Time to think about my diet. A test kit arrives from the NHS screening team who want to inspect a stool sample to see if a hostile cluster of cells is growing in my guts. What I eat horrifies everyone – except me. I live on Bran Flakes and Frosties straight from the box, and I enjoy chocolate bars or digestive biscuits coated with redcurrant jam (Lidl, 51p). Each year I spend about £600 on food – mostly processed pap full of fructose and additives. ‘Chemical rubbish,’ my mother called it. I avoid restaurants because I can do better at home. I like boiled rice or noodles smothered with sauces that glow like the core of a nuclear reactor.
Ketchup is my favourite. The perfect condiment. A delicious creamy blend of sugar and tangy vinegar suspended in a thick scarlet relish. Ketchup is great with fried potatoes or spread across a pillow-soft square of supermarket bread (Asda, 49p). My health is all right, touch wood. I haven’t gained weight since I left school. My heart beats roughly 45 times a minute, slightly more when I run up an escalator, and I avoid pills or prescription medicines. Being self-employed, I don’t get sick because I don’t get sick pay. We could probably eliminate all diseases if we stopped paying people to be ill.
Deep down, I know my diet is a revolt against my childhood. We were raised on organic produce (‘wholefood’ in the 1970s) because my mother mistrusted factory farming. She never bought cakes, biscuits or bread from supermarkets, and she baked everything herself in the kitchen, with the kids helping. I still keep my hand in. I fill a Perspex bowl with a gleaming alp of sugar and I double its size with an avalanche of plain white flour. Powdery bombs of cocoa dropped from a tablespoon turn the pale mountains a dark coppery brown. Then I heave in 2lb of Co-op margarine and stir it all up into a rich, gleaming mudslide of cake mix. This heap of wonder might become a chocolate gâteau after 20 minutes in the oven. But I’m impatient. My inner child takes over. I dig in a fork and transfer a thick clump onto my tongue, where it dissolves into heavenly sensations. I keep the mixing bowl on my desk as I work so I can take a sugary blast whenever I need it.
My diet is considered dangerous. A nutritionist told me I was killing myself. ‘You’re in your sixties. The decade of disease,’ she said. ‘My consultancy room is full of men like you with diabetes, asthma, bowel problems, thick arteries and soaring blood pressure.’ I asked her how many of these invalids eat Frosties, ketchup and cake mix? None. That’s the problem, clearly. Her patients are slithering into an early grave because their intake of processed garbage is too low.
The key command of the diet gods is to eat ‘five a day’. And I do, thanks to ketchup
I don’t believe in nutrition. It’s a bogus creed. Advances in technology over the past 150 years have removed our dread of bad harvests. Thanks to rising crop yields and better distribution methods we no longer fear famine or starvation. To fill the gap, we’ve invented new gods and new rites of sacrifice and propitiation. Instead of fretting about a dearth of food, we worry about the right type of food. We view our ingredients morally, as if they were angels and devils that lead us to paradise or damnation. Good or evil, organic or junk, protein-rich or ultra-processed.
The key command of the diet gods is to eat ‘five a day’. And I do, thanks to ketchup. The ingredients include tomatoes, which are fruit, and onions, which are vegetables. Pepper grows on vines. Sugar comes from cane or beet. And vinegar is a by-product of grapes – another fruit. That’s five.
But the religion of diet is fictional. The gods are false. Look at our ancestors, the cavemen, who ate anything they could cram into their mouths. Grubbed up roots. Speared mammoth. Deer pelted with stones. Fallen fruit or handfuls of scattered grain. Some tribes probably lived for thousands of years on one or two basic foodstuffs. We’re animals – like cows that exist on grass, or bears that eat leaves and berries. We don’t need variety, just quantity. Our hankering for blueberry muffins or wild salmon sprinkled with lemon juice is a fetish. It doesn’t make us healthy. It makes us anxious. And being anxious is bad for our health.
My test result arrives from the NHS. The envelope bears my legal first name, David – a form used by doctors, tax inspectors and magistrates. I wait a few seconds before opening it up, to savour my peace of mind. The ease and stillness. This could be the last cancer-free moment, ever. I notice my
fingers are trembling. I tear it open. ‘We do not have a record of receiving your completed test kit.’ Thank God. I’ve escaped death row. Two weeks later, another letter. ‘No further tests are needed at this time.’ At the bottom, they add an irascible footnote, as if they feel cheated by me or let down somehow. ‘This does not guarantee you are free from bowel cancer or that it will not develop in future.’ I understand. They want me scared. They are the gods. They are real. They made me tremble.
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