On a street near my home there's a gigantic poster, depicting a grisly photograph of a young girl glugging a five-litre bottle of cooking oil. The oil is pouring down her chin and over her shirt. It looks disgusting and is designed to put you off eating crisps. "What goes into crisps goes into you," shrieks the tagline. Do you see?
Beside the fact that it'd be bloody weird if what went into crisps didn't go into me, but somehow leaped inside the nearest bystander, what's really annoying about the advert (paid for by the British Heart Foundation) is that it's a hysterical exaggeration, the equivalent of a shrieking idiot telling you you'll have someone's eye out in a minute if you don't put the cap back on that pen.
What their stupid poster is trying to say is this: if you eat a large bag of crisps every day for a year, you're effectively "drinking" almost five litres of cooking oil. But so what? Drinking five litres of cooking oil would indeed be awful, but only if you necked it in one go. Sip it in tiny quantities over a full year and it might be quite pleasant. Or you could drizzle it over some crisps. That'd be even nicer.
You could create an equally sickening campaign attacking organic brown rice. Run a cinema ad showing a year's worth of excrement emerging from someone's backside in one endless, unbroken go, accompanied by a voiceover saying look, if you eat organic brown rice every day for a year, here's how much waste you'll jettison. And then to underline the point you'd show someone vomiting over it. You know: just to argue your case subtly, like the British Heart Foundation does.
It's not just them. Wizened, infuriating, oatmeal-and-bracken guru Gillian McKeith creates unappetising food mountains in the kitchens of blobsome paupers in an effort to fuel their self-disgust. Look, you hopeless waddling gluttons: look how revolting it is when we take all the cream cakes and sausages you ate in a week and stack them on top of each other! Watch how the tomato sauce from Thursday's spaghetti hoops congeals with Monday's chocolate milkshake. Weep! Weep, you fat fools!
St Jamie Oliver pulled the same stunt on his recent Return to School Dinners, mixing chips and cakes and fat into an almighty steaming lump in front of horrified onlookers. As a spectacle, it's stomach churning; as dietary advice, it's meaningless. Churn a ton of pesto, scallops, muesli and yoghurt together and it'll look just as grim, especially if the camera intermittently pans up to take in St Jamie's increasingly well-fed face gurning over the top of it.
Still, who cares if the shock tactics make sense - this is about saving lives, right? Well, yeah, maybe - that and snobbery. But where does this demonisation end?
Tip junk food into a trough and you're effectively saying the people who eat it are pigs: greedy ignorant livestock, who perhaps deserve pity, or perhaps scorn, but clearly don't deserve freedom of choice. Because left to their own devices, look what they'll do: they'll happily drink a five-litre bottle of cooking oil, like the woeful, indolent scum we think they are.
