Standing in line for a Truck Haven breakfast, carefully considering my choices, I am struck by another epiphany. The sort of epiphany that most people have before they reach double digits, but a thicky like me needs to be prediabetic to grasp.
If I have the eight piece breakfast, I don’t need to make a choice about anything, I can have everything that I want. Bacon, Sausage, egg, black pudding, haggis, hash browns, mushrooms, tomatoes, toast…but thats just way too much food. No wonder I am fat, I only need five items.
But here’s the rub. If I am limited to five items, I have to really think about what I want and choose wisely. My breakfast will be complete, and will be made up of the things I like the most.
And that is a handy segway in to my main point. There is a public health crisis at the moment. Too many of us are eating too much, and we are eating is shite. We all know that we should eat home cooked food, from scratch, using fresh basic ingredients. It tastes so much better than processed food. And how can it not? The main ingredient is love.
When we work long hours, travel long hours, the task of preparing something more elaborate than a cheese toastie during our few hours of freedom looms large and ominous, but we must maintain our resolve to stick to the plan, and to cook something decent.
And then we discover Aldi. With all of its choices and bright colours, and promising flavours. How are the regular customers not driven insane with the sheer range selection?
On Friday I cooked three types of ribs, and some wings, for just me and the youngest. We ate them outside in the garden, at sunset. It was lovely. I took a photo.
Just my first bowl, I had three more…
I don’t sit out in the garden often enough. We don’t seem to have the climate for it, though thankfully that seems to be changing, but when I do sit outside I am reminded of all of the gardening that I should have done but didn’t.
But anyway, back to Aldi.
I only went in for some chicken wings to have with sauce. I filled a large basket. Delicious processed food and sugary snacks and drinks.
Gluttony is perhaps the one sin to which I am most vulnerable, with Sloth as a close second. And with prices so low, it becomes a battle of spirit over will to deny one’s self these earthly pleasures.
I look back on the good old days, back to childhood, the seventies and eighties, when everything had to he made from scratch. If you wanted a pie, you needed to know how to make pastry. And there were fewer choices too, you had to plan it in advance, you had to put the effort in. Gluttony required some degree of work befire Aldi and its ilk enabled, packaged, branded and discounted that sin and sold it to us for pennies. And now we’re all fat.
Maybe not all of us. But the night is young. What was it Jesus said about cutting out your eye if it offends.
Evil is a strong word and I’m using it here in the context of harm, whether that harm is conscious and deliberate I cannot say, harm causes suffering, and evil causes unnecessary suffering, or something like that.
Lifestyle magazine is a catch-all phrase and I include websites and social media, and TV shows, and gurus in that. Cooking shows for example, property porn, that sort of thing.
I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I watched a lot of property shows in young adulthood, in the early naughties they were hard to avoid. TV shows like Location Location Location and Property Ladder. It was the height of Gordon – no more boom and bust – Brown’s unprecedented economic boom, and aspirational telly was very much the thing.
What’s stopping you having a house like this?
Food shows too. Nigella’s cooking shows were particularly pernicious in their facade of perfection. The yummy mummy effortlessly fixing up a treat to share with her impeccable peers in soft focus and deceptive camera angles.
Saturday Kitchen too. I remember a chat with the butcher. He told me that whatever James Martin cooked that Saturday morning would always sell very well. It’s a powerful thing is lifestyle TV.
Mere exposure to these shows induced such swings of ambivalence that put me at risk of whiplash as my aspirations would switch from that of a city penthouse with double parking and views of the city landmarks, to that of a riverside cottage out in the Dales where I could grow my own spuds, keep hens, and buy fresh beef and unpasteurised milk direct from the neighboring farmer. None of these things I wanted strongly enough to try to attain.
Come Dine With Me, a show about four strangers competing to deliver the finest dinner party experience, showed me the error of my ways. I’d been doing it wrong for years, seating my guests to eat on the sofa, unmatched cutlery, serving gravy in a vase. No wonder they laughed. What was I thinking?
What I was thinking was that I had a lot of guests and needed a large vessel in which to serve gravy, a pint glass was too small and could break with the heat, but a clear glass vase was perfect.
We need, as a society, our cultural conventions, traditions, taboos, mores, values, and what better way to communicate them than through the TV.
We need role models that can steer us, help navigate the world and find the right path. This is why I think lifestyle magazines are evil. They don’t seek to set us on the straight and narrow. They don’t teach us how to improve our lives. They show us a life that we cannot possibly lead and tell us that it is easy. They leave us feeling empty and wanting more. They distract us from what is important.
Of the seven sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, lifestyle gurus encourage and perpetuate at least six of them. I’m struggling to fit wrath into this vague but sweeping commentary, but the others are definitely in there.
Sloth, the reluctance to make an effort. Lifestyle marketing is all about selling us an idea of a way of life that can be packaged for consumption. It’s a shortcut to status. It’s lazy.
Gluttony is an easy one to pin down, particularly with the food shows. They don’t do modest meals.
Envy is a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities or luck. Lifestyle media showcases what others have and deliberately frames it as something you should desire and have a right to expect.
Lust is possibly a stretch, especially if limited to a lust for sex. But lust can be for money, possession, travel. So yeah, I stand by it.
Greed, the excessive desire for material possessions and wealth. A four bed detached house in a leafy suburb, with a kitchen diner, games room, twin office, large garden with lawn, water feature, decking with tandoori oven and outdoor dining, work shop shed, boat on drive, classic car and a Chelsea tractor in the garage, nursery and playroom, large well equipped kitchen with all the appliances, a potato ricer, home cinema with 70inch 4k TV and digital music system, power shower wet room, herb garden, and magnificent views of the Thames valley. Just the basics really.
The sin of pride is an excessive preoccupation with self, one’s own importance, achievements, status, or possessions. This is the very point of Lifestyle magazines and TV, to encourage self glorification. My own conception of pride is showing off, and that pride cometh before a fall.
Lifestyle magazines are evil because they make us lose track of what is important. Sin is originally a Greek word that means to miss the mark, to fall short of our potential. We cannot miss the mark if we are looking at the wrong target.
Happiness is not having what we want, it comes from wanting we have, lifestyle mags seek to subvert that. It makes us look at what we have and reject it in favour of the lie, and that leads to misery. Lifestyle TV doesn’t tell us that the most important thing about throwing a dinner party has nothing to do with the place settings or how what you serve the gravy in, it’s about having enough people in our lives that want to enjoy our company and whose only expectation of the food is that it doesn’t give them dysentery.
There are no shortcuts to friendship and respect, it’s not something you can buy and it’s not something the lifestyle gurus can sell to you, so they distract you from what’s real and good.
And the worst part about it is that you don’t notice the cuts, the death by a thousand cuts. You don’t have to rush out and buy the latest car or holiday or air fryer, to be consumed by the lie. You just feel, even if subconsciously, the emptiness in the space left by the absence of the thing you never knew you needed. And the feeling of inadequacy that you cannot replicate the simple meal without blowing the food budget, trashing the kitchen, and wasting a whole day in the kitchen, and it ends up looking and tasting like crap.
No. Lifestyle media is definitely harmful and therefore evil. Is it any wonder that half the population is in a mental health crisis? Be careful what you watch and read, it’s insidious.
Duggan's Dig 