Firetop

‘We’re getting obese in Britain’ is the message we hear and read a lot in the media now. Jamie Oliver goes to schools to sort out unhealthy meals (which actually were quite healthy at my school fifteen years ago), an irritating Scottish woman gets on the box to remind us that if we piled all our week’s food up on a table it would look ridiculous, and the Prime Minister starts advising people to eat more fruit and vegetables. Has it really come to this? I do wonder if food packaging will soon come with large black and white labels stating ‘eating too much sugar could make you fat’ like they’ve done with the ‘oh so effective’ cigarette packets.

One good bit of news in the fight against fat is that UK potato crops are at their lowest yield for 20 years following the bizarrely hot July and wetter than average August. Prices of chips and crisps will be forced up and passed on to the consumer; a torrid time ahead for Walkers, McCain and chip lovers everywhere… blame global warming.

When I was a young lad I interviewed a ’large’ lady for a job. She was perfectly suited to the tasks at hand and I told my boss the good news – “we’ve filled the positionâ€? I said, but was told “yes I agree, you’ve more than filled it and you can’t employ her, she’s fat and we all know fat people are lazy peopleâ€?. I was pretty shocked to say the least. “Do you really think that she’s the image we want people to think of when they say our company name?â€? I was asked. Needless to say this poor lady didn’t get her job because my boss wouldn’t allow it (and I wanted to keep mine). So there you have it, ‘fatism’ does exist in the workplace, as do some very odd perceptions about fat people’s capacity for hard work. But it proves that I personally have got nothing against fat folks, not unless they’re sitting beside me on a plane or train, and then I usually have everything against them

I’ve put on three stone in five years by eating too much junk food. It tasted good on the way down but I’ve gone from a 34 to a 38 inch waist, and at my current rate of expansion will be a 44 inch waist by the time I’m forty. Something that would slow me down would be a tax on ‘bad foods’ - donuts, chocolate bars, full fat curries and fast foods. If it was too expensive I wouldn’t eat it as much, and I’d loose weight. And here’s another idea, take the proceeds of the ‘fat tax’ and subsidise organic vegetables to bring the prices down and encourage healthier eating.

Another candidate for a ‘fat tax’ is public transport; buses, trains and especially planes. When purchasing your flight to Orlando you should get charged by your weight, is it fair that everybody gets charged for extra luggage but fat people don’t pay more for their extra body weight? Or for an additional seat - in extreme cases? They clearly require additional force to be exerted in order to get them off the ground and more energy is needed, increasing carbon output and worsening global warming. So let’s tax fat people, making plane travel more comfortable for those who can control their eating habits and slow down global warming.

At least it all proves that there are checks and balances at work in the world – eat too many chips and you get fat, get fat and you require more energy to fly - thereby increasing carbon emissions, the result of which is you screw up the climate and UK potato crops take a knock on effect – thus reducing levels of obesity back down again due to a chip shortage. Perhaps that’s what global warming is for, it’s an obesity balancer.

 

Technorati Tags: fat people, obesity, green taxes, global warming

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