Crash Bang Wallace

Some shocking news has filled the airwaves, taken over our TV screens and dominated the BBC’s online news output. Across the nation, listeners, viewers and readers are struggling to take it in: bacon, pork pies, scotch eggs and sausages are quite bad for you.

I know, I was stunned, too. Who would have thought that salty, fatty, processed meat products were worse for your health than apples and Bran Flakes?

Sure, pig lobby groups (I suppose we should call them “Big Pig”) have been pushing that line for years but until I saw today’s evidence I  thought they were just squealing to protect their vested interest in not being sliced up thinly and eaten for breakfast.

Why is this considered news?At the start of the day we all knew that unhealthy foods were unhealthy and, after top billing from our national broadcaster, by the end of the day we will still all know it. Tomorrow perhaps we can expect groundbreaking findings that a kick in the groin hurts, followed by exclusive revelations of George Galloway’s slight scepticism about free market capitalism.

There is a distinct irony in medical researchers wasting years of their lives carrying out a mass study in order to tell us something we already knew about extending our life expectancy. At best there was an outside chance that they would crunch the numbers and announce that a terrible mistake had been made – that five portions of fresh fruit and veg is actually deadly, and we could only be saved by high doses of fried bread and black pudding.

Obviously if that had happened it would have been great news, and a genuine triumph for science that we could all welcome. But I doubt it was their motivation.

Instead, they seem to have purposely re-researched a well-established fact, with the sole aim of being able to publish it again. The BBC has kindly obliged to pass the message on, with the result that thin people with excellent life expectancy are loud-hailering in the nation’s face that we ought to shape up and stop being so disgusting.

You can almost taste their exasperation that the fry-up hasn’t yet died a fatty death, face down in a pool of its own egg and beans.

I severely doubt that today’s publicity will change anything in the national diet – other than perhaps boosting bacon sales by the constant looped video footage of butties. Show me someone who doesn’t know that bacon isn’t good for you and I will show you someone under the age of 5. Propaganda campaigns haven’t just scraped the barrel, they’ve hacked through its planks with a dented spoon – and yet they still aren’t working.

That people haven’t snapped to attention at the call of a Change4Life advert isn’t down to ignorance – how could it be, given the fortune spent on “public information” campaigns? It’s down to their personal choice to do things that are gratifying and enjoyable even at the well-known cost to their eventual lifespan. In other words, they’re exercising their right to choose how their own lives should be lived.

The failure of repeated attempts to turn us into a land of the uniformly fit and boring helps to explain why food nannying is moving away from pure propaganda and into the realms of bullying. The cries for a “fat tax” will grow and grow, and if we aren’t careful the nudges will turn it to shoves and then outright legislative force. All because the people won’t do what they are constantly told they should – and because those doing the telling are self-righteous enough to shift with ease from “you should” to “thou shalt.”