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October 17, 2007
Food Cops Of The Future: Fat Camps And Ration Cards
George Orwell may have been slightly off the mark when he predicted 1984 as the year government transforms into Big Brother. In 1994, the British government launched the Foresight program -- an initiative responsible for forecasting future social predicaments and recommending public policy to prevent those problems. Today, Foresight released a widely publicized report on obesity.
The forecast: Only 10 percent of men and 15 percent of women will have “healthy” weights by 2050.
The recommendations: The think-tank suggests everything from “fat quota” ration cards for regulating individuals’ food purchases to government-mandated fat camps for thinning overweight teens.
While much of the report seems to be a scary combination of Orwell’s book and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, its most shocking notion is the near-complete dismissal of personal responsibility: “Obesity is a result of modern life and individuals cannot be blamed for being obese due to overeating and lack of exercise.”
Bolstered by this it-takes-a-village-to-raise-BMI concept, the report outlines familiar food cop initiatives like taxing “junk” food and “creating a credible threat of litigation” to combat the party allegedly responsible for every pending potbelly: the food industry. Thankfully, Spiked editor Rob Lyons is quick to spot the fatal flaw in Foresight’s plan:
[D]espite suggesting that there is a need for a national, we’re-in-this-together approach to tackling the problem of obesity and exercise, there is no proof whatsoever that government intervention in these areas has a positive effect—a fact that the report admits.
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