All right, Barb. Hey, Barbara, make my bacon dead crispy will ya? The Royle Family s3e3 ***** Decorating with Twiggy
Barbara: Denise, what we having for starters tomorrow?
Denise: Well erm I’m thinking of Cup-a-Soups. But with a twist. The Royle Family Christmas Special 1999: The New Sofa
I made little David Turkey Twizzlers and chips. The Royle Family special: The Queen of Sheba, BBC 2006
We didn’t have any sausages left so we just had the hole. The Royle Family Christmas Special: Joe’s Crackers, Denise, BBC 2010
Barbara: Have you had your tea?
Denise: Yeah.
Barbara: What did you have?
Denise: Chops.
Barbara: Chops. On how lovely. Lamb or Pork?
Denise: I don’t mean Chops. I mean Chips. The Royle Family special: Barbara’s Old Ring, BBC 2012
More people in the world are overweight than undernourished. Obesity levels are rising. Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Fat I, BBC 2012
How business changed the shape of a nation. How the food industry itself choreographs temptation. ibid.
Two-thirds of British adults are overweight. ibid.
The food industry has changed the very nature of what we eat in the last forty years. ibid.
A Japanese scientist had invented a process that turns corn into a cheap sweetener. By the 1980s high fructose corn syrup would become the number one substitute for sugar. ibid.
Earl Butz transformed the American diet and ultimately its waistline. ibid.
Corn syrup: its greatest impact was when it was put into soft drinks. ibid.
In 1994 the figures showed a frightening increase in people’s weight at the very time that Corn syrup in America’s food and drinks had spiralled out of control. ibid.
Scientists are now beginning to think that there is something very specific about fructose which accelerates obesity. ibid.
Keys’ view of fat as the enemy [cf. Yudkin] became the orthodoxy. ibid.
The food industry denies that it exploits neuroscience. ibid.
The idea that certain foods can be addictive is highly controversial. ibid.
The food industry and the sugar lobby in particular brought its muscle to bear to bury the [McGovern] report. ibid.
Overnight a whole new type of food was invented: low fat. ibid.
SnackWell’s was a marketing triumph but a disaster for America’s waistline. ibid.
What they did in the ’70s was give us sweeter food and more of it. ibid.
Britain is in the grip of an obesity epidemic. Twenty-four million of us are now overweight, our appetites super-sized by big business. Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Fat II
The story of the men who trapped us into eating more. ibid.
Kid’s breakfast: weighs the same as a small child. ibid.
This over-consumption is killing us. More than 60% of men and women in Britain are overweight or obese. ibid.
So when did we all start over-eating? And who was it that decided we should eat bigger and bigger portions? The answer lies not in Britain but four thousand miles away across the Atlantic in America. Here in downtown Chicago is where the story of super-sizing began. ibid.
People loved the bigger popcorn buckets and taller drinks. Sales and profits soared. The super-size portion was born. ibid.
It was the arrival of McDonald’s in Britain that was to really transform the way Britons ate. ibid.
Across Britain the new counter-service restaurants offered faster food for a faster lifestyle. ibid.
McDonald’s didn’t want to bring in the value meal. ibid.
The value meal was rolled out globally. Within three years it accounted for almost half all meals sold. ibid.
More money on takeaways than on fresh fruit and vegetables. ibid.
Supermarkets: they are using super-sizing as a weapon in the price war. ibid.
They are offering calorie-rich foods at discount. ibid.
Back in the US, the land where super-sizing began, one in three people are obese, and still they keep eating. ibid.
There’s an obesity epidemic in Britain. And we think it’s all down to us eating too much fast food, processed ready meals and indulging deserts. But what if we are wrong? What if the food being sold to us as healthier is the very thing making us fat? Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Fat III
Welcome to the brave new world of shopping science. ibid.
Consumers get confused about what’s healthy and what is less fattening. ibid.
In 1992 John Major’s government was the first to grapple with obesity in this report: The Health of the Nation: A Strategy for Health in England presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Health. ibid.
In 1998 Procter & Gamble launched Sunny Delight. ibid.
By 1999 the organic business was worth over £600 million, more than doubling in two years. ibid.
By 2001 obesity had doubled in women and trebled in men, and it was rising. ibid.
The food industry – they have one priority and that is making money. ibid.
The food industry: why are governments so scared? ibid.
The assumption is that it is the inactivity that is the cause of the fatness. We’ve studied this very carefully and we cannot find that. But what we can find is the reverse: that the fatness through perhaps eating inappropriately reduces physical activity. Professor Terry Wilkin, EarlyBird Diabetes Study, Peninsula Medical School
We’re becoming obsessed by the numbers stamped on every packet of food we buy. The Truth About Calories, BBC 2015
Carbohydrates: we love them. But newspaper headlines keep telling us how bad they are for our health. Are they the killer, as claimed by many, responsible for the record levels of obesity and diabetes? How do we recognise them and how do we become much smarter with the carbs we are eating? The Truth About Carbohydrates, BBC 2019
In almost all cheap food and junk food … Once you’ve eaten them both starch and sugar get quickly broken down into a smaller molecule called Glucose and that gets dumped into your bloodstream where your body uses it for energy. But if you eat too many carbs, then that glucose can be stored as fat – and that’s giving carbs a bad name. ibid.
Will eating these make me live longer? Will drinking this cut my risk of cancer? Can I get away with eating this if I also have a daily dose of these? There has never been so much hype around foods and drinks that are claimed to improve our health. The Truth About Healthy Eating, BBC 2019
I’ve paid over six times more for my trendy superfoods … a very poor result for the superfoods. ibid.
Breakfast cereals: the boxes are plastered with healthy buzzwords … Milling the oats starts to break the fibre down. ibid.
My course of multivitamins was a complete waste of time and money. ibid.
No real benefit from doing the detox diet. ibid.
Low fat cottage cheese, with a tablespoon full of low-fat sour creme, lots of walnuts, and fresh fruit. Any fruit you want, and if you try it, Merve, you try it, you’ll be addicted as I am. Dr Herman Tarnall, interview American chat show ibid.
In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentlemen in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves. Douglas Jay, The Socialist Case
On a cold December night in 1941 an artist stood on the sidewalk in Manhattan gazing through the plate glass window of an all-night diner … Hopper set out to capture a very American loneliness. America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner, BBC 2013
The American diner is a bit like that Dodge City saloon – it preserves a vital fragment of the American spirit. ibid.
The diner began as a restaurant on the move. ibid.
Richard’s restored more than eighty abandoned luncheonettes. ibid.
The diner became the battleground in the civil rights war. ibid.