Why not shut the chip shop?

Minding my own business this morning listening to Radio Scotland when a discussion was going on about schools failing in their responsibilities to ensure pupils eat healthy food. Now apart from the fact that schools are places of learning, and teachers and head-teachers are not usually trained dieticians, and the main responsibility for a child’s health lies primarily with parents or other full time carers, and our entire culture is saturated (as in fats) with outlets for fast food, confections (or sweeties), foods high in sugar, sodium, fat and therefore calories – apart from all that, how does a school ensure that secondary school young adults – that’s right, forget children – young adults with the disposable money to buy what they want and  like to eat – how does a school do what it is accused of failing to do. How do you tell a teenager raised in a ‘consumer rules ok’ culture, that an apple is better than a Snickers, and a banana is better than chips.

A very articulate health educationalist, doing a PhD on why primary schools are doing better on the healthy food conversion statistics, was able to tell us that young adults can’t be compelled to not eat unhealthy food, and you don’t change taste and appetite by draconian measures of compliance. Quite so. The young people interviewed had their own opinions of healthy food, I quote only one, and I regret that I am unable to reproduce the exact inflection used in his chosen adjective: "Healthy food juist tastes mingin!"

Suggestions to try to improve the situation in secondary schools have apparently included lunch time lock in, bag search, banning vending machines. The intended social control exerted by such measures I find worrying, and frankly, breathtakingly narrow minded and short sighted. What we put into our bodies is surely one of the most important freedoms and choices we have, always excepting dangerous substances. If in trying to combat obesity and change people’s eating habits, forcing social compliance towards healthier eating is acceptable, why not shut the chip shop? And if chips are so unhealthy (and of course they are if they are staple diet), why not make them a controlled substance, or measure or weigh people in the chip shop queue or at the confectionery stand? I know this is all daft stuff – but no more daft than thinking you can bag search at the school gate for Mars bars or crisps.

What grabbed my attention in this debate is the way a basic right to choose what we put into our own bodies can, at the suggestion of well meaning policy makers, simply be put up for grabs. It goes alongside the weekend revelation that what is already in my body, mainly my organs, are also up for grabs. The presumed consent debate is about who is presumed to own the vital organs and living tissue which at the moment embodies me. Unless I opt out of the assumed right the State wants to have to Nationalise my body, then my permission isn’t needed for others to take parts of me as donor organs. The bigger debate is about life-saving transplants, I know; and the tragic situations of people dying because donor organ availability can’t keep up with medical demand. But a presumption of ownership over a person’s body is a quite outrageous shift in our perception of human value, dignity and definitive freedoms.

I’m beginning to think it’s time to waken up to the danger of allowing daft, half baked proposals for social change to be spoken, argued for, given even minimal plausibility as serious debating points. Bag search teenagers for Mars bars; change the presumption of each person’s inviolate ownership of their own body; change from the presumption of innocence to that of guilt; extend by weeks the length of time a person can be held without charge; introduce universally required identity cards, and link these to employment, spending and other social activity; pay as you go road tax so that every journey is traceable and on someone else’s database; live move and have your being under the pervasive surveillance cameras in cities. Not all these social changes or proposals are daft – but cumulatively it’s hard to escape the feeling that freedom, privacy, personal value, are being eroded by stealth. Or am I just having a bad day?