Do the Americans know what's good for them?

I hope she doesn’t read this. While I know that’s unlikely because she lives in America, she does have relatives in the Newcastle area who may read it and tell her what I’ve said. And then where will I be? Divorced probably.

You see, she’s one of my wife’s best friends and their friendship’s endured all sorts including marriage breakups and emigration. But if she (let’s call her “Mary”) sees that my wife’s told me about the diet Mary lives on, and I’ve then written in a widely-read newspaper that it’s no wonder she’s got so many chronic illnesses, their friendship may become under too great a strain and my wife’ll take it out on me.

But I’d not be telling the whole truth if I didn’t mention that after only three days of visiting her over there, my wife rang to demand that I start planning the food I was going to give her when she got home, which was still over a week away. She was already craving fresh fruit and vegetables and, even though she’s a great fan of cheese, she was already sick of the stuff that they call cheese that appears on everything in every meal. She noticed there was even a choice of cheese in the larder: Cheese Whiz or Easy Cheese – both in spray cans! Who on Earth finds the cheese we eat so difficult they need an Easy Cheese?

Things seemed to get even worse when, catering for a party that was coming around, Mary took a packet of processed meatballs from the freezer, poured them, along with the contents of a super-sized bottle of tomato ketchup, into a slow cooker to allow the balls to thaw and heat up. It’s no surprise that my wife declined these particular delicacies. After all, she’s used to living with me and, while we don’t eat fancy food all the time, we do at least know what we’re eating and what goes into it. However, the guests thought nothing was novel.

It’s no surprise that Mary, an intelligent professional, suffers from more ailments than most GPs have experienced. Numerous allergies compete with migraines and age-related arthritis-type afflictions which are all the time being battled with packeted diet meals, low-fat spreads, fat-free milk and bottles of pills while she continues to live on food comprising . . . .  Well that’s the problem: she has no idea what’s in the food she’s eating. And, while she continues to fail to loose weight while at the same time eating processed foods picked straight off the shelves of the supermarket, it won’t matter what treatments she gives herself, they won’t work. After all, no amount of car engine additive is going to help a diesel engine fed petrol.

What happens in America soon comes to the UK. If this same type of diet is followed by people here, maybe I shouldn’t be too put out that the powers-that-be feed us such simplistic-seeming instructions as eat-five-a-day and so on. If we’re as far gone as the Americans though, it almost seems a lost cause. Maybe we should allow the people who choose to eat what they like without understanding the consequences to die off and then we can start with a new stock so to speak and educate them properly. As it is, we’re allowing a generation of ignoramuses to influence their offspring and spray cheese may be the least of our worries.

She was a good friend of my wife’s. Anyone know a good divorce lawyer?

20th May 2011