EATING MADNESS, ALL THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES

September 18 2006: the last few days have seen a couple of significant happenings within the public weight arena. Firstly, Jamie Oliver has returned to his school dinners theme (for our non-UK readers, Jamie Oliver is a celebrity chef campaigning for improved school meals. He speaks in a distinctive London vernacular and his trademark dialect-term "pukka tucker" translates as "good food"!). Secondly, reports from top UK children's hospital Great Ormond Street say that kids as young as seven are now caught up in the Hardcore Dieting madness:-

The latest blast of media food hysteria has it that seven year olds are now dieting themselves into eating related difficulties. That comes as no surprise to us - in fact the dieting induction often starts shortly after birth and it's going to take a lot more than a few scoops of pukka bloody tucker to sort out the complex eating mess we've got ourselves into.

Most people seem to love Jamie's Nu Skool dinners, amazingly even the kids - but within the total nutrition and weight picture can they achieve much more than window dressing of parental food hang-ups?

It would be great if re-education were to flow upwards from daughter to mother and from son to father but there's a danger of projecting our own food paranoia on to our children whilst conveniently ignoring our own demons.

In the West we are stitched culturally in to a food-centric mentally as tightly as a haggis is squeezed into its skin. Cultural and commercial pressures conspire to keep us there and the quality of political debate is far from savoury.

The nanny state has been getting up quite a head of steam over the last year or so. This “Slimming by Statute” movement points its accusing finger at the usual bogeymen – big business, in this case the leviathans of the international food industry. Even better should they be American, the likes of McDonald's and Coca Cola stand accused of seducing us into obesity.

And the Right has its equally simpliste counterpoint. Have you seen the flurry of opinion pieces? Only stupid, weak, selfish people get overweight (unless, like some authors, of course, they are sufficiently sassy and independently minded that they can choose to be overweight).  The loathsome mass market fatties are the new centre of ridicule, even the new enemy within. Opprobrium has moved on from the chavs to the fatties, whatever the reality and implications of the so-called “Obesity Epidemic” itself.

So people feel obliged to do something. At the governmental level we get a slew of vacuous worthiness. The US and the UK have been making aspirational announcements for over 100 years  about the “ideal diet” for their citizens. Down to the present day the public generally pays not a blind bit of notice to such exhortations, unsupported as they are by any excitement of hard sell from the diet industry.

And this is where all the action remains. For many longterm dieters it has ceased to have much to do with weight loss and simply become a badge of ongoing food related distress and confusion. It's a Dantesque horror, hopping from one futile fad diet to the next with no end to the torment in sight.

It's gone mainstream, it's going more hardcore and it's getting them younger. Dieting started for those who could afford to be precious about food back in the Victorian era but it only took off in the 1960's. It was a rebel thing women flirted with in their 20's when they left home – they picked at their food but they didn't starve.

But by the 1970's they certainly did starve as anorexia blossomed alongside Women's Lib. and the explosive growth within the dieting industry.

By the '80's dieting was becoming just a way of life, with the rarely mentioned and rather unpleasant side effect of growing armies of women privately putting two fingers up to it all in the form of booming Bulimia. By the mid to late 90's the cult of superwomen had moved on a bit and the ideal continues to be the average athlete who can juggle career, home, kids and weight distress.

These days the West is increasingly exporting its more extreme anorexia and bulimia to 2^nd world countries and settling back into a comfortable and predictable phase of endemic eating dysfunctionality.

It crept gradually down the age scale over the last 40 years, from mid-20's in the 60's, on to mainstream teenage fashion and by the 90's down to the pre-teens. It then hit a problem, that of children below 7 or 8 being below the age of dieting understanding and hence dieting consent. But hardcore dieting is nothing if not ingenious in its expansionism and so it did something very clever – it got the mothers and fathers to take it right back to age zero, skipping the awkward years in between.

Parents increasingly prefer “formula” milk and prepackaged infant food because you can carry on the counting obsession. Forget the vagueness of some lightly steamed vegetables mashed up with a little mince or flaked fish, you know exactly where you are with labels. This is the highest achievement to date of the creeping process of nutritional dislocation which is paralysing natural feeding instincts.

It would strike one as utterly absurd if there was a whole industry and national obsession premised on uncertainty and quack advice about breathing. Yet this is how we have become regarding eating. For several millennia people have managed quite well feeding themselves.

It gets worse as it is all being clouded over by some overly stretched definitions of eating disorders. Just as it is remarkable how few poor people have genuine food allergies, so can the definitions and claims surrounding eating disorders become surprisingly elastic. Some people can die from the merest fraction of a peanut and death by anorexia is a cruel torment - but the great unspoken in all of this is often the surrounding disingenuous whimsicality.

At a time when the most extreme phase of eating disorders in the West appears to be over, the definitions of what can constitute an eating disorder becomes more open.  One only needs to cast around a selection of eating disorder websites to bear this out. Most people who have ongoing doubts about self-image and have any significant history of failed dieting can walk straight into the eating disorders camp. Illness is a third party treatment issue; pathologisation is a lock-out to self-help.

The keys to unpacking and unpicking the nutrition conundrum need not be overly complex, nor the preserve of medical specialists. Many commentators now recognise that commercial dieting is the reddest of herrings with regard to lasting and relaxed weight control and is in a fact a major contributory factor to widespread obesity.

To some extent it is one of those "white bear" things, whereby the more you try not to think about something the more it dominates your consciousness.A practical step is to loosen the three restricting bands which keep food and dieting fixations in place.

Ignoring any one of the emotional, cultural or commercial pressures will almost certainly condemn a problem eater to weight-control failure.

Apart from occasional celebration and a backdrop to sociability, eating needs to be food, not mood.  Less widely appreciated than the unrealism of waif-thin icons is the need women especially feel to be involved with dieting - the need to fit in with friends and society by talking, living and suffering it. Hardcore dieting has sadly become for many a rite of passage into womanhood.

Similarly men are increasingly under pressure to hop on the body beautiful bandwagon; manhood could be next major eating battleground.

Good nutrition needs to be a background and enabling environment, not a constantly in-your-face (often literally) obsession. Mindshifts do not occur in the stomach. Kids should not be made doppelgangers to their parents' eating hang-ups but rather be allowed to mature naturally out of their puppy fat.

Larkin might just as well as have been referring to food when he wrote of parents, “They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.” That Nu Skool stir-fry, be careful – it's possibly not as additive-free as you'd hoped, or as Jamie intended.

It's going to take a lot more than this to deliver us from our collective eating madness. Ad hoc mini-crusades, without full regard to the broader picture, can fall short or backfire.

If Jamie can help ease in a new generation of eaters, emancipated from bottom-end junk food and dieting bunkum, fair play to him. The problem is that with their parents' food obsessions still raw and unrefined, their geese may have been well and truly cooked before then.