Taste The Difference

Nine chicken nuggets, a large chips and a coke please. These days eating at Richmond’s McDonalds is about as taboo as admitting to having voted for Mrs T. If you want a Big Mac you have to pretend to be Humphrey Bogart out of The Big Sleep, donning a large trench coat to avoid detection by Richmond’s allotment mafia.

Yet I remain an unashamed advocate of the benefits of junk food. Just think about it. Since the introduction of junk food in our schools, exam results have increased year on year at an impressive rate. In fact US research published in The British Journal of Public Economics clearly showed a direct correlation between a high calorie diet and improved exam performance. This was based on a computer-based analysis of the nutritional content of school meals.

Unfortunately though, the nation has been brainwashed by folk law hero Jamie Oliver who claims that junk food reduces concentration and causes obesity. His strong academic case is based on the careful placing of words like ‘pukka’ and ‘wicked’ in his arguments, which are demonstrative of the careful methodological approach to his research.

So where are these fat kids who are void of concentration? I thought I’d do some research of my own. I started by observing passengers on the R68, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any of Jamie’s super sized kids desperately trying to squeeze on to the seats. I then went for lunch at McDonalds this time expecting to see teenagers the size of guests on the Ricky Lake show, but instead they all looked positively scrawny, and perfectly healthy.

Alright I admit that my somewhat haphazard approach to qualitative research may be a little flawed, so lets just assume for a minute that Jamie is right and children are suffering from poor concentration and increased levels of obesity. Is he right in thinking that junk food is the cause? My answer is adamantly no, and here’s why!

Firstly children are suffering from a lack of concentration because; wait for it, school is boring. Government after government have rejected a vocational approach in favour of useless, outdated, and uninspiring subjects. We need economics, not maths, engineering, not wood work, IT classes which teach web design and content management rather than providing a simplistic analysis about what computers do and how mail merge works. And as for trying to learn French using Tricolore Text Books, or Science using Nuffield ones, in the words of John McEnroe ‘You cannot be serious’.

As for obesity….. Well as children have become cleverer they have finally started to realise that team sports like football are utterly pointless. After all playing football at school requires about as much strategic planning as a trip to Tescos. It’s therefore not surprising that many children instead spend their time using Playstations, which require logic, skill, and strategic thinking without having to run around like a headless chicken in a muddy field. So the real reason for obesity seems far more likely to be lack of exercise.

And who is to blame for this? I reckon it's that yummy mummy in the 4x4 dropping James off to a school which is only a 15-minute walk from home as she’s on the way to tone up at the Richmond Hill Health Club. You see if children cycled and walked instead of being taken every where by car or using public transport to travel 50 meters down the road, than like me they could indulge in as much junk food as they want. Blaming junk food for obesity is a bit like shooting the messenger when you should be shooting yourself. All right so perhaps that’s a bit morbid, but in the words of the cult TV program, ‘Honey We’re Killing the Kids’.