Here's another few millimetres shaved from the national joy quotient, courtesy of you inner Clarkson/Brooker/Boyle: the Food Standards Agency is launching a scheme to get restaurants to print calorie information on their menus, alongside the name and description of each dish.
What used to happen was this: at the end of the meal, the waiter arrived clutching a dessert menu to ask if you wanted pudding, and you and your companion shared a quick jokey conversation along the lines of "I'll have one if you do" or "if you order the Chocolate Guernica, I'll have one mouthful ... just the one, mind".
This would continue back and forth and so until the waiter smiles and says, "I'll get two spoons". and a few minutes later you enjoyed guiltily tucking into a velvety mass of warm brown mush together, then went home giggling like schoolkids to underline what a decadent pair of naughty revolutionaries you'd been.
[Hang on a minute, didn't I cover this in my Anti-Valentine's Day rant last year ?? Oh, yes I did ...]
Now, that same dessert menu will become a dossier of sobering statistics. Sure, it'll still be accompanied by devilish descriptions of moist sponge enrobed in an oozing burqa of dark chocolate sauce, but no amount of unctuous wordplay can ever distract you from those cold, hard numbers.
FIVE HUNDRED FLIPPIN’ CALORIES ?? The waiter might as well tip a jug of freezing water directly into your lap. Perhaps if it was accompanied by a list of strenuous physical activities you'd have to undertake in order to burn off all that fat and sugar, the balance would be redressed.
The drawback of this new system would be that business lunches with the boss would be rendered awkward and excruciating. But that's a small price to pay. In reality, however, this idea is about as much use as a Sat-Nav on a lawnmower. All it will achieve is a rise in the national level of food-related neuroticism, which is surely peaking in conjunction along with all with the obesity statistics. So does it matter if now and again we all slip into the occasional meaningless phrase? It does if you have a voice that makes headlines about eating habits at a time of a national obesity crisis and when it has just been confirmed that millennials are the fattest generation in history.
It matters if you start to imply that the poor have so little agency that they may as well give up, that the poor are so sensitive about being told the plain truth about what causes obesity (eating too many calories and moving about too little), and all its consequent health risks, that the main way ahead is government action against cheap food, unhealthy food and a ban on junk food adverts on the Tube.
A similar system in New York restaurants apparently reduced the average diner's intake by around 100 calories. A success, on the face of it, although the figures don't show how many of them went home and tucked into a bowl of Ben & Jerry's because they wanted dessert but didn't want to be judged an indolent slob by the waiting staff.
Now, there are certainly grounds for understanding why the poor make the food choices that they do and these must surely be about poverty as well as ignorance. If parents want their child to avoid dental problems and getting fat, it is logical to make sure they are not having a breakfast of cola, crisps and chocolate biscuits. This is irrespective of whether the day is starting in an inner-city tower block or a six-bedroom former vicarage along a gravel drive.
The whole calorie-counting business is far too banal anyway. It encourages fat people to waddle around with a head full of numbers, perpetually totting up their scores like a cross between Carol Vorderman and the Green Goddess. It's the same with alcohol and units. Literally no-one understands the units system.
Around last Christmas the NHS ran a campaign called “Know Your Units” which looked a bit like the periodic table as drawn by Pete Doherty: rows upon rows of different-shaped glasses full of different drinks, each with the relevant unit number finger-painted in the condensation on the side of the glass.
Not only did it underline how baffling the units system is, but because the forbidden beverages were all lovingly shot, cool and inviting under studio lights, it actually made you want to try drinks you wouldn't normally contemplate. Hey, that vodka and tonic I saw on telly this morning looked utterly refreshing. How many units was it again ?? I can't remember. Think I'll have 10. Nice round figure, that should blot out any doubt. Hey, as long as it’s wet, I’ll drink it !!
Fundamentally though, obtaining food requires effort, whether hunting it down, gathering it, tilling for it, or working for it. Put food ‘on tap’ and you end up with scenarios like learlier this year when one ‘disgruntled’ customer phoned the police because Dominos wouldn’t deliver during a snowstorm.
Yes, we might have smartphones that can show us the entire takeaway menu, but we are lumbered with the metabolism of animals. So rather than bashing us squarely in the back of the head with a metaphorical sledgehammer, surely the healthy-living mob would be better employed to devise more creative means to make our indolent, jelly-bellied, slobbering populace bend to their free-range, organic-farmed wills.
For starters, how about hooking every chair in every restaurant up to a weighing machine ?? Having instantly gauged how heavy you are, a computer then prints out a menu with all but the least gluttonous items removed. You might end up with a choice of nothing but almonds and watercress, but at least it’d count towards your five a day.
How did we ever survive before the Food Standards Agency ?? Simple, we just didn't eat stuff that …
a) Smelt a bit funny.
b) Had mouldy brown or green bits growing out of it.
c) Glowed in the dark.
Actually, why not go the whole hog and ban food altogether ??
STEP 1) Make owning a kitchen illegal.
STEP 2) Replace all supermarkets and cafes with trucks that rove the streets three times a day dispensing bite-sized meal-pellets.
STEP 3) Make sure the trucks are controlled by a computer, so they adjust their pace each time a crowd approaches, forcing them to break into a run and gain essential exercise.
Alternatively, they could carry on patronising and nagging and prodding and hectoring until everyone in the country gets so utterly sick of it all, they take up arms and start a violent revolution. Beating your way through a flank of riot police with a sledgehammer surely burns off thousands of calories.
And afterwards you can sit down in the rubble and skeletons eating mouthfuls of apple pie and custard, secure in the knowledge that you've earned yourself a treat.
Bon appetit !!