My unequivocal answer is NO. It is nice to realise that even in programmes such as Any Questions - one of the concentration spots of the politically correct, progressive and non-cynical chattering class of this country - there are people decent enough to debunk the futility in labelling supermarket food products in the hope of tackling obesity. (ref: 'Any Question' 10/7/10)
Food products are not labelled (regarding fat/energy contents) in Chinese or Japanese supermarkets - not as far as I know - yet I am sure that the obesity rates are far lower in such countries than in here or America. The root of obesity lies in the dietary culture, and even more deeply, general life styles and philosophies of people. In the UK, where I have now lived for almost two years (I have previously lived in China, Japan, Singapore), the problem seems to be that it is very difficult to find healthy food in the first place. There are Fish and Chips, curry rice, and the most sinful of all, the good old English breakfast...what more is to be said? I am a student lazy enough not to cook at all, and daily I scour between the aisles of supermarkets for something to fill my tank in order to have enough energy to pursue bogus scholarship, and the difficulty to find anything tasty yet healthy is one that I struggle with perennially. Labelling the energy contents is not going to help when your stomach screams for delicious in-fill. The significant consumption of meat and dairy products may have been historically due to the geographic and climate conditions of European countries, but when ways of life change and more and more modern comforts become available, things go out of kilter.
Consumption of food is primarily a matter of personal choice and life style, and then why such intense public interest? The simple reason is that in welfare states such as the UK, personal problems such as obesity have become public issues, because the state is responsible for the health care of its citizens. The funny fact is that when you take you on one responsibility, you take on a whole chain of others as well. So, once you are responsible for providing health care, you also need to monitor obesity, alcohol abuse and smoking, because the consequences of these habits are a state liability, not personal ones - well, not any more. I know this is a cliche Thatcherite argument, but if people are responsible for their own medical bills, perhaps they might take a bit more care of what they eat, drink and smoke. But Thatcher didn't even scrap the NHS, nor should she have done. From the way this coalition government has ring-fenced health spending, we can see that NHS is at least one of the most fundamental backbones of this society. If a government wants a revolution against it, the easiest way is perhaps to propose to scrap NHS.
I am not in favour of further neoliberalisation, but I just wonder (and I really 'wonder', that is to say I really don't have an answer or firm opinion - not like when most poeple say they wonder they actually mean disagreement) whether the welfare state itself has been responsible for many of the problems that the country faces now. The over-consumption based on credit is at least partially responsible for the current financial difficult in this country, and that was precisely because a welfare state has meant that people didn't need to save money for rainy days and can spend all what they earn. I have always been bewildered when people say that they are skint and have to wait until payday in order to go to pub again or to buy some small items. Spending all what one earns seems to be the way of life here, and one that I, despite my staunch opposition to Modoodian multiculturalism and approval of an assimilationist approach (I don't say assimilation as such as that is of course impossible) to living in another country, will never subscribe to.
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