By 21ST
Issue No. 625
Published on
Posted on 2005-10-13

(鼠标右键选“目标另存为”下载此文件) OBESITY is a hot topic nowadays. Experts everywhere are debating how to eradicate it. But British newspaper The Guardian has taken an original point of view. It's no mystery why we're getting fat. It published an article on Tuesday with the headline of "Fuss is a fat lot of good". Here is an excerpt: "Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody wants anybody else to be fat. And still we get fatter. "That's probably just because we eat too much by accident. "Dame Deirdre Hutton, chair of the Food Standards Agency, has delineated how these accidents happen. "We eat too much processed food - most at risk are teenage girls, male city workers, 'people in poorer communities' and the over-50s. Her first hurdle is to force packaged-food manufacturers into making food healthier. Or, if they won't do that, put big, red warning labels on the boxes. "Burger King told her where to stick it. (They want their customers to 'take responsibility for their own health' - how sweet). Others will be more co-operative, I feel sure, but this is a pointless battle. "Processed food is sugar-, salt- and fat-loaded because it doesn't taste nice otherwise; it's been sitting around too long. "Healthy processed food will always taste like self-denial; to get people eating well without feeling hard, they need fresh food. "How do you achieve this? Well, 'male city workers' are time-poor, you need to supply them with a helpmeet: a wife, for instance. "In other words, you'd need to reverse a trend of the past 50 years and bring back the doubly occupied single-income unit. That would be tricky, no? "'People in poor communities' would eat better if they had more money. How do you make the poor less poor? With redistributive taxation. How amazingly unfashionable. "Teenagers tend to be either undereating or overeating. This is mainly for psychological reasons. You could change this by outlawing images in which an unattainable body shape is shone as normal. You also need to strengthening teen girls sense of self, so they don't feel like sex objects. That sounds hard as well. "For the over-50s, let's imagine that the erosion of the family unit has left people isolated, and home-cooking is an activity people rarely undertake alone. The answer would be to repeal all divorce laws so that people had to stay together. It's an idea, but I don't fancy your chances. "Obesity, in the end, is a function of social progress. I say we bring back rationing. It might sound extreme, but given the alternatives it also sounds surprisingly manageable." -------------------------------- delineate: 描绘 eradicate: 根除 excerpt: 摘录 helpmeet: 伙伴 hurdle: 障碍 obesity: 肥胖 rationing: 食物配给制度 repeal: 废除 redistributive: 再分配的 unattainable: 难以达到的