Would you like a gastric band with that?

I've often wondered why people continue to eat the chemical cocktails that pass for food these days when their contents are brazenly confessed on the packet. Having watched the first few episodes of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, I have my answer.

Jamie's goal is to take the hillbilly backwater that is Huntington, West Virginia - statistically the fattest state in the US - and squeeze it under a microcosmic magnifying glass to highlight the way in which parents and the government are colluding to kill their kids with junk food.

In one scene, a junior school dinner lady tries to justify the coronary-inducing slop she is preparing for lunch. She flips over a box of chicken patties, glances at the ingredients list and declares it perfectly acceptable because the first item listed is 'chicken'. Never mind the other three dozen unpronounceable fillers, additives, flavour enhancers and preservatives below this in the line up. I'm sure these could include excrement or cyanide and still get the all clear from these clueless poison peddlers.

Clearly wasting his breath on the adults, an exasperated Jamie turns his attention to the kids. In a last ditch attempt to convince them to change their eating habits he whips out the big guns; his what's-in-a-chicken-nugget demo. Apparently this silver bullet induces spontaneous convulsions in British kids so is sure to do the trick. Before their eyes he blends up the picked-clean carcass of a chicken along with its connective tissue and throws in some artificial flavour for good measure, coats the vile, pink sludge in bread crumbs and then dares, "now who wants nuggets for lunch?". To my horror some hands from the audience still shoot up in the air without a moment's pause. It seems you can make anything taste palatable if you deep fry it in enough golden brown grease.

We catch up with the school 'cooks' again following the publishing of a newspaper article accusing Jamie of branding them stupid and ignorant. His comments were twisted for dramatic effect, nevertheless they seem genuinely shocked and baffled by the suggestion. This coming from grown adults who routinely serve the kids in their care pizza for breakfast and nitpick at the nutritional value of Jamie's alternative meals.

In another episode we meet 16 year old Brittany who is so obese, doctors have told her she's likely to be 6 feet under in 5-7 years as a result of the spots on her liver caused through binge eating. The threat of death looming over her like a black cloud apparently hasn't been enough to motivate her to exercise or go on a diet, yet now there's 5 minutes of fame at stake, she's prepared to take her health seriously.

I suppose the take-away (pun intended) lesson is that eating colossal dollops of saturated fat on a bun for breakfast, lunch and tea makes you morbidly obese. See, watching TV can be educational.

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Throw them away; the future's legless

Last week I visited Monkey World in Dorset, as you do when nothing else can slake your yearning for simian-based entertainment. You know what the first thing which occurred to me upon walking into the park was? (I mean besides, "gosh, what a lot of monkeys there are"). The sheer number of people scooting about in motorised wheelchairs. I stopped dead in my tracks and scratched my noggin in wonderment at the sight of this - partly because I thought it was particularly appropriate considering the setting, and partly because if I hadn't I might have lost a toe or three under the wheels of one of these pedestrian pulverisers.

"Hang on a minute", I mused, "there are more disabled people here than there are in the whole of the country, what's going on here?"

It then dawned on me that 75% of them are probably perfectly able-bodied, just unbelievably lazy. Being the inquisitive type I looked at the park's disability policy - it stated that electric wheelchairs are free of charge to anyone in possession of a disabled ID badge. Does that mean anyone who isn't disabled can rent them too as long as they pay a fee?

As each death-cart swept past me in a cloud of dust I began scrutinising the occupants as though I'd somehow be able to discern the genuinely disabled from the merely indolent. It stands to reason that the idea of effortlessly zooming about in an electric chair rather than using those antiquated, posterior-protruding limb things would appeal to a large segment of the population when you consider the lengths some people will go to avoid exerting physical effort of any kind: double-parking on busy narrow streets right outside cash points causing mile-long pile-ups to save walking 20 yards is the best example I can think of (though I once saw a documentary which showed a morbidly obese woman driving to the end of her garden to collect her mail!).

The fact that lots of the people at Monkey World in electric wheelchairs were also obese doesn't really provide any clues as to their authenticity - if you're wheelchair-bound then you're not likely to be getting much exercise - as if the disabled didn't have enough to contend with! I won't stoop so low to use the "some of my best friends are paraplegics" gag, but I am on good terms with one wheel-chair bound person, which is why the disdain some able-bodied people show towards their fully-functioning legs winds me up so much.

This particular theme park is tiny yet they still lay on novelty trains to get people from one end to the other - trains populated mostly by young, fit people. So why would you stop there? Why not hire your own personal carriage to escort you to all the exhibits, toilets and snack bars in between?
I don't visit theme parks very often so I wouldn't know how common this is elsewhere. Maybe you do and would. If so feel free to share your experiences below.

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