Saturday 29th September 2007
The growing problem with British eating
In Britain there is a growing epidemic that is potential more deadly than most diseases. Its called obesity and is already the most common preventable cause of death in the united states of America. With the rise of the woman in the work place came the rise in convenience foods and the decline of nightly family meals. This is not the women’s fault ,when they started work in the last half a century the standards of British food was in decline.
And it was only going to get worse, but this wasn’t going to be the U.S.A.’s complete fault contrary to popular belief. Before their influence we had fish and chips and the pub lunch. Not exactly the healthiest meals around, but this greasy greatness is up there with London black cabs and red buses so as the British tourist industry took off tourists wanted to eat this food so more stores opened up and there was more in your face advertising. But this wasn’t all bad, yes we had the unhealthy food but other icons stand out just as well. The roast dinner and shepherds pie were and still are some of the best well balanced meals out there. So what went wrong?
One of the big turns in British eating habits was the arrival of the golden arches in the 1970s. for the first time in Britain you could go in, order a meal and 10 seconds later you could be sitting down eating in this restaurant. To begin with there were only sensible sized options what would be considered as a kiddie’s size nowadays but with the rise in customers came larger more fattening menus, cheese burger then big Mac, then the big tasty. Finally McDs hit the jackpot with the super size option, 1 kilo gram of chips, ¼ gallon of coke and a 30-50 minuet eating time burger. This time greasy greatness had gone to far.
How much did it really change us as a nation? I mean we already had fish and chips, greasy spoons to name a few but compared to McDs it was expensive a meal for one...