You know the deal. We need to shoot the crocodile nearest the boat.
If we were not locked down or, as the government prefers us to think about it ‘in measures’, I might well be inviting you to dinner tonight. You never know.
And if you chose to come, you would be offered Middle Eastern Lamb Burgers in a pitta bread, with a carrot and cumin salad. The ingredients used will include (grass-fed) lamb, onions, garlic, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, allspice and, of course, carrot. Total cost for three of us, about £7.50. It is my turn on the roster, so it will be cooked by me. Enjoy, because I am a sensitive chef, and I have my pride.
I wish I hadn’t, but I spent between 5.30 and 6.45 this morning reading an in-depth analysis of the composition of a famous fast-food chain’s chicken nuggets. The author had sent the meal to a biologist at Berkeley for analysis and, among other things, he had identified that 56% of the meal consisted of 13 different derivations of corn, cornstarch or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and that was the good bit. Throw in some ‘leavening agents’ (sodium aluminium phosphate, mono calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate and calcium lactate), and about 14 other things, and you are finally left with Chef’s little surprise, a dollop of tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a form of butane that would kill you if you ingested so much as a couple of grams. All above board. All legal. All sanctioned by the FDA. Such chicken that was involved was very much a minority participant, like a little three minute cameo role by an ageing superstar in a two hour blockbuster, arranged to glitter a sprinkling of stardust. And we can all guess at the life that chicken had led before it was invited along to the party.
According to the World Health Organisation (2016), around 2 billion of us are overweight, of whom 650 million of us are clinically obese. By contrast, 820 million people are starving, or severely malnourished and, whilst it is sometimes glacially slow, real progress has been made over the last twenty years or so to control that figure, and even bring it down.
I am trying to conjure up an acceptable word for the kind of board of directors that signs off little plastic bribes for children to pester their parents to bring them regularly to a place that will enable them, if they lack self-control, to become obese and diabetic themselves. I can’t. But then I have failed over the years to come up with a word that describes a board of directors who would knowingly market a meal deal that provides twice as much sugar as the human body can deal with in a day, and I can’t, either.
The existential threat of climate change that has been our gift to the other 8.7 million species with whom we are journeying through space on our blue and green ball, is one where the issue is not whether we will take notice and do as much as we can to avert it (because we will), as to whether we are already too late. But the little crisis that we humans have gifted purely to ourselves, the obesity epidemic, is something else altogether.
And it is the crocodile that is creeping up on us.
It’s not the one that is writing deranged tweets from a White House basement, nor the ideologues on both sides steering us away from a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU. It is not even Covid, terrible though that still is, or where HS2 goes, or doesn’t, or a third runway at Heathrow.
No, the crocodile that is coming for our species is the fat one heading first for the little picnic basket at the front of our canoe.
Once it’s eaten that, it’s coming for us.
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