After research is released recommending that all retailers use the traffic light labelling system on food products, John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, on why the labelling madness needs to stop; food isn't poison so why treat is as such?
This week’s tale from the food twilight zone is inspired by Which? magazine.
Which?, with it’s annoying question mark, has been around for decades and specializes in consumer choice issues – which bag-less vacuum or vibrating egg is best value for money, that sort of thing.
They took it upon themselves to buy a lot of high street store sandwiches and see if the nutritional info matched what was on the packet. Unsurprisingly it didn't, often being wrong by a significant margin.
Which? wasn't very pleased about this, and also objected to the location of the traffic light graphic which displays how much fat, salt etc. is in the sarnie, saying it should be on the front and not on the back. How do we actually know which is the front of a triangular packet though? The whole thing annoys the hell out of me.
There is nothing about this which isn't idiotic, and it’s exactly the sort of approach to eating that is driving the western world to distraction, sickness and a state of permanent worry about food. It is exactly the sort of attitude that I rail against in The Meat Fix.
Firstly, labelling food with traffic light system, red is bad, yellow is – err. ..a bit bad and a bit good - green is oh so very good, is a quick way to make a person insane.
What are you supposed to make of it? Will the ones with most red on kill you and, if so, how soon? What if you’re only eating this once in your life? Will you be healthy if you eat only ones with lots of green on? That is certainly the implication.
But how are these judgements made? Based on what, by whom, and what the hell do they know about it? Shut up, Johnny, just accept what we tell you. It’s for your own good. That's their mantra.
Bollocks to that.
What all such labels are saying, effectively, is that fat is bad for you, because anything high in fat has a red light. Well, as you should know by now, I disagree totally with that and there are many researchers who do too. So if you put one of these labels on something wholesome and natural such as butter, it will be glowing hot red with warnings. But in fact, butter is a great food and will not kill you not even if someone throws a half pound of it at your head. Anyway, even if you buy the whole traffic light farrago, you have to look at your diet as whole, not in isolation. There’s no information here, only confusion.
How can we be expected to live like this? Endlessly weighing one label with one red flag, three green and two yellow against one with three green, two red and one yellow. It's an insane way to live and bad for your state of mind as much as anything else. It is symptomatic of a mental sickness when it comes to eating; a paranoia and fear.
But Which? don't seem so bothered. Rather, they seem shocked that the nutritional info of the actual food differs from that stated. How could it be otherwise? These are made by low-paid workers, standing on a conveyor belt, wearing a hair net in a giant metal shed on some bleak industrial estate in the early hours of the morning. They are not hand-crafted by artisans in a supportive village setting, they are churned out by the thousand for next to no money by people who would, frankly, rather be doing something else.
It's not a precise exercise, dumping slices of boiled egg and cress in between two slices of bread, or splurging a dollop of mayo onto some tuna. This is not fine dining. The very idea that someone is trying to measure the amount of fat, salt or whatever in it is certifiably bonkers and only exceeded in its stupidity by that fact that Which? think it could be somehow accurate, as though sandwich is a 3mm self tapping screw made by a machine.
All this is simply treating food as though it is a poison, which we must monitor and analyse, to make sure it’s not doing us too much harm.
Relax. Bloody hell.
You'll be a nervous wreck by the end of the trip to the supermarket if you looked at the food labels on every product. It leads to insane attitudes, such as the decision to buy diet coke and a pizza as though one is off-setting the calories of the other.
I don't shop like this and not because I’m a rock ‘n’ roll crazy – though I am – but because I’m all grown up and don’t need mollycoddling through life by Which? and its bloody annoying question mark.
I have just a couple of basic principles. The first is that I don't buy any processed food. This means you're not actually buying much with a nutritional label on anyway. Not eating processed food means you avoid almost all the aisles in the supermarket, including the one full of bread, crackers and pasta. Easy. Second, I don't buy sugar. Very easy. Third, I don't worry about the amount of fat I eat, only the quality of it. So I buy Guernsey butter and not vegetable oil for example. Job done.
This has made life very easy. Yes you have to make your own food instead of eating something made on one of those bleak industrial estates, but having control of that is a good thing, not a hassle.
While in an era saturated with marketing and food paranoia this may seem like a hair shirt, stripped down approach to food shopping, but it really isn’t. It is, more usually, what we and our ancestors would have called downright sensible. Free your mind from this craziness. Trust me; I'm not a doctor.