Think back four years to the health crisis that shocked the Government. Thinness was the problem. A Minister, alarmed that pictures of superwaifs were persuading young women to starve themselves, convened a body image summit. Magazine editors duly promised fewer toast-rack physiques and more plump models, such as Sophie Dahl.
What happened next is that Ms Dahl shed three dress sizes and several stones, while the rest of Britain did the opposite. So now we have the fastest-growing fat problem in Europe, and hardly an Ally McBeal lookalike in sight. Children, half of whom could be obese by 2020, risk dying before their parents. Suddenly, nobody is identifying Kate Moss's collarbones as the greatest threat to national health since the Black Death.
Instead, the Commons Health Select Committee has produced a vision pitched somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Beryl Cook. Media reports of its findings evoke a country in which globular amputees hobble on crutches to their local McDonald's and legions acrifice their eyesight to a surfeit of stuffed-crust pizza.
Sometimes it seems that we live in parallel countries. Official Britain is a dystopia populated by skeletons or blimps whose babies choke to death on their own fat at the age of three. Other children cower at home, afraid to venture into a wider world permeated by what Roman Catholic bishops last week described as a 'culture of death'. Abortion, teenage sex, consumerism, demand for legalised euthanasia and diminished respect for the elderly, marriage and the family have, in the bishops' view, created social purgatory.
In unofficial Britain, people pinch themselves. Their neighbours do not resemble dirigibles or famine victims, their children get through whole nights without oxygen tanks, and few people buy the view that sex outside marriage, or aspiring to avoid a painful and protracted death, constitute a highway to an earthly hell.
Specifically, the scare stories thrown up by the obesity report sound overblown. We know that, from Rio to Mumbai, the world is getting fatter. We know that a third of British women are serial dieters. And still, most people's experience fails to tally with doom-laden scenarios. Not since Jonathan Swift recommended, in A Modest Proposal , that the Irish should boil their babies has a story linking food and children seemed so grotesque, or so implausible.
The political reaction, though, has a familiar ring. The food industry, Ministers agree, must volunteer to be more responsible. Or else. Just over a week ago the Prime Minister told a meeting hosted by the drinks group, Diageo, that alcohol binges were a 'new British disease'. The industry, Mr Blair warned, must volunteer to be more responsible. Or else.
Government does not want to venture down the 'or else' route. What's new? Only that something is beginning to jar in Ministers' rejection of nanny statism. On issues of diet and fitness, anyone can see that the state is far from being Mary Poppins, or even a trainee au pair from Riga. British children get fatty school lunches that adults would not touch, playing fields are being sold off and vending machines dispense rubbish.
In other areas, mandatory regulation has not seemed coercive. Crash helmets for motorcyclists and compulsory seatbelts are not an assault on human rights, and even Olympian smokers think it quaint that they were once allowed to puff away on aircraft and buses. The question on food is where to intervene.
For a start, the causes of obesity differ. Sloth, gluttony, depression, genes. If you ask Lord Tebbit, it's all down to gay rights, which is like blaming the Curly Wurly for the intifada . Then there is the argument that what to eat is an individual choice, not one for regulators. There is stigma to consider. To criticise fat youngsters would be unthinkable, especially since their shape is of adults' devising.
People choose to be thin, but fat is foisted on them. Any supermarket trolley or restaurant menu identifies the social chasm between rich and poor. The wealthy are the self-indulgent ones - Spartan gluttons scouring Waitrose for the last spear of organic asparagus. Poorer people do not overdose on burgers through greed or addiction. Low-grade mince, though arguably habit-forming, is not the heroin of the masses. Junk food sells because it is cheap and easy.
The middle classes, commuters with long working days, are also responsible for the outlay of £7,000 a minute on ready meals, three times the average of other Europeans. Bad diet is becoming universal, disaster looms, and the Government, as John Reid and other Ministers keep proudly claiming, is reacting to the crisis by offering fruit to schoolchildren. Never, outside the Garden of Eden, has so much significance been invested in a free apple. Like the biblical fruit, this one comes with conditions. Only four- to six-year-olds are eligible, and insufficient effort is being made to explain that fruit is supposed to replace crisps, not supplement them.
Feeble solutions are more patronising than tougher laws. So is the specious argument that regulation interferes with basic freedoms. How odd that a country which lives under the gaze of CCTV, and allows vital civil liberties to be squandered, should uphold the liberty of manufacturers to brainwash children into poisoning themselves with toxic meals.
Libertarians feel more comfortable having a laugh at the daftness of the health committee's report, complete with calls for a 'walking strategy' and indigestible neologisms. But plough past the 'obesogenic' and the 'diabesity', and the content is thorough. Part calorific ready reckoner (613 per children's burger meal, plus cola), part price guide (21p per satsuma), it is a stern indictment of government inaction. The report's fault is that it proposes more of the same.
The industry, in its recommendation, should get three more years of grace to ponder whether it might consider reducing reckless quantities of salt and fat. Too late. The Government should act now. School vending machines and advertising on children's television must be banned. Cola cans should say that the contents add up to 139 calories, will rot your teeth and make you fat. People have a right to consume what they want, but they deserve to know what they are swallowing.
I dislike officious regulation and foodie purism. I don't lie awake worrying about the perils lurking in a white sliced loaf. I never buy organic produce and would happily eat GM food. I know, like everyone else, that some people gorge themselves or starve for psychological reasons unlinked to astute marketers or social status.
But killing children, albeit slowly, is not a hallmark of civilisation. Industrialists and Ministers are colluding in a state variant of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Obviously countries cannot be run along the lines of a series of Celebrity Fit Club. The state cannot play the role of nanny, personal trainer and diet guru, but nor is it wise for politicians to take a Herodian view of child welfare. Protecting citizens must take precedence over big business interests. This time the doom-mongers have a point.
