NORTHERN PLANNER

You may have noticed that I’m a lover of proper food. Since I burn loads of calories in my daily routine, eating well and keeping healthy was always a no brainer for me. So I love stuff like this. Lurpak ad. But that won’t work for all.

This report on obesity in the UK made for an interesting read. It suggests that we can’t help getting fatter, life makes us that way.

I guess it’s up to you if you buy the conclusions – maybe it comes down to your views on how much responsibility people are willing to take for themselves – but you can’t argue that human biological evolution is way behind our social and technological development. Food is there whenever we want it, and we like eating it too much.

When we’re hungry, we can’t help but get some food as quick as we can – and nature hasn’t stopped us craving the energy dense food we don’t need anymore. and here’s the rub, we haven’t developed the urge to stop eating when we’re full.

If you asked me, I’d say it’s easy. Eat a bit less and exercise a little bit more, but the evidence suggests that expecting everyone to take that view is naive.

So while there’s a big need to encourage us all to change our behaviour, it won’t happen overnight. And I hate to admit it, but I can’t escape warming to technology that messes with food a bit more.

Natural food is becoming popular. Look at how Birds Eye has re-cast the role of frozen food based on it’s purity and nutrition. But, maybe food that’s been interfered with needs its role to be re-defined.

You cannot change people’s attitudes and behaviour overnight. I’ve seen enough primary research on attitudes to global warming to see that – people are far happier to do the right thing if it fits into what they’re used to. And they’re used to stuffing their faces and sitting on the ir arse.

And most people can’t afford to shop at Waitrose either.

And, like people’s biggest biggest problems with hybrid cars, cost aside, is the perceived lack of performance, it’s pretty much the same with food. It needs to behave normally.

Low fat food just doesn’t taste the same – or behave the same. Low fat cheese doesn’t just lose the taste, it loses texture and it when you make cheese on toast, it doesn’t bubble the same way. Low fat mayo isn’t as thick and creamy – so you just pile on more. Turkey rashers, rather than bacon give you gas. Take saturated fat out of meat pies and they become too watery. Burgers made with low fat steak mince don’t bind properly and so on……

What I’m suggesting is that low fat food needs to be indistinguishable from the normal stuff, and that means working hard on re-formatting it to fool us a little bit more. Make it more like the normal stuff. The challenge will be to keep it good for us in other ways. But are chemicals really that bad? Who REALLY likes tea with the chemical taken out? Caffeine I mean.

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