Archive for the 'Eating & drinking' Category

Healthy eating != bruschetta-eating

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

Julie Bindel has a comment piece in the Guardian about the class snobbery that permeates the healthy eating debate, and particularly about the way that fair-trade liberals sneer at the poor for eating badly. It’s nearly sensible, but it falls down on a crucial point:

Encouraging a healthy diet has far more to do with choice than education… Although the majority have worked out that freshly squeezed orange juice is better for their child than fizzy pop, they have neither the budget nor the time to offer it… It is time we put working-class and poor people on a par with those of us who can afford to choose. It is no good sneering at people in Scotland who deep fry Mars Bars if we do nothing to make healthy food more widely available.

The point where this falls down, just in case you missed it too, is that healthy food is not expensive or unavailable.
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