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10/22/2003 Entry: "Food and drink"
Helping to keep arguments about blogrolls in perspective is Martin Roth, who has written of his concerns about alcohol (ab)use by young people
It’s disgusting that liquor companies are making alcoholic drinks that taste like chocolate milk shakes and are clearly aimed at the young. But if you have a liquor industry you can’t really expect them to make only drinks that people don’t like. It’s dreadful that it is, apparently, not overly difficult for young people to obtain alcohol, though I don’t think that’s new, and, anyway, it’s probably pretty inevitable in a free society. I think to me the outrage is that we have given our kids so little to believe in, that, when they get to a party, about all they want to do is get blind drink as fast they can.Well said that man! I'm not against drinking alcohol as such. I enjoy a glass of wine, a good beer, even a fine malt whiskey if I can. But theses are not drinks for youngsters. Good beer, for example, is produced with care and should be drunk with discipline. It's made to be savoured, not slung down your neck so as too get you hammered as quickly as possible. The craze for vodka-based fruit and milk drinks is definitely a market the drinks manufacturers have created to exploit young people who have more money than sense. They should be held to account.
Alcohol is a gift from God. Wine, says the Psalmist, "makes the heart glad". But like all good gifts it can be abused. Overindulgence is always a temptation, but there is no excuse for manufacturers producing things which are designed to produce overindulgence.
On a similar theme, the BBC reports that
The nutritional make up of fast food encourages people to gorge on it unintentionally, increasing their risk of obesity, research suggests. Experts at the Medical Research Council found most fast food is very dense in calories - you only need a small amount to bump up your calorific intake. They found that these "energy dense" foods can fool people into consuming more calories than the body needs.The report goes on to highlight particular concers for the health of children
"Children have not yet developed any of the learned dietary restraint that needs to be exerted by anyone wishing to remain slim in the modern environment. "It's surely a stark paradox that the strategy used to achieve rapid weight gain in malnourished children in Africa - the frequent offering of energy-dense foods - has now become the norm for many overweight children in affluent societies."No one is trying to argue that individuals are not responsible for their own diet. But manufacturers and retailers need to wake up to their responsibilities too.
