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If you’ve ever done your own grocery shopping in the UK (or US), then you’ve probably noticed that eating healthy comes at a cost. You could easily pop over to a fast food joint or buy a giant bag of say, pizza rolls, and fill your belly to the brim for the same price (or less) than you could make a salad at home or keep an assortment of fresh fruit on hand for a healthy snack.
That said, childhood obesity is also a real and growing health problem across the Western world.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has created what he calls his #AdEnough campaign to try to fight it by changing the way junk food is advertised to children, which includes lobbying for a sugar tax that would increase the prices for fatty, sugary, junky food.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BiRM7shBEZd/?utm_source=ig_embed
“This is a tax for good; this is a tax for love; this is designed to protect and give to the most disadvantaged communities,” he said in a statement.
That said, many people are calling him out for a couple of things.
https://twitter.com/praxxxxxis/status/996698652268785666
First, Oliver has a Cookies and Cream drink that’s served in a chocolate cup and contains 46 teaspoons of sugar (6x the daily recommended allowance for a child).
Second, as pointed out in this brilliant thread by Twitter user Ketty Hopkins, the tax would not help “the most disadvantaged communities” at all, since those are the exact same people who need cheap food in order to survive.
everyone knows my opinion on jamie oliver by now (insufferable bellend) but im still going to weigh in on this whole “make unhealthy food more expensive” thing from the perspective of a girl who was genuinely poor growing up and ate awfully:
— cara delevingne’s sex bench (@sibylpain) May 16, 2018
Things got pretty bad for her and her family…
from the age of about 6, my dad had to mostly raise me and my brother on his own as my mother cheated, left him and then became too violent and dangerous to even be allowed on our street. now when i say we were poor, i mean very poor. money given to me on birthdays often had to
— cara delevingne’s sex bench (@sibylpain) May 16, 2018
Like really, insanely, horribly bad…
be spent on food for us to survive. my dad met my mother in a psych ward after he was sectioned when they found him too depressed to function, with no possessions and the intent to die on a park bench near the hospital. so we had no rich relatives to live off growing up either.
— cara delevingne’s sex bench (@sibylpain) May 16, 2018
Hopkins grew up in a low-income family, and explained, based on her own experience, why eating healthy sometimes (most of the time) wasn’t really an option.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996807658912014337
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996808162241056768
But they weren’t lazy. Her father was emotionally devastated and completely overwhelmed.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996808762903187467
This next part is just… wow.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996809281713393664
Instead of making bad food cost more, Ketty has some pretty good insights – and suggestions – on how to help families and children currently struggling to make ends meet.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996809706155991040
Being healthy takes effort, and her father simply didn’t have the energy.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996810414888509441
She also reminds people that judging others for what they’re eating isn’t any more helpful than it is nice – it’s more often than not money, not laziness, that’s at issue.
After all, she points out, if her father had not bought cheap, unhealthy food, their family wouldn’t have been able to afford food at all.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996810939654602755
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996811521257820161
Better to change the system that keeps people at a disadvantage than to try to keep all food out of their reach, price-wise, in the meantime.
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996811971638022144
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996812665757556736
https://twitter.com/sibylpain/status/996813099243134977
It’s hard to disagree with her logic, though I’m sure some will!
