'Public Health'

On the current version of state intervention in individual food choices:

Quite often these days, wartime rationing is held up as an example of a time when people ‘ate healthily’. But wartime is a time of universal dis-ease and distress. There’s nothing healthy about war. Wars kill people in their millions. And it is another example of a complete inversion of values that it should now be held up as being ‘healthy’.

It’s almost as if a new Belsen were discovered somewhere, filled with painfully emaciated men and women, it would now be dubbed a ‘health camp’ of a modern and ‘progressive’ kind, particularly if there was plenty of ‘healthy’ exercise in the form of breaking and carrying rocks. But if the new Belsen was full of fat people instead, lounging around doing nothing, doctors would express shock that its inmates had been so ill-treated as to be allowed to become obese (particularly if they were well-supplied with alcohol and tobacco as well), and would call for the camp supervisors to be put on trial, perhaps for ‘crimes against humanity’. Such is the inversion of values.