GIVEN that our religion centres around a sacred meal, Irresistible: Why we can’t stop eating (BBC2, Monday of last week) should furnish material for sermons and study groups alike. Not the comparison between white, wholemeal, or gluten-free communion wafers that we’d really value, but a rather more devastating exposé of why ultra-processed food is so addictive.
No unfortunate by-product of the global food industry’s noble aim to provide everyone with cheaper and cheaper meals, it’s a deliberate and cynical plot to sell more and more of their products, supported by vast resources of scientific research and analysis.
Supermarkets demand long-lasting products, so preservatives must be added; one of their cakes lasts for four weeks, one you bake yourself, a few days. But the preservatives taste bitter, so other chemicals must be added to balance that out. Your fresh ingredients cost you £4.86; theirs cost them 23 pence. Is any particular food ultra-processed? Check the packet’s list of ingredients: if you neither have them in your larder, nor can even imagine what they are, then it’s ultra-processed.
Such processing makes food softer, encouraging day-long snacking, bypassing the healthy exercise of having to chew — and, although delicious, provides no real sustenance; so we’re still hungry, eat more, and buy more, resulting in the worldwide epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease. The evidence is clear: such a diet (most prevalent, of course, among the poorest) is actually addiction, like alcohol or drug abuse. And the food industry giants learn the tobacco companies’ lessons: commission research into healthy eating as smokescreens while lobbying as hard as possible to prevent scrutiny and regulation. Their glossy advertising and packaging promises healthy, fun-filled lives, while actually promoting idle submission, and eventually death.
When does Christmas begin? For purists, at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, with the King’s College carol service; opening the first Advent calendar door satisfies laxer souls. For Channel 5, it’s the switch-on of The Oxford Street Christmas Lights: Then and now (Tuesday of last week). This was a lightweight documentary, but their story since 1959 provided nostalgic social commentary. Mirroring economic boom and bust, the design and ambition of Christmas lights have waxed and waned; but far more should have been said about today’s catastrophic decline of physical shopping and glamorous department stores. Any parallel with the C of E, still bravely flourishing each Christmas surrounded by 11 months’ collapse, would be unkind.
Disney+ offers star-studded, hyper-glossy Rivals (from 18 October). Colleagues labouring long in the Cotswolds will better judge the accuracy of its depiction of life in their favoured country. I find Jilly Cooper’s enthusiastically sexualised version of the Cinderella myth (put-upon dogsbody wins Prince Charming by sheer goodness) fatally undermined by the hero’s irredeemable unpleasantness.