EDITORIAL: Choc ban's a fat lot of good!

Louis Pierard
It's a little thing; a small, seemingly insignificant step on the road to wellness and rude health.
The planned removal of the giant chocolate bar from supermarket shelves is notable less for its practical use than for its symbolism: Chocolate addicts can cheerfully make up the sum of its kilojoules by scoffing two lesser-sized bars, even if the additional effort can't mitigate its effects.
The chocolate bar is the bogey of the health reformer. It has no redeeming nutritional features. It's pure self-indulgence. Instant energy? That's a crock.
And in its giant form, it torments the weak-willed with the deadly sin of gluttony.
That leads to obesity and a host of health problems, such as poor circulation, heart disease and diabetes. And they cost money to treat.
The king-sized chocolate bar has to be banned because fat people need to be saved from themselves. For constitutionally slim people, or those who are able to curb their appetites, and happen to enjoy massive chocolate bars (perhaps they are useful to take on picnics) ... well that's just too bad.
If the fat won't acknowledge the harm of "big chocolate", that decision has to be made for them.
The obesity activist is the Torquemada of a secular age, banning large portions instead of burning books. The confectioner is the modern Mephistopheles, knocking at the same door as the tobacco baron.
The army of slender health professionals battling the obesity epidemic do so from the highest of motives. It is a noble conformity that they preach. We must be fit and healthy. They care, even if we don't, or can't.
It's the presumptuousness that grates: We're being dragooned into health. The very worst is assumed of everyone else by those who know far better. Says one: "The more you give people, the more they eat." What an irredeemably hopeless lot we are.
Eating chocolate in excess is bad for you. But then, so is eating, drinking - in fact doing - too much of anything. Short of wiring up the jaws of the potentially obese, if the answer is to deprive us, for our own good, of food designed to tempt the palate, where is it likely to end?
All convenience foods can be down-sized. No big bags of chippies. No big bottles of Coke. No big portions at restaurants either. Ban all-you-can-eat smorgasbords and big steaks. Ban big bottles of scotch, too. And cars with big engines. Selling XXXOS clothes simply indulges the obese.
In this "super-size me", non-judgmental world the recipe for obesity is as follows:
Take human appetite (to which we are all heir). Plunge it into a climate of convenience, bordering on outright inertia.
Provide it with the expectation of instant gratification. Be sure to erase the notions of moderation and self control.
And finally, flatter (or insult) those who succumb to such temptation by insisting that any unfortunate consequences they experience have nothing at all to do with choices they made. May they be forever victims.
It is the lack of restraints on that singular human foible -uncontrolled appetite - that needs to be tamed, not the size of the portions.