balance toward liberty. Yet, in the six years of its existence, PHE has worked steadily to reduce our freedoms and extend its own powers. A body that does useful work on epidemiology, preparing for civil disasters and the like, is making itself absurd through dietary finger-wagging.
I hope ministers will return PHE to its core functions and cut its budget commensurately. In the meantime, though, cheer up. Our diet is richer and more varied than it has ever been. We can allow ourselves the occasional indulgence.