Portion control.

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When I first heard this bit of Newspeak, it referred to the amount of food on a plate. Increasingly it is used to refer to the type of food. That’s because, in many cases, the amount has been reduced to zero.

“Let him who has knowledge count the number of the Beast” goes the ancient prophecy. Well, who would have knowledge other than those who have already seen the Beast in action? Those who have already watched the tobacco template applied., over and over again, can easily spot its early stages.

(Tobacco) causes diseases you never thought it could cause. Including a new way to say AGE-related dementia. In conversation you cannot tell the difference, which makes it easy for the drones to accept.

(Tobacco) causes a different disease too, using exactly the same mechanism.

(Tobacco) is, of course, capable of causing cancers in parts of the body you don’t (smoke) through.

And of course, if you live as directed, you will live forever.

Just replace (tobacco) with lovely fried bacon or something similar and there you go.

A couple of interesting points here. If fried food causes prostate cancer and assuming you don’t roll up slices of bacon and insert them into the eye of your one-eyed trouser snake (I have to say ‘assume’ because you just know there’s always going to be one), then, as with smoking, the only way those carcinogens can reach the prostate is through the blood. Therefore, as with smoking causing remote cancers, the NHS must immediately cease accepting blood donations from anyone who has had a fry-up in the last month. Otherwise, a transfusion recipient who later develops cancer can sue. I really hope someone does. All the evidence is there for them, pronounced by Experts.

The other point is that despite the claim that ‘vegetarians have a lower mortality rate’, the truth is that they all die anyway. Just like everyone else. It might take longer, it might allow the care homes to utterly fleece them of every penny and then batter them around until it’s time to put them on the Stairway to Liverpool and find a way to make it a smoking-related death.

All that aside though, the template is clear. The Beast is back again. All those diseases that were the sole preserve of smoking, then of drinking, are now all caused by the wrong kind of food. The high-energy kinds of food. The ones you need to keep you active and prevent you turning into an easily controlled zombie.

Sure, I know vegetarians who do well on that diet. I do not, and I have tried it. It makes me slow, dazed and appallingly flatulent. My own metabolism does not appreciate slowly-digested things. It wants it all and it wants it now. Low food intake means, to me, rapid weight loss. As in – six pounds weight loss in three days when I had that cold and wasn’t eating much. Oh I was eatling, but picking at food. When you can’t taste it, there is little to appeal.

I’m not fat. If I lost weight at that rate steadily, I would be nothing more than a Cheshire Cat smile in less than a month. If you see a floating smile, pour whisky in, please. I might reform around it.

So no, these new dietary diktats are not for me. I need salt. I do not have high blood pressure. I need fast-burning carbohydrates. As for meat, I like it. I like to eat dead things. It’s better than eating living vegetable matter. In fact I am particularly fond of lamb so I can declare that I like to eat dead babies. I declare this with pride and an evil grin. Mainly because I know it will enrage PETA and as a smoker, that gives me a double-edged sword to fillet them with. Does anyone still think it’s not the same template? Anything to say on that slippery slope fallacy now, Dreadful Arnott?

Do they offer us anything to replace our burgers, steaks and bacon? Why yes, yes they do. I suppose we can take comfort in the knowledge that it isn’t burger-flavoured gum or a shrew duct-taped to your arm, but those things might be preferable to what they really want us to eat.

frogfoodFunny, they don’t seem to mind if we deep-fry the locusts. So once again, it is not about health.

But then, none of it ever was, was it?

21 thoughts on “Portion control.”

  1. Loma Linda, California is a stones throw away. It’s a Seventh Day Adventist veggie-town. When I was a kid there was only one grocery store in town, the Loma Linda Market. Big fruit and vegetable section – no meat counter. No cigarettes for sale , nor booze either. Strictly cleansville.

    For cheap thrills we’d get some unsuspecting schmuck to execute an I Buy, You Fly maneuver for us while we waited out in the car. Here’s two dollars, you go in and get us all a pound of sliced bologna and a loaf of bread and it’s lunchtime on me, sound good?

    They’d come back out red-faced and dumbfounded saying “You’re not gong to believe this but they don’t sell meat in there” or alternately “You sonafabitch, you!”

    Then there was the slight variation of sending someone in for a pack of cigarettes.

    It was funnier than hell. Well, you just had to have been there to fully appreciate it.

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  2. When I went veggie about twenty years ago, I discovered some delicious homemade food. One of my favourites was my burgers, made with half soya mince and half cooked white rice, mixed up with onion, seasoning and an egg to bind – and soy sauce to colour the rice – and fry them up like normal burgers, bung them in rolls with tomato sauce (‘ketchup’ for US Leggites), a few lettuce leaves if you can find some hanging around the kitchen, and hey! Spot the difference. Especially when I tend to overcook everything.

    Then I shortly returned to normal, but about a year ago I went veggie again after I read in the Daily Scare that animals given a halal slaughter and later found to have a blemish are no longer declared halal and enter the food chain declared as non-halal. That was the last straw. I still eat fish because they don’t have Muslims on fishing boats manically slitting their throats while pointing them towards Mecca.

    But I’m not veggie out of choice. No way! It’s the forced multiculturalism that’s done that thanks to our treasonous politicians and multinationals who don’t care. And while there’s labelling for almost every conceivable thing, there isn’t for halal slaughter. No gory pictures on otherwise plain packaging of animals hanging upside down with their throats cut and bleeding to death.

    But the normal person’s attention span seems to be worse than ever – I can’t be the only person to tell people something one day and have to tell them the same thing again a week later as they’ve no recollection of when I told them the previous week – or day, even. So it’s easy that what was blamed on smoking can now be blamed on drinking (like throat cancer – number one cause in under 50s is disgusting oral business and apparently alcohol is up there being mentioned now, whereas a year or two ago, everyone assumed it was all caused by smoking).

    But because the average person now has a memory that makes your average goldfish seem like Ross and Noris McWhirter (for those who remember ‘Record Breakers’ in the 70s) what they once blamed on smoking, they can say it’s the booze or the fat/sugar/salt – but never the aspartame or artificial colours which are known to cause grievous harm.

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  3. …the ones you need to keep you active and prevent you turning into an easily controlled zombie.

    I recently had a good look at a GCSE Food and Nutrition textbook (that’s what they call it these days – sounds nice and scientific; never mind if you’re crap at chemistry, kids, you can do this!).

    I think you would be amused by the extent of the doublethink required to explain that a) you need lots of energy especially when growing and b) these foods are energy-dense, but c) you mustn’t eat any of them or you will die horribly of diabetes and heart disease, possibly at the same time.

    The whole thing is a right-on jargon-fest of ‘eatwell plates’ and ‘five a day’, while remaining interestingly vague on the details of halal meat production or – and quite a crucial point, this – the difference between intolerance and allergy. It’s not exactly reassuring to know that a proportion of tomorrow’s catering workers won’t be able to distinguish between ‘seafood doesn’t agree with me’ and ‘if you let any shellfish get into my food I will die of anaphylaxis’.

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  4. Leggy, isn’t the brain at least 3/5ths fat? Isn’t the ‘war on fat’ really a war on thinking? Yet another way after television and state education to dumb us down? Would that be a fair assumption or am I being as mad as a box of frogs again, to quote one of your readers a few days ago?

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  5. …I have tried it. It makes me slow, dazed and appallingly flatulent.

    Back in the late ’60s when I was enamoured of Eastern spiritualism and ‘you are what you eat’ I went vegetarian for about a year. I am by nature a very un-stressed and laid back (some might say lazy) person, and after a year of vegetarianism, it occurred to me that I had become positively supine and lacking any drive whatsoever. So I went to an Angus steakhouse and ordered a porterhouse steak that had only had ‘grill’ whispered in it’s ear and been given a brief glance at the cooking apparatus. I’ve never looked back since.

    Re SC’s opinion of Halal meat, I do agree, although it has never stopped me eating it. His principles are obviously stronger than mine! Years ago (1967) when I was in Chitral (NW Frontier) I had a room on the roof of a chai shop which overlooked the local butcher / slaughterman’s yard. He was the only one in town, I believe, and every morning at first light I would be awoken to the pitiful moans of some poor cow that had been hobbled and laid down with it’s neck over a ditch and had it’s throat cut. It died slowly as its life-blood ran down the ditch. Not the alarm call that I would have chosen.

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    • I’ve visited slaughterhouses for gut samples, but never a halal or kosher one. Perhaps it’s because I worked mainly with pigs.

      There are some very dark senses of humour in those places – and that’s just the humane ones.

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  6. “…and find a way to make it a smoking-related death.”
    Dammit! That’s another keyboard you owe me. A little OT, I wonder if the late Doctor’s Shipman’s diagnosis of ‘death caused by smoking’ for his 300+ victims was ever altered?
    (Or should I wonder?)

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  8. If being a vegetarian is so awfully good for you. And 500 million people in India are,

    http://www.vegetarians.co.nz/articles/500-million-vegetarians-in-india/

    Then you’d expect to see a wonderfully long life expectancy.

    https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

    India comes in at 103, the UK comes in at 30 and those with access to first class medical treatment, plus the means to access it, make up the top four places.

    Seem the top eight also benefit from low levels of tax, though Japan has recently changed that policy.

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  9. Pingback: Portion Control | Underdogs Bite Upwards! | Vap...

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