Eat recklessly - and die happy

By SUE ARNOLD*

As night follows day, as sun follows rain, as Blair follows Bush, three or four times a year a dietitian will step up on a podium in front of a conference of distinguished medics, adjust his spectacles, shuffle his papers and tell them that the British nation is becoming increasingly fatter, lazier and unhealthy; that obesity is costing mega-millions a year because one in five of the population is clinically obese.

And next morning at breakfast when we've read about it in the papers and exclaimed: "Good grief" or "Blimey O'Reilly" or whatever, we do what we have always done and will doubtless continue to do for the rest of our natural lives. We add cream and sugar to our coffee, polish off our bacon, sausage, egg and beans, spread a second slice of toast liberally with butter and marmalade and then, as likely as not, head off somewhere in the car.

Horror stories no longer appear to horrify. For instance, a professor of nutrition told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that if we carried on like this, in 10 years obesity would be the biggest killer after cancer. Alas, it falls on deaf ears because we know this already. We know we shouldn't eat junk food and fried food and processed food, but we do because it's cheaper and easier and, in some cases, extremely delicious.

We know we should give up the car and use bicycles or public transport or walk, but cycling is dangerous, public transport is unreliable and it's pouring with rain. We know that labour-saving devices have turned us into couch potatoes. Of course we should carry the laundry in baskets on our heads down to the river and, after pounding it on stones with our feet and using up 3000 calories in the process, we will have earned our stuffed crust pizza and Coke, but it's so much easier to shove it in the washing machine and watch telly.

So what's the answer? And if anyone says a balanced diet including five portions of fruit and at least three pints of water a day, I shall hurl my deep-fried Mars bar at his head.

I live opposite a supermarket whose fruit-and-vege department is heaving with exotica flown in daily from every corner of the globe.

Besides eight varieties of apple and four of pear, I can, at a price, buy mangosteens, guavas, jack fruit, star fruit, lychees, kumquats and you know something? They all taste exactly the same. In other words, like pap.

Supermarkets taint fruit in the same way that half an onion carelessly left in the fridge will make everything from yoghurt to last night's chocolate mousse taste like vindaloo.

How can a banana that's been picked when it's dark green, shoved into a chiller, wrapped in clingfilm and left to ripen on a shelf under fluorescent lighting possibly be nutritious?

The obvious solution is a war and a return to rationing, food coupons and allotments. Maybe Blair's bellicose leanings have less to do with ridding the world of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction than fighting national flab.

A less drastic measure would be to make everyone wear a badge bearing their ideal BMI (body mass index) weight. Spot checks by policemen or traffic wardens carrying portable scales would immediately identify any excess and the culprits fined accordingly.

My personal solution is to do nothing, live and let live. Two hundred years ago when people started getting taller, builders and tailors and cobblers did not complain about having to build taller houses, longer trousers, bigger shoes. "Cosi fan tutti," they said (well, maybe not in Blackburn) and got on with it.

We've all got to die somehow. Remember when Maigret had to investigate the mysterious deaths of the three fat husbands of Madame de Ribes? They all died peacefully in their beds with smiles on their faces, each leaving the widow a substantial legacy that aroused the neighbours' suspicions. Maigret is stumped until he studies the post mortems and discovers that all three had eaten extremely rich last suppers - five courses, foie gras, truffles etc.

Finally, he twigs. "I believe, Madame, you fed them to death," he says. "Peut-aciêtre," sighs the widow and asks if he would care to stay for dinner. What a way to go.

What's wrong with being Rubenesque anyway? Given the choice between a Sabine woman and Kate Moss, most red-blooded men, I bet, would settle for cellulite.

* Sue Arnold writes for the INDEPENDENT in London.

* Diana Wichtel is on leave.