Health Warnings are Mince
19 May 2010
An advert on a Glasgow bus shelter stopped me in my tracks. It had a picture of spaghetti with Bolognese sauce in the shape of a heart. Until I read the slogan, I thought, delicious, great idea, why not turn the mince I’d just bought into Bolognese. My mince was standard Scottish stuff and had cost me 1.99. The lean meat option had been a pound more and that was why I hadn’t gone for it. The slogan said: ‘Simply using leaner mince can help reduce saturated fat intake.’ ‘Damn you,’ I thought. Do I look stupid? Everyone since Jack Spratt knows lean means the opposite of fat! I got even madder as I realised the advert was by Healthier Scotland and the Food Standards Agency. It was all about heart disease. My taxes had paid for an advert that was telling me how to eat and accusing me of stupidity while at the same time trying to save my life which it had diagnosed as threatened by my own ill-informed shopping choices. The Bolognese on the bus shelter mocked me and I got to wondering if these adverts were up in the housing schemes and how they must really be pissing people off if they were. About five years ago I made a video for NHS Scotland. In Springburn I found there was a weekly supply of fresh fruit which mothers and kids could buy at reduced prices at the local health centre and kid’s nursery – The reason was there was very little access to fresh fruit in the area. It was the same in Possil, due to disastrous town planning in the 60’s and 70’s and the closing down of local grocers; it was extremely difficult to buy affordable quality fruit and veg. The problem was literally in concrete. In Springburn, a walk to Sainsbury’s involved negotiating an industrial estate and motorway to get to the nearest banana. With the fruit project, local people, with help from the local council and NHS were bringing fruit in as if it were rations to a war zone. As one of the women who ran it said ‘You should have seen the kids faces when they saw their first pomegranate.’ Imagine how insulting it would be to be living in a fruit deprived area and to witness a government poster telling you to eat more fruit, given that they invented the stinking scheme they stuck you in on the edge of fruit oblivion in the first place. I recently discovered that the fresh fruit market in Possilpark had been reduced from a weekly market to once a week. This is Govt Health planning. These heart-shaped ‘consciousness raising adverts are deeply insulting to the populace. They give the illusion that the govt is doing something, and that it’s really the populace’s ‘choice’ to change their ways, but all that’s really happening is that govt agencies are getting fat on telling us to get slim. Not everyone in the country can even afford to take the advise of the Health elite. Goddamn it, I am not poor but I can’t afford ‘lean mince.’ On the bush shelter to the rear of the Healthier Scotland advert was an advert for MacDonald’s: 1.29 for a double cheeseburger. I hate MacDonald’s but at least it wasn’t patronising. If the government wants me to eat lean mince, then let it give me a quid to buy some. Failing that perhaps it could mail it to me directly. I’m sure the cost of express-posting mince to everyone in the nation would work out cheaper than the cost of the Healthier Scotland project. Their adverts are mince anyway.
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