Wheel of death

A couple of news stories today have given me pause for thought. 

First off, the announcement that McDonalds and a host of other food chains are going to put calorie counts on all their menus. I've suffered from seriously disordered eating and am only just beating it after a number of years. In all that time, I was obsessed with calories and this measure would have made my life even more painful and difficult. I spent so much time denying myself nice food - I would often find myself in tears in Sainsburys desperately wanting the tasty ready meal or chunky soup but feeling forced to have the bland low fat option because I couldn’t ignore the calorie information - "the wheel of death" as it's known in our house. Going out to a restaurant was the only time I could pick something to eat without stressing about the calories. Of course, I knew that the pizza was more caloriific than the salmon, but that was fine. What I didn’t want to know was the precise value of every single dish. I'd have found it so hard not to always pick the lowest one - or if I'd picked a higher one, I'd have suffered greatly because of it, feeling enormous guilt about my choices. People with eating disorders already find stress in every single food decision so this just seems like another way of making things worse for them. Eating - especially eating out at a restaurant - should be a pleasure. It's a bit of an indulgence and it doesn’t need to be quantified.


However, I accept that as someone with eating issues, I'm in the minority. Another minority is the batch of people who we're told don’t know that a Big Mac has lots of calories in it. I guess there must be some of those people, but I'm not sure whether they should be the driving force for legislation either. One example that's been used to justify the move is the fact that apparently people underestimate the amount of calories in a latte and a muffin by about 300. My response to that is, so what? 300 calories is very little. Obesity is generally not caused by the odd underestimate a couple of times a week - most people who like their latte and muffin don’t care about the calorie count and if they're overweight, that's certainly not the only reason why. Anyone who wants to can find out the calorie count of their muffin by using the good old internet and then make their eating choice accordingly. They don’t need it thrust in their face at the checkout.

On balance then, if you don’t legislate for me, or for the Big Mac denier, what difference will this make to the majority? Probably not much, although I suspect it will take a small amount of the pleasure out of eating out for quite a few people and make no difference to the vast majority of others who order a Big Mac in the full knowledge that it's a little bit bad for them, but what the hell, they want to do it anyway. I think there's a real misunderstanding that people who are fat would be thin if only they had a bit information. We're drowning in information and yet we're getting fatter. 

I guess I don’t really have a definitive answer, maybe it's soemthing I'll come back to, but all I know is this move makes me uneasy and it seems, somehow, pointless. Perhaps it would just be better, if you have to do anything at all, to do what some restaurants do and have a "light choices" or "healthier choices" section so people have the option if they want it.

Secondly, free schools. For anyone reading this outside the UK, these are the brainchild of the coalition government - although they are common elsewhere in the world. They are state-funded but completely independent, set up by parents, charities, private bodies, teachers and so on, and able to operate their own timetables, curricula, etc. I heard a TV news correspondent say in rather judgemental tones that the government was being forced to deny that they wouldn’t just benefit "pushy parents". 

Merits of free schools aside, surely that begs the question, what is wrong with being a pushy parent? We're not talking about the kind of parents who force their children into Hollywood auditions aged five - what the media and the critics mean are basically parents who want the best for their kids and are prepared to move hell and high water to get it. What's wrong with that? Surely that should be the definition of a good parent. Adults do know better than kids - aged 10, I kicked up months of almighty fuss because I didn’t want to go to a good private school. I wanted to go to the crap comprehensive instead (btw I don’t think comprehensives are in any way crap by definition - they're not - but this one was demonstrably rubbish) because my friends were going there. If my parents hadnt been "pushy", I'd have gone to the comp - and I can say for absolute certainty that my life would have panned out very differently. Even if I'd got to where I am now, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the journey as much - and that's just a fact. 

My parents urged me to try every sport going, to pick up an instrument, apply to Cambridge, do all those things - but they also respected my decisions to drop certain things or take choices they didn’t agree with. Pushy is a good thing, pushy shows you care and gives your kids a fighting chance. To use pushy like a swearword just sums up so much of what's wrong with the UK - we seem to love mediocrity, or at the very least, we fear ambition, brilliance and success. In America, striving is a national pasttime - here, it's like train spotting or pornography, something you have to do under the cover of darkness. Hooray for pushy, I say, we wouldn’t be in half the mess we are if there was more of it about.

Sorry that's such a long post, but I felt like there was a lot to say! What do you reckon?



PS: I really am going to post some Scotland pics soon - work has just been very busy!