William Sitwell's school dinners

It didn't take much to make the Telegraph's restaurant critic embrace illiberalism

The restaurant critic William Sitwell is as mad as hell and is not going to take it any more. He has been pushed over the edge by the news that people with a health condition - specifically obesity - are more likely to take sick leave than people who do not. According to an unpublished study presented as a conference poster at the European Congress on Obesity, people with a BMI between 30 and 35 are 38% more likely to be off work for a week with illness than someone of a healthy weight - and people who are severely obese as twice as likely.

38% is roughly how much more sick leave women take than men. People aged 50-64 take around twice as much sick leave than people aged 16-24. Society has managed to employ women and middle-aged people without the economy collapsing, but The Times put the news about obese people on its front page with the implication that they were to blame for Britain’s productivity problem. I wrote about this for The Spectator on Monday (tldr; sick days are trivial when compared to long-term sickness, the rise of which is mainly down to mental, not physical, health).

Back to Mr Sitwell. It is perhaps most charitable to assume that the Telegraph offered him a few hundred quid to knock out 500 words at short notice and he didn’t take the commission very seriously, but let us take him at his word.

Delegates to the congress are discussing a new report that shows how obesity hampers economic growth, specifically because obese workers are twice as likely to take time off sick.

… Which means it’s no longer just their problem – the dilemma of the obese – it’s our problem too, because it’s our country and our economy.

If you look hard enough, you can always find a way to make something your problem. People who retire early or work part-time are depriving the government of much-needed tax revenue that could be spent on our precious NHS. Force them into work! People who play sport clog up A & E at weekends with their avoidable injuries. Ban contact sports! No man is an island, but if we wish to rub along in a reasonably free society, we need to make allowances for one another’s preferences and foibles.

It [obesity] is making our country inefficient: fewer staff means customers may spend longer waiting for companies to pick up the phone or to get their new passport processed. So is it time we intervened? Hell yes. When it comes to the British obesity crisis, I’m afraid we need to get illiberal.

It takes a long time to get any company to pick up the phone these days, but I suspect this has more to do with corporate cost-cutting than staff being off sick with gout. The passport office, by contrast, has become a model of efficiency, but even if it weren’t, would it really be sufficient warrant to abandon the doctrine of liberalism? One wonder how committed Sitwell was to the principles of the Enlightenment if he could put them aside with so little provocation.

Sitwell has a little rant about how everything was better during the Second World War and recites some clichés about ‘ultra-processed food’ before laying out his agenda…

We need to fix this. To do so will take courage and a long-term vision and, sorry politicos, short-term unpopularity.

But we have been here before, with seatbelts, with alcohol, with smoking. And we got through those pain barriers. We look back now aghast that it was once normal to light up in the office.

Actually I don’t, but that’s another story. Opposition to the seatbelt laws was largely driven by the fear that it would create a slippery slope for coercive paternalism. This was dismissed as libertarian paranoia at the time, but it turned out to be incredibly prescient.

I’m not sure what Sitwell thinks we’ve done about alcohol, but then he doesn’t seem to know what we’ve done about soft drinks either…

Taxing the firms who manufacture sugary drinks, restricting the sales of takeaways, putting 18-certificates on fast food, ushering in a new era of rationing might all seem impossible. We have already gone too far.

We’ve been taxing the firms that manufacture sugary drinks since 2018 (to no great effect) and various local authorities have been banning new takeaways from opening for years (also to no great effect) so no, it doesn’t seem impossible.

Putting 18-certificates on fast food does seem like it would meet with consumer resistance, but since the government wants to ban minors from buying mobile phones and using social media, it can’t be ruled out.

A new era of rationing also seems unlikely, but if it were ever to be re-introduced it would have to involve smaller portions than people got during the world wars. A standard civilian ration contained 3,000 calories, which is considerably more than people are advised to eat in these more sedentary times. It also contained more sugar than people are advised to eat these days.

Well, there is a way. There is a route to compulsory good eating and to indoctrination.

You had be at the words ‘compulsory’ and ‘indoctrination’, William! Where do I sign?

And that is through schools. By which I mean free school meals, in every school, and a very limited menu of choice.

Why would there need to be a ‘limited menu of choice’? So long as each meal has a cap on the number of calories, surely that would address the obesity issue?

Could it be that the Telegraph’s restaurant critic is less interested in childhood obesity - which is mostly fictitious anyway - than in forcing people to eat food he approves of?

Were learning about food to become as much a part of the school day as a maths lesson, it would be the greatest social leveller of the 21st century. No more wretched, divisive (plastic) lunch boxes and generations understanding and appreciating a good diet. 

Would it be expensive to implement? Of course. We’re talking billions every year. But it’s a revolution that would in time transform this country.

This is just reheated Jamie Oliverism. It’s been 20 years since Oliver stuck his oar into school dinners. Is there any evidence that those children grew up with a better understanding of a good diet? Is there any evidence that they are consuming a good diet? I’m not sure that there is. They certainly don’t weigh any less.

The point of free school dinners is to stop kids from poor backgrounds going hungry. Why should the general taxpayer pay for the children of rich people to have lunch? On the face of it, it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s not about poverty alleviation. It’s about control. Once you make school dinners ‘free’, you can make them mandatory. You then turn the screw by banning packed lunches and giving the kids a ‘limited menu of choice’ so they can only eat what you want them to eat, not what they want to eat or even what their parents want them to eat.

Before you know it you have created a system of school lunches based on the NHS model: free at the point of use, but absolutely awful.