Trying to get good, healthy, nutritious food down the ungrateful throats of the lower orders, especially northerners, has become a serious national problem. At the moment these awful people eat nothing but fat coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried in engine oil, and so as a consequence they are gargantuan, slobbering masses of compacted lard, so vast that there would be room, if they so wished, for Hogarth to do their tattoos. Have you ever wandered about in the centre of Sheffield or Rotherham? It’s like being transported to a film set where Quentin Tarantino is shooting a version of Gulliver’s Travels with belching and farting, shellsuit-clad Brobdingnagians waddling and wheezing in and out of fast-food shops, gripping hold of deep-fried oblongs of saturated fat with their black-pudding fingers.
Poverty, we are told, is the major cause of this epidemic of obesity, but I’m not sure I buy it. I heard one chap from a leftish think-tank explain that northerners eat this cheap fattening filth because it is very quick to heat up in the oven, and they cannot afford to have the oven on for longer than 20 minutes because of the prices charged by those bastards who run the energy companies. Surely, then, a simple solution would be for the poor to invest in an Aga? I have had a shin of beef casserole with morels, butter beans, black kale and Puy lentils bubbling away for the last three hours — no extra cost, because the Aga is always on! Sometimes the lefties don’t think of these common-sense solutions, probably out of resentment and bitterness, and yet one of the upper-end Agas would improve the look of their usually rather frowsy kitchens no end.
We are constantly told that we are in the grip of an obesity ‘epidemic’, the word ‘epidemic’ suggesting that it is something extraneous which has been imposed upon people, in the manner of the black death, or influenza.

Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in