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Food For Thought

Plans to tackle the prevalence of junk-food and increasing obesity in Irish society should be welcomed. But focusing purely on the calorie count is the wrong way to go about it.

Niall Stokes, 19 Apr 2012

On the way home recently I had to drop into a small supermarket for a carton of yoghurt that was needed to make a Tsatsiki. As I queued up to pay, I was forced to walk through a channel, overloaded with sweets and bars and other snack foods on either side. It was like being part of some absurd behaviouralist experiment. Would the rat find the goodies too hard to resist?

My first reaction was that I’d never go to that shop again. Not because I was tempted. But because the whole strategy is so demeaning. I understand that every retailer wants to sell more. And also that it is not a moral issue for them. Times are tough. They need to make every sale they can. But there is something that feels deeply wrong, nonetheless, about making customers walk a line through foodstuffs that everyone knows are bad for you, just to be able to pay for what you really want to buy.

And of course we all know too that the expectation is that children will indeed find the array of sweets irresistible – and that they will harass and bully tired and vulnerable parents into parting with the extra cash just to shut them up. Or alternatively that the inner sugar addict in adults will come bursting through and that impulse buying of Mars or Twix or Mararthon bars will result.

I sometimes look at what is on display in shops and wonder: how do people eat so much of this stuff? The bars are there in their tens of thousands. There are mountains of crisps and other oily, salty snack foods. These are going to be bought and eaten and bought and eaten – till the cows come home.

Fine. If people want to buy ‘em and eat ‘em, then that’s their prerogative. It’s a free country. But this new strategy of forcing people to walk a line of the stuff just to get to the till is taking pressure to buy junk food to a new level of tawdriness.

Meanwhile, there is a health crisis in Ireland. Levels of obesity have soared over the past twenty years. We are getting more and more like the United States of America, where a huge number of people are phenomenally overweight. In an attempt to address this, the Minister for Health James Reilly is considering introducing legislation, which would require restaurants, cafes and fast food outlets to display the calorie content of the food they sell.



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