How long until the government makes McDonalds display photos of fat people, instead of pictures like this?
Imagine if you will it’s a night out, you’re in Soho and walking back towards Piccadilly Circus. You’re drunk, you’re hungry and then as you make your way down Shaftesbury Avenue, you see the golden arches. You walk in and order a large Big Mac meal, which you devour. You finish eating it, you’re satiated, you walk out, go home and fall asleep.
There’s not much that would stop you in that situation from enjoying your Big Mac meal. Yet as part of a new government-led initiative, McDonalds will now display the calorie-count of each meal on the big backlit menus, behind the counter (“McDonald’s begins showing calories on menus in the UK“).
Regardless on where you stand with the government’s health-nudging-nannyism, this is one of those preposterous decisions that won’t do anything.
They already do this – to a much worse extent – with cigarette packets. And who has honestly gone into their local corner shop, asked for a pack of Marlboro Lights, saw the cancerous pictures on the back and then said “actually, I don’t want this packet of cigarettes, I’ve just realised that it might give me cancer”?
The fast food industry hasn’t been hounded like the tobacco industry quite yet, but this is the start.
How long will it be until, instead of inviting pictures of Chicken Legends and McFlurrys, McDonalds are forced to put pictures of morbidly-obese people and fat-filled arteries behind the counters?
If things carry on, we’ll reach a stage where everything enjoyable is distributed in a brown paper bag (and I bet everyone will be carrying them around).
I’m all for people becoming healthier but it’s not the role of government to make that happen, especially when it’s with a measure as useless as this.
