by I’ve just been watching a YouTube video from the Royal Institution about ultra-processed foods. The subject of obesity comes up a lot, especially when you talk to non-overweight older people. The younger generations (which include anyone under 60!) are too stupid and lazy and immoral to eat proper food and they don’t know when to stop and blah blah blah. A few years ago a photo of Brighton Beach in the 1970s (it was probably during the heatwave of 1976) did the rounds. Look how slim everyone was back then! The implication was that we’ve all got stupider and lazier since then. The real story is the increased availability of all that ultra-processed junk (and in some cases non-junk, or at least marketed as non-junk), not a massive loss of willpower that began in the late seventies and occurred in both men and women and across all ages and ethnicities. Willpower is a thing, and some of us are blessed with more of it than others, but the idea that humans lost it en masse a few decades ago is ludicrous. What the video didn’t quite go into (but Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens books did) was how incompatible modern food availability and consumption are to the caveman instincts that we still have. I live in Timișoara where I have a substantial market within walking distance and half a dozen more markets a reasonable bike ride away, so most of what I eat doesn’t even have an ingredients list. Most people aren’t so lucky.
Last week some lurid language came out of the UK Covid inquiry, but the expression that stuck in my mind was Dominic Cummings’ (who else) description of Cabinet Office in March 2020 as terrifyingly shit. I can’t stand Cummings, but it was a pretty accurate description. The handling of the pandemic at that point was dangerously, frighteningly, life-threateningly, bad. From my last few conversations with Dad, he has a similar view of the UK as a whole. A country unravelling, with few prospects for improvement. If Labour win the next election, they’ll hopefully drive out the sheer toxicity of the Tories, but there’s little sense that they’ll make any meaningful positive change. It’s all very different from the feeling before the 1997 election. Indeed I remember a conversation I had with Dad in 1993 – he was my current age then – in which we talked driving across the vastness of Russia and the former Soviet Union, not long after it had all opened up. Now there’s no optimism, no sense of hope at all on a scale beyond one’s own immediate family and friends. That’s terrifying.
