It’s bad therefore it should be banned. No hesitation, no intervening punctuation. Just add -nne- to bad and you’re there. That’s the meme we have to hack to death.
An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (News Review, 5.7) spreads this same poisonous little idea, far more poisonous than anything in junk food itself. Junk food, says Medicine Today editor Jerome Burne, is bad for you. It contains too much sugar and screws around with the way your brain cells operate. People who have given groups of children non-junk-food diets have seen remarkable improvements in their behaviour. Ergo corporation chasing American lawyers are launching class actions against junk food makers, and Congress is considering taxing junk food.
That is the kind of legislation Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South and chair of the reform group Food Justice, would like to see in this country. “It is time the government took the side of society rather than the food industry,” he says. “I would support a tax on junk food, on sugar or on snack food advertising. That could then fudn effective campaigns to promote healthy eating.”
But what is wrong with simply saying that you think junk food is bad, and saying why, as publicly as you can, if that is what you think? Why do you need government money to say something? Why should people who like junk food and don’t misbehave as a result be hit by the law and by the tax man merely to sort out all those kids who eat badly? I read the article. It had me convinced about everything except the need for the lawmakers to get involved. What’s wrong with that as a general strategy?
Next to this junk article about junk food there’s another one about why sleep is a good thing. (I know. There we all were thinking we didn’t need any.) Presumably they couldn’t think of any laws to pass to make us sleep better. So they just had some advice: sleep better. That’s the way to do these things.
