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Well, of course

British retailers have called for the government to take tougher action on tackling obesity and consider mandatory measures to ensure more companies make their products healthier.

Public health bosses have urged food manufacturers to make chips, pizzas, crisps and burgers healthier, and ministers are expected to issue “strong guidance” on how to reformulate products popular with children.

However, the British Retail Consortium, which represents more than 90 retailers including major chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, said the government would need to move beyond voluntary agreements if it wanted to make a real difference.

“We believe voluntary approaches only take us so far,” said Andrea Martinez-Inchausti, deputy director of food and sustainability at the BRC.

“If you really want to make a difference then there is a need for stronger measures. Taxes might be one of way of doing it but there are alternatives to taxes such as mandatory targets.”

To translate. We know the demanded changes will make everything taste like shit. So, none of us will do it voluntarily, fearing loss of business. You know, the punters just don’t like stuff that tastes of shit.

So, force everyone to do it.

46 thoughts on “Well, of course”

  1. Why can’t the cowardly fuckers just say : “No . Fuck off Mr gubmint puke. We are not going to do shit with or without legislation. We and the public are sick of your nannying tyranny”. Very publicly.

    The impact would vast. Imagine some gubbo-slime spokes-creature on TV eyes bulging and gob working like an expiring goldfish “But…but…it’s the LAAAAWWW”

    “Fuck off–and we’re asking the British people to support us by demanding the de-selection and dismissal of any MP who supports this shit and an Eck’s style punishment sacking of any bureaucrat who thinks of and/or endorses–let alone tries to carry out –this shit”.

    They would have a good chance of success and forcing the poli-scum to eat their own vomit as well as drawing boundaries to the states meddling. At least they could enter their houses each night justified as men who stood up for something.

    Next up –removing those fucking “Stuff we can not sell you” shite next to every check-out.

  2. Could we give local authorities the power to set VAT on domestic energy at 20%, if they want to, and to keep the additional income.
    Then we’d have a nice suite of natural experiments to see if central heating is an issue ( one of our host’s theories ).
    The feckers at PHE seem to think fat councils like Copeland and Gateshead need the same national policies as skinny Richmond. For no reason.

  3. The government has long been threatening such moves, saying they’ll legislate if the sector doesn’t address the problem itself. Now the supermarkets are calling their bluff. I expect the government will fold.

  4. The left must be using their usual schizoid methods on this.

    On the one hand they hate fascists but on the other the State can never be too powerful.

    To me, Public Health (where even an optician can talk authoritatively about your obesity/smoking/drinking) are the real fascists.

    It doesn’t need a genius to imagine the format of their meetings. Half an hour in an ait-conditioned office reading their news clippings followed by three hours at The Ivy, eating salty, fatty food washed down by a few gallons of Gevery Chambertin.

  5. “Public Health” is stuffed full of anti-capitalist far Left nut jobs who don’t even recognise the right of private enterprise to exist, let alone be able to sell ‘unhealthy’ food. Retailers are playing a dangerous game feeding the crocodile. It will eventually consume them.

  6. Now the supermarkets are calling their bluff. I expect the government will fold.

    Hopefully. The banks knuckled under when the government helpfully suggested that the keenness of the banks in letting people open accounts was letting evil terrorists and money launderers in.

    Of course, actual terrorists were already barred and transactions that were actual, or even suspected, money laundering was subject to stringent reporting requirements.

    But no, now Mrs Beenwiththesamebankforages has to bring several large folders of irrelevant ID if she wants to open a new savings account. And the evil bastards still get away with it. Why?

    Because they are evil bastards and just lie.

    But the government are happy. Cnuts.

  7. The gradual salt reduction in cornflakes seemed to have worked. I mean somehow no brand disrupted that with ‘tastes like the original” and no consumers went on a new coke strike.

  8. “British retailers have called for the government to take tougher action on tackling obesity….” The last piece of legislation, the banning of free plastic bags, fed straight through to the megastore profit line. Where’s the money on this latest initiative?

  9. ‘However, the British Retail Consortium, which represents more than 90 retailers including major chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, said the government would need to move beyond voluntary agreements if it wanted to make a real difference.’

    Odd demand from a trade council. Give us more government!

    Could be they want government to enforce the idiocy on their competitors. The fascist/business alliance tends toward monopoly.

  10. The processed and manufactured food industries are now at least two hundred years old and have expanded greatly since the mid 20th Century. It is too late.

  11. BIND –
    well thank heavens they haven’t banned cruet sets yet!

    I remember plenty of people in the 80’s/90s who were ‘auto-condimentors’ (RIP Terry P) does’nt seem to be a thing now, but they’re still there, the cruet sets, on every table at home and in the cafe. The point is adding salt to taste is always an option.

    It’s probably just be my borgeois cultural conditioning but i don’t see this as marxist art rather just fabulously gay.

    http://soviet-art.ru/soviet-painter-ilya-mashkov/ilya-mashkov-self-portrait-and-a-portrait-of-petr-konchalovsky-1910-state-russian-museum/

  12. When will these people realise that some people are just gluttons. Not only that, they are Gluttons who do not exercise at all. They are going to cost the NHS a lot of our cash treating their chronic type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. It has nothing to do with companis making preprepared ready meals nor with retailers. It has everything to do with idiots over eating. Education is required. Make a tiny burger and these people will eat two instead of one. Governments seem staffed with idiots.

  13. “When will these people realise that some people are just gluttons.”

    When will people realise that some people are too tall? Over the past 150 years, the average height of people in industrialised nations has increased by about 4 inches! (It’s an over-tallness epidemic!) That’s because they’re idiots eating too much. Education is required.

    “They are going to cost the NHS a lot of our cash treating their chronic type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.”

    Have you ever heard of the “obesity paradox“?

    I’m curious as to whether people have heard of it and are dismissing it for some reason, or whether it’s simply that nobody has heard about it. If you only ever get told one side of the argument, it’s not unreasonable to assume it’s “settled science”.

    But if people have heard of it and are dismissing it because ‘government experts’ doing public education have told them it’s not true, perhaps “education” isn’t the answer?

    Do we need more government “education” on climate change? (It’s just ‘idiots’ using too much fossil fuel.) Do we need more government “education” on tax avoidance? (It’s just ‘idiots’ not paying enough taxes.) How do we know the things we ‘know’?

  14. I don’t know how you do it NiV, butI follow the pattern that everyone else has throughout mankind’s history: through my five senses ordered by my brain.

  15. “I have recently eaten a bag of M&S crisps. They weren’t salty enough: I shall buy no more”

    At a recent family picnic our hosts provided a bag of Co-op “hand baked” crisps. They obviously cost a lot more than ordinary varieties, but were quite frankly not a patch on a bag of Walkers. A look at the ingredients revealed a fraction of the fat (baked, instead of fried) and salt content – the things that give “unhealthy” crisps their taste. The biggest joke was the self congratulatory praise on the label – how their “taste testers” gave them top marks! Most of the packet went in the bin…

  16. “I don’t know how you do it NiV, butI follow the pattern that everyone else has throughout mankind’s history: through my five senses ordered by my brain.”

    OK. And by which of our five senses did we here determine that “They are going to cost the NHS a lot of our cash treating their chronic type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.”? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any sense that can see the mechanisms causing diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. Is it like X-ray vision? 🙂

    What I mean is, do we do it by looking at the evidence, or by believing what government-endorsed experts tell us to believe? Isn’t the latter what we mean by “education”?

  17. More of your cockrot “science” NiV.

    Couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the NHS or collectivist tripe about what fatties supposedly cost us. But any “scientist” who thinks that carrying more weight doesn’t make the heart work more is a fuckwit. Now he says that there is no evidence that being fat “strains” the heart. And it may not on each and every occasion. Having seen however, on numerous occasions fatties huffing, puffing and sweating in the heat as they toiled up assorted hills–the “scientists” in question need –like yourself–a substantial and ongoing course of injections of high-strength common sense.

    Although in your case NiV such alien material introduced into your system would be as like to kill as to cure you.

  18. “But any “scientist” who thinks that carrying more weight doesn’t make the heart work more is a fuckwit.”

    Anyone who thinks doing intensive cardiovascular exercise doesn’t strain the heart is a fuckwit. Therefore doing regular exercise (like going to the gym or running up hills) is bad for the heart. Totally logical.

    That’s what you call “common sense”, is it?

  19. They are also basically saying that being fat is so bad ‘for you’ (read: you belong to the government) that they’ll be willing to kill people to stop it.

    Because that’s what ‘mandatory’ means when the government says it.

  20. Bloke in Costa Rica

    The old “but you can add more salt if you want” thing crops up, as usual. Squander Two, formerly of this parish, was fond of pointing out how spectacularly that missed the point. Go and make some scrambled eggs, or bread, or ham and leave the salt out. You can add it later, right? After you’ve finished gagging and have thrown the vile mess in the bin, you can ponder the implications of a world in which food is super-abundant, but tastes like shit.

  21. SE – have you opened a bank account recently?
    I have to produce a lot less ID now than I did 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.
    Now I provide a bunch of personal details and that’s that.
    Have opened 3 accounts with banks I have not used before in the past 12 months.

  22. “you can ponder the implications of a world in which food is super-abundant, but tastes like shit.”

    It’s a familiar story. That one’s straight out of ingsoc’s guidebook on the perfect society!

    She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.

    ‘It isn’t sugar?’ he said.

    ‘Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread proper white bread, not our bloody stuff — and a little pot of jam. And here’s a tin of milk — but look! This is the one I’m really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because -‘

    But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.

    ‘It’s coffee,’ he murmured, ‘real coffee.’


    The reason’s for the continual shortages were described in Goldstein’s book. It’s an interesting hypothesis, and fits well with a lot of the media fears about ‘consumerism’.

    The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

  23. NiV–muscle contracts and assists the heart. Fat –like your intellect– merely lies and has to be supplied with blood etc.

    In fairness your point re 1984 is well made.

  24. Without planning restrictions the Lake District would be a jumble of cheap hotels flung up in a trice and yet those restrictions are universally popular . There is a problem with voluntary systems , the tragedy of the common as it has been described . Essentially the will of us all, is not always the sum of each of individual selfish choices

    Awkward for your free market fundamentalist that , which has to be good

  25. Bloke in Costa Rica

    LY, we were just talking about that at lunch at work yesterday. It’s why I’m a bit ambivalent about cops getting shot in the US.

  26. “NiV–muscle contracts and assists the heart.”

    I have no idea what you’re talking about, there.

    “Fat –like your intellect– merely lies and has to be supplied with blood etc.”

    Some people like to train carrying a heavy backpack, because it increases the strain on the heart, lungs, and muscles. It’s just a dead weight you’re carrying around. The generally understood “common sense” understanding is that when the body is put under stress, it adapts its form to optimise performance under the conditions it most commonly encounters. So if you exercise, the body produces stronger muscles and bones, a bigger heart, bigger lungs, etc. If you don’t exercise, it disposes of the excess capacity, as it’s expensive to maintain. (An especial problem in zero-g!) So putting your heart under a constant extra strain can normally be expected to result in a stronger and fitter heart.

    You only get a problem when you switch behaviour too suddenly – going from a sedentary desk job to running a uphill marathon in a week, say. Exceed the limit, and you’ll kill yourself with a heart attack. But a constantly applied stress within the bounds you can cope with improves your general fitness. Carrying around a load of extra weight can be expected to do that. However, it it also acts as a multiplier on any occasional extra effort, so doing things like climbing hills when fat (or carrying a backpack) has an increased impact.

    The old theories about obesity causing heart disease were not about the strain placed on the heart, but about the idea that arterial disease where fatty deposits build up in the arteries of the heart were the result of too much fat floating around in the blood and getting deposited on the walls, like fatballs in a sewer. More recent theories of arterial disease indicate that some other condition causes the walls to roughen, and the body has an automatic repair mechanism that covers the rough patches with cholesterol/fatty deposits to smooth them. If whatever is causing the roughening doesn’t stop, the protective layer builds up until it blocks the artery. It turns out that fat and cholesterol in the diet have stuff-all to do with it – the levels in the blood are precisely controlled by the liver. But the old theory has persisted.

    I don’t blame people for only knowing/believing the old theories. The powers-that-be have made sure not to tell anyone about the alternatives, because it suits their agenda. I’m less impressed when people keep their minds closed to alternative viewpoints when they *are* presented, and not thinking carefully about their reasons for believing it. I don’t mind intelligent arguments with people who disagree or don’t understand something – especially if they’re expressed politely. That helps me check and refine my own assumptions and explanations. But it doesn’t work if there’s no proper counter-argument.

    But I’m happy to see that you’re making the effort to come up with proper arguments, instead of just resorting to insult. That’s good! Very good!

    “In fairness your point re 1984 is well made.”

    Thank you!

  27. “Awkward for your free market fundamentalist that , which has to be good”

    It’s not at all awkward – in fact it’s one of the market fundamentalists’ favourite examples. The problem of the tragedy of the commons was solved by taking the commons into private ownership, creating a market in access to the resource. Problem solved.

  28. “The problem of the tragedy of the commons was solved by …”: actually, on nearly all British common land there was no tragedy at all, because each commoner was stinted. That is, he knew how many cows he could graze, how many geese. At some point in the distant past the manor courts had adjusted the stints until their total had proved not to cause any tragedies.

    The obvious tragedy for Britain has been fishing: we don’t seem to have had a way to stop overfishing of our waters. Yet our procedure for fishing in rivers has been just fine as far as I know, and that is indeed to privatise the rights. Of course a privatised right might be owned collectively by a club rather than individually. How the clubs avoid a tragedy I have no idea.

  29. Newmania is clearly a Lake District fan. I’m curious if he can name the only other national park in E&W which is worth keeping according to tripadvisor ratings.
    Hint: compare other things worth doing in the county that also contains the national park.

  30. “Of course a privatised right might be owned collectively by a club rather than individually. How the clubs avoid a tragedy I have no idea.”

    Elinor Ostrom got the Nobel for this. Small groups (ie, under couple of thousand) can manage through social custom. It breaks down larger than that.

  31. Bloke in North Dorset

    “Awkward for your free market fundamentalist that , which has to be good”

    All the free market fundamentalist I read and listen to acknowledge there are externalities and that there can be a case for the State stepping in as a last resort if a market solution can’t be found.

    Perhaps you could supply a link to a credible article or website to support your assertion.

  32. Boy No2 broke his leg last week. First time I saw him in hospital he was a bit woozy after the op.
    Second time I visited, a few hours later, he was wired up to two intravenous drips.
    One drip was sugar, and the othe one salt. FFS I could have bought him a bottle of coke and a bag of crisps for 1/100th of the price. His arms were still working.

    We are overmedicalising everything.

  33. NewRemainiac–thanks for confirming that you are indeed a snobbish cunt who is well suited to be a crawling dog (sorry for the invidious comparison all you dogs) for the corporate socialist tyranny of your EU masters.

    Shame that all such superior stock as scum like you won’t be deciding anything now.

  34. NiV–I have never relied on insult alone to dispel your tripe as logic does the trick.

    You are generally well-up on the latest fashionism in scientistic cod-knowledge. But since the theories –despite all scientistic pretension–are contradicted and/or changed more often then the “scientists” underpants you are still usually a day late and a lot more than a dollar short.

    Still waiting to hear the stats on your personal jihadi conversion rate tho’.

  35. Eat what you want and die like a man.

    Preferably in a firefight with a leftist – bureaucrat – SJW – Antifa paid rioter or Muslim murderer.

  36. “NiV–I have never relied on insult alone to dispel your tripe as logic does the trick. “

    When was that? I don’t remember it.

  37. I had a friend in Safari Club International who would go on some pretty bizarre hunts in Africa. When I questioned his sanity, he said he’d rather his family talk about how Grandpa was mauled by a lion than he died of a heart attack at 80.

  38. ‘Public health bosses have urged food manufacturers to make chips, pizzas, crisps and burgers healthier’

    Healthier than what? Dumbasses.

    Unless they contain toxins or microbes, they are not unhealthy. THEY CANNOT BE UNHEALTHY. Public health bosses should be fired, prosecuted, fined, and locked up.

  39. @ BiCR
    Into the Sun, they would die quickly; into the outer reaches of the solar system, they would die slowly.

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