Bayard left this comment on an earlier post:
... what this government really wants to do (and may yet) is bring back rationing.
??? There's no 'and may yet' about it. From an article in the FT last week:
Food agency declares war on dietary nasties
... as Britons indulge in Easter eggs and other sugary and fatty treats, the government is increasingly concerned about long-term health problems associated with over-eating. In a bid to tackle rising obesity and ill-health caused by poor diet, which costs the NHS £7bn a year, the Food Standards Agency has now issued a mandate for change...
It is the second assault on the food industry in recent years. The FSA has already run a salt reduction campaign, viewed by campaigners as a success after salt intake dropped by 10 per cent nationwide in 2008 – only two years after the campaign was launched... “Salt came first and the reduction in salt is easier because you can do it by stealth,” he says. “You can also retrain taste buds to accept less salt. But saturated fats are much harder to do.”
Food Standards Agency recommendations:
* Chocolate: Cut the saturated fat level in some confectionery (bars with fillings) by at least10 per cent.
* Soft drinks: Those containing added sugar should be made readily available in single portion sizes of 250ml.
* Cakes and biscuits: Cut the saturated fat in plain sweet and savoury biscuits, and plain cakes by at least 10 per cent; 5 per cent in non-plain biscuits and cakes.
* Portion size: Smaller single portion sizes should be more easily available for chocolate and confectionery...
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Geek points for whomever can work out which EU Directive this stems from.
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7 comments:
Rationing was part of the last period of austerity, just after WWII. Austerity will be back soon enough, this current economic crisis will see to that. Then you will see a nation composed of nutritionally healthy people apart from the privileged few of course.
Geek points for whomever can work out which EU Directive this stems from.
EU enlargement?
Greece, Turkey and Hungary with large fries and a coke?
;-)
Funny, but I was thinking something similar today while out shopping at the grocery and noticing all the products coming in smaller sizes with higher prices and being cleverly disguised by packaging to not appear to have been shrinking - and almost across the board, on all products and all within the last six months.
So tying in with what you are reporting, about government (and by association, its quangos and fake charities who are government tools for policy implementation) increasing its demand for more war on the obesity epidemic and I'm certain other wars on the domestic front it wishes to escalate - that some of that could be tied in with the food production industries - more of this marketing by fiat by way of first government/quango/fakecharity definining a problem, then announcing a solution, at which point corporations, in this case food producers, immediately and amazingly have solutions already in hand - thus their reduced sizes with increased prices take on the aura of being very normal - as the old vision of larger sizes at lower prices fades out of memory until it is gone - assisted of course by constant nannying by the state mandating the war on obesity be fought.
It could be this is all part of a setup, moving us closer to the future where food will be available only in individualized portions and of course at a higher cost. Wasn't it the Egyptian Pharaohs who doled out just small tidbits of food, one day at a time, to those enlisted to build the pyramids, keeping them hungry and in daily need, so they were always up bright and early the next morning, on the jobsite, prepared to slave away for their masters. Maybe some of that is the bigger picture of what is going on with the food supply, the next area of government/big-business socialism/fascism plotting.
A, are you sure?
JP, nice try.
Anon, that's a perfectly plausible explanation, and there are other bits and pieces in the full article that would support it. I still bet that Big Snack will be pulling strings at EU level though.
I was also thinking of the extent that agriculture and the food supply chain were under state control when rationing was in force (with the usual results: an old boy in Somerset told me that they had received a directive from the Ministry of Food that said that, to prevent waste, cows were only to be milked to meet demand).
This isn't an EU thing at all MW. They just approach manufacturers and persaude them to change their recipes.
They want to change the legal definition of 'cheddar' so that supermarkets can sell low fat cheese as 'cheddar' too.
There is very little doubt that the EU wishes to create an austerity situation where they are dolling out the rations.
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