Out of the box

Abstract

Have you ever felt that life is really all about paying the mortgage and raising a family, and all this stuff about making a difference in the wider world is smoke and mirrors? Sure you have. See below. Plus, why we still seem to have our collective heads in the sand on climate change and on unorthodox eating patterns like fasting, and instead stay fixated on food chemistry. This month's novelty is my first go at a truly conscientious 750-word acknowledgements section (730, getting there). How to be a crank The historian Howard Zinn (1) refers to the JFK-RFK or Martin Luther King-Malcolm X syndrome: when anybody starts to threaten The System, they get knocked off. The reasons for the killings of John and Robert Kennedy will remain murky, but there's little doubt that Martin and Malcolm were assassinated because they were making too much trouble-in Malcolm's own phrase, they were 'crazy niggers'. Public health nutrition is nursery slopes compared with the black and off-piste runs of politics. A nutrition professor tells me that in 1952 Jack Drummond was not murdered by a demented French peasant, but assassinated by order of dark forces concerned that as the proud architect of the British wartime food and nutrition policy, he was about to denounce and impede postwar policy, then being shaped to suit big business. This notion is too far out even for me, if only becausesorry to say-nutrition professionals don't seem to rate assassination. People in our world who challenge the established order stay alive, but they are stopped from kicking by being marginalised. In my long-gone activist days, public relations agencies hired by food manufacturers dreamed up collective names for Tim Lang, Sue Dibb, Tim Lobstein, Caroline Walker and others including myself, designed to hold us up as objects of hatred, ridicule or contempt. We were labelled as cranks, fanatics, food faddists, food terrorists, food Leninists, even-rather charming-food lentilists. Selfishness supremacists, who believe that individuals should be free to do whatever they feel like short of breaking the law, also get in on this act. Bernard Levin once identified me as 'Life President, Great Panjandrum and Sugar-Finder General of the Incorporated Society of Wowsers' in one of his columns for The Times (2) , and averred that I would disapprove of him enjoying 'Bise's poulet à l'estragon or Pic's foie de canard au marc, to say