There's another government initiative on food, one more step in the process of raising awareness about what is really in what we eat.

But I wonder whether anyone who is fat, or who lives with someone who is fat, really thinks it will matter a row of tinned flageolets.

I fear all this breast-beating about food hazards is just making the problem worse.

Maybe there are other reasons for being fat but, in my experience, the most important factor is self-esteem: believing that what you do between breakfast and bedtime matters - to you, if not to anyone else in the whole world. I think it used to be called self-respect.

It's a whole lot easier to start to get fat than it is to stop getting fat and start getting thin. And when you eat, because it makes you feel better and you eat too much of the wrong thing, because the wrong things - the fats, the sugars, the chips and the doughnuts - make you feel better quicker, the fact that the whole world is looking on with pursed lips and sucked teeth just makes those things more desirable.

Once you are fat, the whole world gangs up on you. That's why you need fat friends, to laugh with when you can't get into size 14 in Topshop (so demoralising it almost guarantees that you won't make it into a size 16 the next time); someone to bunk off with and go and buy a bag of pick'n'mix and a coke.

Of course you know you shouldn't do it. But when every time you turn on the TV there's another solemn face telling you that being fat makes you a bad person. So who wouldn't?

Being fat has never been fun. It's a myth that once no one cared and Billy Bunter was the most popular boy in the school. But now the criteria for success in life are so tightly drawn, the premium so high and so frequently underlined by everything we watch and read and talk about, that most of us are doomed to fail. Nowadays, being fat is often (almost always?) a sad side-effect of feeling useless.

At some point, with a bit of luck, most of us grow up and learn to live with who we are. (That's probably the time when we are most likely to be able to take a sensible decision about how we are going to live and what we're going to eat.)

But until then - in many cases well into middle age - a sense of failure and the lack of a sense of being in control of one's life and one's future, especially when other things go wrong, mean bad food sure does make you feel good - until the next lecture from a thin person.