How To Fight, How To Love

Disclaimer: This outrageous pudding is taken from the internet and not the subject of today’s recipe. Instead it means to only highlight something good, and ‘calorific,' which will make sense in light of reading further.

I have been caught ranting recently against the government’s new requirement that large restaurants, cafes and takeaways are required to list the number of calories in each item on their menu. It’s not only that I doubt this will be effective, but that I am also sceptical of any scientific rigour having been applied in working out if it might be.

I am certain instead that someone has popped a finger up into the wind, read the currents beginning to cyclone round the nation’s obesity epidemic and said ah, adding calorie counts to food item, sounds good doesn’t it?

Such an act is mere intuition. It’s theoretical, even hypothetical. Whatever your aversions to the technological society we live in today, one advantage of it all is that we have data. Data on pretty much anything. Data in fact specifically on this kind of thing, and data that I believe no politician to have used when concocting this slapdash plaster of a policy.

I believe this because first and foremost…

Who cares what you believe? Interjects my wife; most beloved and singular light of my life. Exhausted at having heard me flail this point for the seventh time, she proceeds to point out to my audience that I should by now actually know how the government decided on the policy rather than spouting my presumptions again and again.

My audience who before this point were putty in my hands, their opinions like clay braced to be thrown upon the potter’s wheel, hardened instantly in witnessing that I had just been thoroughly schooled, and I remained silent for the rest of the discourse.

But whether you are a food writer or not, one dish that we all know to best served cold is revenge (without being accompanied by a calorie count). In my silence, I resolved to go away and study the matter in great depth with intent to later share an irrefutable case and restore my political pundit credentials. Better yet, a case that would then be made to an audience formed of even softer clay and far greater in number; the adoring fans of Sam’s Good Stuff (217 and rising).

So now that you see my motives (namely to win an argument with my wife), I hope you are ready for what will naturally be an impartial, objective analysis of the situation and available data.

My most damning findings:

• Individuals following commercial diets (many of which are calorie counting) have an 83% chance over two years of gaining back more weight than they lost (UCLA)

• Women with with binge-eating disorders order significantly more calories when the menu is labelled, while women with anorexia and bulimia order significantly fewer (International Journal of Eating Disorders). (This undermines many other studies that report calorie counting leading to slightly decreased calorie intake, as they always fail to reference which slice of the population it occurs in)

• Fast food chains supported implementing the calorie count. I imagine the lobbyists would be far more active against something they actually viewed as threatening to their sales.

• This policy has already been enacted in the USA since 2017. Transaction records in a major fast food chain showed a slight reduction in consumer calorie intake when introduced, though this intake quickly increased again at rates similar to before (BMJ).

Figure from BMJ study. Even if it can be argued there is some decrease, is it enough to affect national levels of obesity? And which people are decreasing their intake; those who are already thin?

With the data conclusive that the obesity epidemic will not be helped by nationwide calorie counting, we can now move onto my ideological grievances (finally).

I feel a great personal violation in a meal’s healthyness being forced upon me without request. First they come for the big chains and make them count calories, then it’s the local Indian restaurant, next it’s your most beloved food newsletter, and before you know it each lunch you’re reporting the exact energy contents of your quinoa salad to Big Brother.

That’s of course a little farfetched with the nanny state angle, yet there is a point in there; if such a policy is not implemented on evidence, then how do we know where it should start and end? And more so, how do we know that it could not be doing harm?

To this very drum many youth charities are banging away, observing the dangers of calorie counting in what is also an epidemic of eating disorders. A New Statesman piece by a recovering anorexic details how it feels to be confronted by calorie counts: the way it immediately robs her of choice, creates heart-pounding guilt, and strips the enjoyment from eating out.

This revival of guilt makes me think to MFK Fisher, a woman of great appetite and greater wit, who was born in 1908 among the emblems of pious protestant tradition. She wrote of growing up under those unhappy millions of Anglo-Saxons that had been taught to believe that food should be consumed without comment of any kind, and above all without sign of praise or enjoyment.

She describes a boy who expresses delight in his soup, only to watch his father pour a pint of cold water into it; an attempt to “drown the devil.” A spiralling hymn against the reservation of indulgence and for the necessity of pleasure climaxes with this passage:

“All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realisation of life, whether they are poor or rich.

It is a sinful waste of human thought and energy and deep delight, to teach little children to pretend that they should not care or mention what they eat. How sad for them when they are men! Then they may have to fight, or love, or make other children, and they won’t know how to do it fully, with satisfaction, completely, because then they were babies they wanted to say ‘Oh, what a fine soup!’ and instead only dared murmur, ‘More, please, Papa!’”

I’m not such a rabble-raiser as to entirely equate her world with ours, yet I can’t help see aspects of the sermon ignored. The devil is again thrust in our face at the table, no longer to be drowned, but avoided where he measures most high, and if calorie counting may not make neurotics of us all, it shall at least taint enjoyment. There will be tables of adults afraid to order the sticky toffee pudding in good company for its exposed calorific content, which like one’s true inner nature on a first date, was best left unrevealed. The brave who damn their observers in the eye and order anyway will have guilt rise with the rhythm of mastication, the count pulsating on the menu like Edgar Allen Po’s beating heart under the floorboard.

And what is to become of the children? (a surefire question to rally the masses for an argument). They are to grow up in a world where their dinners out - the celebrations of this life - are accompanied by an empty heuristic, under which a can of coca cola and a bowl of wholegrain rice amount to the same thing. They learn to see each dish listed with an additional price, one exacted from a more subjective currency, leaving each recipient to ascertain exactly how it feels to have paid.

I started this piece in detailing a disagreement with my partner, and today I fight my corner. She may fight back, but we will also love, and do it all with satisfaction for we were born unto tables that damned the devil. And I urge you to do the same, which is not to encourage you to ignore your health, but a promise that if you apply yourself to your satisfactions with adequate reflection, sound body and mind will invariably follow suit.

So I end with a plea. If as individuals we are powerless to prevent the follies of policy, then at least when we are as groups united round tables, we might promise to rubbish this count in unison, and order the creamiest Vichyssoise we come across, with our only reflection upon its contents being that purest of exclamations; “oh what a fine soup!”

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If you agree most thoroughly and think others should join our cause in damning the devil wherever it may raise its head, please share this newsletter on your ‘social medias’; twitter, instagram, tiktok…. you know the ones. Let us not dine alone xx

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A Fine Soup

I have no idea how many calories are in this, but I am certain that if followed with a good and zingy green salad (eaten in the same bowl so it may entangle the remains) and respected properly, it must be as good for your health as it is for your spirits.

This is an adaptable recipe based on the central European potato soup, which by simply chilling and serving later can be repurposed as a Vichyssoise of sorts. The key is to get exceptional double cream (I order mine from farm direct) and some good stock does not hurt, but is not entirely necessary.

I label it a fine soup on virtue of its purity; it only requires you to boil potato with the white bit of leek, blitz it and add cream with firm seasoning. It takes courage to just boil the things in such virtuous fashion, but you see I was in courageous spirits when I made it last, and I am sure if you were to embark similarly you would find such fonts of bravery within your own heart too.

Ingredients

• 500g floury potatoes (or parsnips, or some other root vegetable, or some mixture of them all), peeled and cut into pieces.

• 1 leek, white part only, thinly sliced

• 1 litre stock (chicken, vegetable, whatever - if no stock is available use water salted to a point where it tastes like tasty seawater)

• 1 bunch chives (or spring onions in my case - what was on hand)

• 200 ml double cream

Place the root vegetables and leeks in the stock and make sure it is all salted to a point where the liquid is a little saltier than you’d like the soup to be at the end (this salt will be absorbed into the vegetables and so even out). Bring to the boil and then simmer gently until the potatoes are soft. Blend with a hand blender until uniform. For an extra smooth experience you can faff about a little and pass it all through a fine mesh sieve into a new pot. Season with pepper and salt if still required. Fold in the cream just before serving, or if planning to enjoy cold in these (hopefully) warmer days, wait to cool, fold in the cream then and keep in the fridge for later enjoyment. Sprinkle with herbs and extra pepper once at the table.