Full Fat Politics

Conservative journalist Peter Hitchens once went on an epic rant against the rising popularity of skimmed milk in corporate coffee chains, but particularly the skinny cappuccinos sold by such franchises. Hitchens is right that the conflation of fat with weight gain has diverted attention away from sugar and its role in the obesity epidemic. He has done well to write about this subject in his column.

There is a great deal of confusion out there and advertising has taken full advantage. The trending support for healthy food - whether 'natural', 'organic' or even just 'low fat' - has been used to sell many of us barely edible garbage. Even 'low sugar' or 'zero sugar' is just a way of getting us to buy drinks loaded with vast doses of aspartame. Meanwhile the country gets fatter and suffers the results, as the collective anxiety about weight and diets intensifies.

Of course, the popular diets probably succeed in weight loss because they are effectively a form of self-imposed starvation. But this is also why so many people fail to eat well. They try to slim down by eating very little, and inevitably transgress later, only to feel awful about themselves. It's all about the super-ego. And I doubt many people are totally living healthy lifestyles (myself included) in terms of what they eat and how much exercise they ought to be doing (I write as the owner of a Fitbit watch).

Unfortunately, Blighty remains an island of ill-health and bad food. Yet British society continues to follow such celebrity chefs as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Cooking programmes are a staple of the viewing diet. One wonders the extent to which people just tune in and never try out the recipes. Perhaps the cooking programmes are just vicarious. I can only speculate about this.

On the one hand, we are bombarded with celebrity-endorsed diets and newly branded 'healthy' food in supermarket isles; while culinary luddites demand that we get on the 'slow food' train and rely on local produce, on the other. It's a rather farcical situation. The fast food culture is just as worrying - and certainly guilty of sugar peddling! - and it leaves us with a political question. If we can't fix our food by personal choice, what do we need to do about at the level of the polis.

On that note, I will defer to the writing of others. I recommend reading Rachel Laudan's article on 'culinary modernism' from last year for a start. Nick Srenicek and Alex Williams have a great section on 'slow' and local food in their book Inventing the Future. These are just starting points for the critically minded.

Self-Service is Disservice.

The predominance of so-called 'self-service' machines in supermarkets should worry those concerned by the depredations of the market. The 'self-service' machines turn us into unpaid employees for a Tesco, or a Morrison's, or a Sainsbury's, and even a wholesome Waitrose. The fact of the matter is that it is a service to Tesco, not ourselves, for the most part, to man the till in the place of a paid worker. It is another way in which the rinsing of people, as workers and consumers, to amass huge profits - and it means worse and worse working conditions and job prospects for vast numbers of people. With all that said, it is unavoidable given the pace at which we have to live, that we are going to avoid queuing for longer (unless we have a tobacco habit), and we can't find an exit point in waiting longer. Notice that the fetish of 'free-choice' actually offers little in the way of quality, and even less in the way of consultation.

Before we go any further I ought to do some throat-clearing: the kind of jobs available to people in supermarkets should be romanticised, they are not examples of fulfilling work by and large. Nevertheless, it has to be said that once such an area of job opportunities is closed off it will leave behind a section of people who had little other immediate option to working in a supermarket. The innovation of 'self-service' machines really allow businesses to discard labour in the endless attempt to pull in enough labour to squeeze dry, but not too much as it encumber the maximalisation of profits. Important aside: profits are by definition what is leftover after the cost of labour is taken into account, before that point its just revenue. The contradiction faced by businesses is in the need to scrap labour to save money, while at the same time drag in even more of it to keep up productivity. The workers are a burden, but at the same time they are invaluable to the economy, they are a cost to be cut, and the source of mountainous revenue.

It is not the case that the prices of food have fallen since this innovation of the marketplace. Yet the liberal accounts of technological progress would have us believe that the betterment of life overall will come out of the liberating capacities of technology. Its a convenient viewpoint, for a liberal or even a Fabian, there is no need for radical change as the evolution of technology will gradually perfect us and perfect our society. If the 'self-service' machines are to be installed then the goods should be cheaper, and if not, then the employees of the supermarket should have a higher wage. Neither is the case. Not only do they take our money for over-priced products they make extra money by not hiring the staff to man the tills. It's yet another instance of the rationality of the market really amounting to irrationality. The business can depend on human beings to act against their own interests, to work for free, to buy over-priced garbage, and ultimately to contribute to the further enrichment of those layabouts convinced of their own brilliance - the crust of wealth hoarders.

Only under particular conditions would self-service actually be conducive to social betterment. The companies could probably be cooperatised, we could each be hired and have a slice of the profits if we are to be engaged in any meaningful kind of self-service. The right to work has to be enforced if there is to be full employment and equitable standards of living enabling each person to lead fulfilling lives instead of living to fulfill the lives of a tiny few. Under conditions of universality and mutuality these machines would be of better social use. It might actually free people from a mind dulling role standing by counters, leaving them to more authentic pursuits, and not just tossing them on the wayside to rot. Otherwise the machine is a bloody con, for consumers, and for workers. In the meantime one can hope that the managers will be replaced by machine innovation sooner rather than later. Now that would be progress of a kind.