TV Cooks on the Rampage

What the everloving heck, cooks on the rampage? First some guy called Alton Brown who's rather late and therefore false in claiming that if the US succumbs to the idea that chucking calories down your neck=disease, it will signal the end of the republic as a cultural entity.

Though reports differ, the AMA declared alcoholism a disease in 1959 that's only 55 years ago, so Brown needs more time to take in the implications. He's perhaps a historian. One can say many things about the US but it appears to have weathered that storm. Clearly he knows little about either civilization or the US.

I can agree with him though that this was bunk, as is the same lie about weight. Both were/are more about siphoning health insurance $$$$'s than anything else, note he doesn't bother mentioning this genesis. Haters often don't. How many times have you heard "FGS medical profession/scientists don't call 'obesity' disease!"?

Though wiser among them have stopped trying to pretend that came from fat people [I wouldn't]. On the whole fatz don't give a sweaty armpit for that. Makes me proud.

Then there's Jamie Oliver, wait, I can't hate. Oliver is more pathetic than he is tiresome, though he is undoubtedly that with his construct related blunderings. I caught the last 15 mins of his documentary called "Jamie's Sugar Rush". 'Twas about 15 too many. I can't make myself care enough to do some digging (please) but what I saw contained a dubious-though somewhat ironic-commentary on indigenous Mexicans consumption of fizzy drinks.

In conversation, he made out that this really required some compelling explanation, which turned out to be, they saw fizzy pop as some kind of sacrament [no, I'm not exaggerating]. This from someone peddling secondhand mythology about sugar as the devil's dandruff [ha, ha, bet that gives you pause] responsible for whipping off a leg near  you. All this within a background of a baby on the breast and food cooked from fresh and wholesome ingredients.

Mexico has instituted a sugar tax the programme claimed has reduced 'obesity' by I think he said, 50,000 people. Yep, 'obesity' reduced by x people. That slipped through. I told you 'obesity' has been deemed 'disease' not 'a disease' as folks tend to insist. The distinction is made by what 'obesity' refers to. It defines people as disease in human form. That's clumsy etymology based on the identifying fatness from the eyes of an ignorant slim person imaging what it would be for them to be fat.

That is not what it is to be fat. 

It's a failure of cognizance. It is someone reaching beyond their intellectual capacity and falling flat. That fat people have borne it at all, let alone for this long, shows who's being allowed the controlling influence here.

The context of calories in/out making hunger and food targets put cooks in the firing line as culpable. Their fat phobia is defensive. That framing makes them feel bad, they take it out on fat people. Seeking to distance themselves. You are responsible, not us for making food that is (nominally) delicious.

It also gives somewhat of a taint. Interest, if not obsession with food doesn't make someone pathological, or bad. Hating fatz exonerates this interest.

Then there's what Oliver represents, a keening for gravitas. Cooking is seen as trivial and he is often seen as a dim but eager type. He's like those pop musicians, he wants to be taken seriously, do something important.

'Obesity' has lured him into thinking that's possible for him or necessary in this way. Everyone ought to be appalled at the lack of investigation into metabolic function. But not with the lack of policy formed around food fixated paranoia. You can never have too little of that. The documentary featured a primary (elementary) school where children grew their own veg and knew what various kinds were and like them. They also learned to cook, ace.

All these things were in many schools if you go back far enough. They were mainly removed during the crusade itself. Indeed its emphasis on individual choice in place of hunger was the most uniform agent in that and other things that mitigate implementation of the starvation strategy.

Though 'obesity' is a surface trivial irrelevance, it manages to be a poisoned chalice, splitting focus away from what is worthwhile and doable. If he'd just sought to re-establish a hot balanced meal for dinner in every school, he might have succeeded. Instead, it had to be a certain amount of calories and that just imposed one demand too many.

(Re-)establishing a gardening area in every school, teaching children about produce and wholesome ingredients, plus cookery lessons are laudable enough aims in themselves.

Enough to achieve everything Jamie yearns for, with the addition of fondness from those who might not have rated him. Though many support him-it is due to their fat phobia, not because he has truly impressed.

I understand the programme peddled the usual pseudo-science, conflating 'diabetes' with sugar consumption, the latter as causal agent.

Firing questions, why has type 1 gone up so much also, why do people who eat cook from fresh find 'empty' calories so acceptable to their palate, why isn't children growing produce and eating the norm and so on, just seem like they're aimed at the wrong person. Ultimately, its not Oliver's fault that 'obesity' has so uniformly drawn out the worst vanities in so many.

I would suggest to Oliver that he drop weight loss diet shill Susan Jebb and stick with his knowledge and love of good ingredients to create good food.

I'm not making any deep point, just saying, be aware cooks of sliding into this syndrome. Food is not the way we should be seeking to control our metabolic function. You are not guilty. So stick to what you are good at and be positive about it.