niq’s soapbox

Was it not Martin Luther King who said we should judge a man “not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character“? When faced with a report saying “Obese blamed for the world’s ills“, I say it’s time we invoked the great man’s rhetoric. Judge me not by the amplitude of my girth, but by the content of my character!

When I heard of the report, my first reaction was to try and seek out the original. Failing that, I thought I’d leave it: the news reports probably misrepresent it anyway. But then today out cycling up Dartmoor, I met a chap even more rotund than myself on a bike, and looking plenty fit enough for Dartmoor’s hills, and thought maybe this is at least blogworthy. This kind of report - judging people for what they are - is perilously close to the kind of prejudice Dr King’s people suffered.

I’m a fatty, so I eat 18% more calories than average?

Probably guilty as charged, though I eat a small fraction of what I did in my youth, before the middle-age spread set in. But against that, the fact I don’t eat meat must surely in itself put my dietary carbon footprint well below the developed-world average.

But more than that: I’m sure my good layer of natural organic insulation is one reason I don’t need to heat my environment in the English winter. Not the only reason: the fact that I’m fit and healthy helps, as does my youth when the cost of heating was out of the question, meaning I got used to nature’s temperatures. But anyway, I have no doubt that my layer of fat more than pays for itself in carbon emissions saved.

And I drive an excessive amount?

Definitely not guilty: the last time I drove was a little over three years ago, when I hired a van for a day to move house. I use a combination of bicycle and public transport for all my travel. More importantly, I make efforts to avoid unnecessary travel, particularly that western-country ritual of commuting, which I have eliminated altogether from my life. To cap it all, my life’s work is dedicated to developing the infrastructure for many more people - in principle everyone in the knowledge economy - to be able to avoid much of their travel.

So I guess I’m guilty of being portly, just as Dr King was guilty of being black. I don’t see that either of us has anything to be ashamed of!

From today, we are smoke-free.  Yay!

Smoke is just nasty: I suffer from it at home when the neighbours smoke, in the street when it’s too crowded or narrow to get past the smoker, at the railway station when three or four smokers spaced out along the platform can leave nowhere free of it, or in the bus shelter where it only takes one to drive me out into the rain.

But wait a minute!  The smoking ban doesn’t affect any of those smokers.  They’re all in their own homes or outdoors.  It might even make it worse, if smokers who would otherwise be indoors are instead fouling the street.

Is there anywhere it will help?  Smokers have been a major blight on my life, from the misery of the school bus, to the three of my jobs that they’ve made a misery (one involved smokers in the same open-plan office, the other two involved it drifting from the smokers’ own).  A pub or restaurant meal can be ruined by them.  And I haven’t been to the cinema in a quarter century, after a very nasty experience in my teens.

But that’s really a battle that’s already won, in the UK at least.  Some pubs and restaurants are still foul, but others are smoke-free and perfectly pleasant.  The station or bus stop may still be grotty, but where it really matters, on the bus or train itself, isn’t.  Places of entertainment are free of it.  Whereas in my youth, avoiding smokers meant severely cramping the social life, nowadays there are ample choices to accommodate both smokers and decent people.

On the other hand, I really would like to get rid of some of the other pollution that afflicts our air.  It was back in the ’80s - when smoking was still a very serious problem in many places - that I first concluded that motor vehicle emissions were actually a worse problem than tobacco smoke.  In the intervening 20 years, that’s just got worse while smokers have retreated.  It seems absurd to ban the minor problem of tobacco smoke while leaving drivers free to pollute on a global scale.  And don’t get me started on bonfires and wood smoke, which in afflicted places are an order of magnitude worse than any of the other nuisances.

Now, if they’d ban it from the home, that would be much more useful.  If I could sue the neighbours every time they make my flat stink, I’d …. lead a life blighted by petty conflict.  Yeah, great.  Smokers rights are not something I’m about to make a stand for, but this ban seems to lack a sense of proportion, as well as being near-useless.

The UK chattering classes, including reputable medical opinion, seem obsessed by the idea that we eat too much salt, and it’s a major contributor to heart disease.

So, here’s a puzzle. Italians eat vastly more salt than us: even after years in Italy, I found the saltiness of their food often quite overwhelming (just as most Italians seem to find a bit of chilli too much for them). Yet Italy has less of a problem with heart disease than we do.

How does that work?