"Individual choice is no longer acceptable public policy."

[elfs]

Yesterday, the Executive of Scotland (that's apparently his title) released a "damning" paper which showed that despite spending over a £100 million over the past decade exhorting its citizens to eat well, the diet of Scotland is worse than ever. Scotland has a socialized medical system, meaning that the state pays for the health-related consequences of a poor diet. Put these two together, and the conclusion was, well, chilling: "So pervasive is poor diet that reliance on individual choice as the prime ideology in shaping food supply is no longer an adequate public policy."

Reading through the comments, I'm reminded of Theo Dalrymple's observation that in London, while the pols complained of there being no supermarkets anywhere in his neighborhood and were prepared to label it a "food desert", he knew of two that consistently had excellent fresh vegetables all the time, and were often full of women making choices for their families' dinners. They weren't labeled as "supermarkets" because they had been zoned as "ethnic food outlets," and the bulk of their customers were Indian or Muslim. Most of the respondents don't know how to cook and haven't cared enough to go find a decent butcher or grocers.

The other "key quote" from the press conference that boggled my mind was this: "It's all well and good to say you should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, but then you have to look at how easy it is for people to access the shops to do that, and how affordable those products are."

Compared to what? Calorie for calorie, a whole grapefruit might be more expensive than a burger, but in terms of portion control the latter is probably enough to cover two servings of fruit.

I know, I go on about this issue but, really, it's a chilling outcome. The only question now is which will be the first for the state to take complete control: the kitchen or the nursery. I think it's a toss-up at this point. I'm reminded of this great article from 2020.

FallenPegasus presented this scenario: first the state declares that there must be public cafeterias serving free but nutritive foods, and people will flock there because people are cheap. Eventually, "affordable housing" will grow up around the public cafeterias that don't even have kitchens: after all, there's the public cafeteria. Eventually, building any house with a kitchen will require "speciality" permits because of their relative rarity and the fire hazard they obviously pose. Insurers will be able to point to houses with kitchens and the rates of fires and jack up rates: the only people who can cook for themselves are those who can afford the food twice: once for the taxes to support the public cafeterias, and once for themselves. Because people are no longer "forced" to buy food at the grocers that profession will wither away, and food bought outside the public cafe system will be that much more expensive. People who object to the whole system will find themselves on the receiving end of a shrieking barrage of abuse about how they support "starvation" and "malnutrition."

I have seen your future dinners, and they are full of mystery meat.

Comments

Mystery meat...

[brainchaos.net (from livejournal.com)]

Then Charlton Heston will come along and tell us what it is.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

What did they do with the dude from... yeah, it was Brave New World, didn't they exile him to some island or other?

I'd rather face exile and good cooking than be a slave to mystery meat.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Scotland is the home of deep-fried confectioanry. Do you call the same thing a Mars Bar that we do.

One nitpick--it's the "Scottish Executive", and it is very roughly the equivalent of a State government in the USA.

And I'd recommend you take the opinions of fallenpegasus on the way we Brits do things with a substantial (possibly unhealthy) pinch of salt. Some of the things I've seen him say, elsenet, seem to have no relation to the reality I've experienced.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but I wasn't thinking that he was expressing an exclusively British point of view. Where I live, for example, the city has a map of "food zones" and there's one zone that literally shows it has no food outlets (which isn't surprising; it's a strip of mostly car dealerships and repair shops). I happen to know, however, that there's a halal grocery in the middle of all that which not only sells good fruits and vegetables, but it keeps live sheep out back for slaughter.

The progression from "a nation of bad nutrition" to "a nation without private kitchens" is parallel the "a nation of illiterates" to "a nation without private schools," and the arguments are chillingly similar.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I've been doing a bit of searching, and I've not found anything quite like the what your piece describes. Not the bit about stupid politicians, but the "ban private kitchens" stuff. Which id mskinh mr suspicious.

What does seem to be going on is a movement towards changing the school meals service. One of those nasty, socialised, things we do here, where the publically-funded schools provide the mid-day meal for the pupils A well-known chef, Jamie Oliver started off a campaign, using a TV series to show just how bad the food was, and the politicians have been running scared ever since.

Anyway, the Scottish Executive is talking about a much more directed system, making sure the food offered to the kids is healthy. Yes, I suppose the difference is that the state is doing this, rather than a concerned parent such as yourself.

That's the nearest I can find to what you're on about, and looked at from here, it's not very near. I think you've missed a lot of the context. I just wish they'd been more concerned about the quality of school food when I'd been eating it.

Oh, and we seem to be quite able to maintain private and public systems in parallel over here. Schools and Hospitals, most obviously. From this side of the pond, the USA seems insanely devoted to devil-take-the-hindmost private provision. We're used to different things.

And the UK media, I'm assured by American friends, get a huge amount of stuff wrong about your country.

The "ban private kitchens" stuff is an *intentionally fictional parody*!

[(Anonymous)]

The idea is to use a fictional analogy: forbidding home schooling is parodied with a proposal to ban home cooking.

Have I now fed the troll?

Re: The "ban private kitchens" stuff is an *intentionally fictional parody*!

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Well, I doubt it's one of Mr. Sternberg's fictions.

It doesn't even mention the non-culinary uses of a cucumber.

[fallenpegasus]

Put up or shut up.

Or in other words, if you're going to smear someone, at least have the honesty to use quotes and links.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

Dunno if he's referring to here, where you appeared to be proposing that washing the glans would be as effective as reduction of receptor sites by circumcision at preventing HIV during unprotected sex, but that assertion seemed a bit odd to me. Not that I'm happy with the idea of promoting circumcision.

[fallenpegasus]

That "proposal" was an off-the-cuff, responding to the theory that circumcision is a way to prevent HIV.

lipidleggin'

[voidrandom.livejournal.com]

F. Paul Wilson's take on this...in 1978.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041012041238/http://www.doingfreedom.com/gen/0600/fa.lipidleggin.html

Re: lipidleggin'

[fallenpegasus]

I loved that. :)

Re: lipidleggin'

[voidrandom.livejournal.com]

If you liked that, look for a copy of "The Survival of Freedom" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449244350), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John Carr and published back in 1981. "Lipidleggin'" was printed in it along with a lot of other great fiction. Some of it is dated as the Soviet Union is no more, but it doesn't take much imagination to make it current.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449244350

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

That scenario seems like a bit of an unlikely catastrophization.
There do need to be some culture shifts around food, though. Many Americans are extremely squeamish about the fact that meat comes from animals, whereas most of the rest of the world fails to freak out if fish have heads. Note the popularity of chicken breasts--they're about as un-animal-like as you can get in a piece of meat; pale, bland, devoid of veins or bones. Is mystery meat much worse?
I wonder--how many people in those neighborhoods know about the grocery stores mentioned? Does the fact that those stores were oriented towards particular ethnicities decrease the likelihood that other people will shop there? I still run into bad attitude from people about the foods that non-Euro cultures eat. Not sure how to change this. Cyclic trendiness may do the trick--the yuppies brought Thai food into the mainstream, and Mexican and Chinese food (or bastardizations thereof) have become commonplace.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

People said the same thing about public education.

One of the illuminating thing about public education in the US is that when it was first made available, many people refused to have anything to do with it.

Massachusetts, the first state to implement compulsary public education finally did it by sending in state police to distroy the "community schools"
in the western end of the state that were defying Boston, and force the pupils into the "public schools" at gunpoint.