Food For Thought

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.
There’s a number of reasons why this is a bad idea.
Anybody who knows anything about food and nutrition will tell you that the calorie content of a specific meal is not the real issue. Good nutrition comes down to a few very simple concepts. The first is that we should eat a balanced diet. The second is that we should not eat too much. The third is that we should avoid junk food. And the fourth is that we need to very carefully monitor our intake of sugar – because sugar has addictive qualities and the over consumption of sugar can lead to diabetes, the incidence of which has also been soaring in Ireland.
There is another problem with the Minister’s plan: the calorie count in particular foodstuffs is of concern to a lot of teenage girls and young women in particular for all the wrong reasons. Anorexia has also been on the increase, including among young men. And so to have the calorie count highlighted at every turn may in fact have no impact at all on people who eat too much, while putting even more pressure on those for whom not wanting to put on weight is already a dangerously unhealthy obsession.
How practical is it anyway for restaurants that are committed to producing great food? It may be relatively straightforward for a fast food chain to measure and tabulate the calorie count of the meals they sell. There, portions are strictly controlled. Every meal is the same. The menu is limited and formulaic. The ingredients are bought in bulk and over a period of months and even years the menu stays the same. It won’t cost them a lot.
Almost exactly the opposite is the case with restaurants where quality is of the essence. They will generally use whatever local ingredients are available. The menu can change from day to day. Portions can vary. And there are areas of imprecision, for example in relation to knowing how much energy is retained in the system from particular foodstuffs. And so it will be a labour intensive and costly process to calculate the calorie count of every dish, every day. As a result, if it is imposed, it will give a further competitive advantage, in terms of pricing, to treadmill restaurants over those that try to do things the right way, and who want to deliver really good, nutritious food.
At the heart of great cooking are wonderful ingredients. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Organic meat and wild fish. Seeds, spices and pulses. Chefs in restaurants determined to produce great food know the provenance of everything they serve. And the emphasis is not on regimentation but on creativity. Good chefs want to know that they can stand over the quality of what they are putting on their customers’ plates. This is far more important than whether the calorie count is low, medium or high in a particular dish.
Calories don’t reckon how much salt is in a meal. Calories don’t clock the artificial preservatives. Calories don’t highlight the sugar count. Calories don’t give any indication if something is good for the heart or bad. All of these factors matter at least as much as calories, which can in any event be burned off depending on the amount of exercise the individual does. Indeed, there is a growing sense that the glycaemic index, which ranks carbohydrates according to their effect on blood sugar levels, is a far more important measure than calories.
It is as if someone in the Department of Health imagines that people eating in restaurants is the problem, when that patently is not the case. Certainly a heavier reliance on badly made takeaway and so called ‘convenience’ food is a modern issue. But forcing restaurants to festoon their menus with calorie counts is not going to do anything to change that.
The Brisol-based Children of the 90s project has revealed some fascinating facts, which are as likely to be true in Ireland as the UK. One of the most obvious but important is that young people have far too much salt in their diets – almost certainly as a result of eating junk food and pre-prepared meals. Bottle fed babies who start eating solids early are far more likely to become obese children. Mothers who put on excess weight during the early months of pregnancy are more likely to give birth to overweight babies, who are fatter than the average and more prone to heart disease. And so on.
As these scientific facts confirm, what is really needed is food education. It is not hard to cook lovely food at home on a relatively small budget. It is not difficult to source good food. The only difficulty is getting started. And the best place to do that is at school. No one should finish their education without being able to rustle up a decent meal for themselves.
Far better to get a proper educational programme going than to impose further bureaucracy on already over-burdened restaurant businesses...
Now where’s that cucumber
and garlic?