I Robot Demographic Winter Nanny State PING!
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"Let me finish with something from my old chum Desmond Morris, who turns out to be an even longer-standing friend of Pat Williams [chair]. Over a leisurely and congenial lunch in Oxford, which involved rather more than the recommended 3 units per day of alcohol, we persuaded him to write an article for publication on our web site to do with food and eating from a zoologist's perspective. We thought he would dash off a witty and interesting piece about lions and their taste for wildebeest, or something like that. Instead, what he sent me was a moving account of his mother's death, which had occurred a short time before. The title was 'A little bit of what you fancy'. In it he said:
'It was a meal to make a food faddist swoon away in horror. My mother was piling her plate high with a greasy, fatty, fry-up of a mixed grill and tucking in with gusto. When I say 'with gusto', I mean she was eating with the urgent pleasure of a predator at a kill. Although she was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, she was more in tune with the robust food pleasures of the eighteenth century, when a feast was a feast, and nobody had heard about health foods, diet regimes, or table etiquette that demanded you chew each mouthful 32 times before swallowing.'
'Watching her in action and trying my best to match her appetite, I glibly remarked that if she kept ignoring the words of wisdom of the health gurus and diet experts, she would die young. This may sound like a cruel thing for a son to have said to his mother, but the fact that she was in her 99th year at the time of the meal in question, helps to put my remark into perspective.'
After some eloquent attacks on the pontificators and what he terms the 'diet fascists', and after calling attention to Man's omnivorous nature, Desmond returns to the story of his mother:
'When my mother was dying (just in time to avoid putting the Queen to the trouble of sending her a telegram, as she expressed it) I asked her if there was anything she wanted, 'A gin and tonic' she whispered. I had to feed it to her through a straw. 'If you've got to go, you might as well go with a swing' she said. And where food and drink is concerned, you might as well stay with a swing.'
That, for me, is more than sufficient reason to argue that bad habits are, indeed, of value – that they make us human."