Now, Europeans want to junk health food
It’s not quite the revenge of the fatties. But it’s a thin wedge of a rising backlash against the thin-is-desirable campaign, at least in Europe.
By Sudeshna Sen, TNN |
LONDON: It’s not quite the revenge of the fatties. But it’s a thin wedge of a rising backlash against the thin-is-desirable campaign, at least in Europe. In just the past few weeks, isolated incidents are taking on the shape and feel of a movement.
Unhealthily skinny models are under attack, burgers are back, and mothers are defiantly feeding their kids junk food. After the Madrid Fashion Week organisers banned models with a body mass index of below 18 — (below 18.5 is considered unhealthy by WHO standards) — the organisers of the London Fashion Week are fighting on the back foot to ward off insistent demands they do the same.
Madrid said that it did not want to promote a waif-like concept of beauty. Britain’s culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, called for a similar ban in London, and meanwhile Ambumani Ramadoss threw his pitch into the hat with statements claiming the thin craze is increasing osteoporosis among Indian girls.
In what may seem like an unrelated incident, a survey across six cities in the UK showed that fast food chains like Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s had no takers for their salads and fruit and health food offerings, which they set up in response to healthy eating campaigners.
Burger King in Birmingham said it was throwing away most of the salads it orders every week, because customers aren’t eating them. They’re eating burgers, and chips, and quarter-pounders. This, at a time when McDonald’s sales grew 4.9% in Europe for May, according to figures published last month, on the strength of growth in France, Germany, and the UK.
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And in an even more interesting turn of events, a couple of suburban mothers in South York are about to be hauled up by school and health officials for running a `junk food’ lunch service for kids at a local school, rolling up a supermarket trolley loaded with food from local takeaways — including chips and fizzy drinks — and passing it through the school fence. It’s their form of protest against the `overpriced, disgusting rubbish’ served in school cafeterias, a result of a highly publicised healthy eating in schools campaign spearheaded by celebrity TV chef Jamie Oliver.
These mums are horrifying health campaigners and school authorities, not because of what they’re feeding their children, but because they’re standing up to say that their children don’t eat what Jamie Oliver and his ilk think is healthy, and they need to be fed.
Given that one of the latest moves of the healthy eating campaign talks of asking schools to `confiscate’ unhealthy food from packed lunch boxes, they’re not the only ones wondering about health food tyranny.
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School guidelines say cafeterias must include at least two servings of fruit and vegetable per day, oily fish every three weeks, bread every day, no more than two portions of deep fried food each week, long with nuts and seeds with no salt, fat or sugar. Try getting any kid to eat that, argue the mums.Back on the catwalk, the organisers of the London Fashion Week are valiantly holding out — from an initial stance that was somewhat dismissive, Stuart Rose, chief executive of M&S and chairman of the British Fashion Council has taken the view that, “Outright bans and indeed legislation is definitely not a route we want to go down”.
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Milan, another fashion capital, is keeping a weather eye out on developments in London, but hasn’t yet gone the Madrid way. The argument that the fashion industry should be held responsible for promoting `unhealthy’ body images as aspirational for thousands of youngsters, has put the fashion industry seemingly on the defensive. It’s citing aesthetics, and designer choice, and even one argument that "models are abnormally tall, or thin, anyway, they’re not your average body type."
The battle though has just begun. This one’s not local mums versus celebrity chefs. It’s got high-profile celebrities who symbolise glamour and wealth on one side, and starving young girls on the other. Any bets?
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