Food Fight: Fear the Freak Shakes

With pitchforks and burning torches in hand the villagers rallied, an elder took to the mound in front of the church, her face ravaged by time. She snarled out facts and figures that shocked and saddened, phrases that induced fear in her flock and once she knew they were on the edge, so very nearly converted, did she drive through the stake. She called out a name into the darkness. The crowd looked left then right and then, they saw him. The horde broke rank as he  stumbled through dividing like the red sea had for mosses. The crowd made no sound as he passed, said nothing as he climbed up the mound and only as he stood in full view of the entire village did the hounding begin, the jeers, the tears, the wails of despair. The group, who had until moments before been mothers and fathers, butchers and bakers even candlestick makers twisted into a mob hell-bent on revenge. The target, the grotesque and fowl creature, the detestable monster that had turned that child on that mound…fat!

‘DEATH TO FREAK…SHAKES!’

Well perhaps that isn’t quite how it happened but as pressure groups take aim at the monster of all milkshakes, does this finally mean the end for the golden age of gluttony?

If you’re not in the loop, then you may not of heard of the phenomenon that is the freak shake. A homunculus of chocolate, cake, cream and confectionary all sat afloat a lake of foul flavoured milkshake. These fudgensteins have been popping up in cafes from Canary Wharf to Caernarfon and they all have one thing in common, calories.

With some of these shake-inducing shakes including half the calorie intake recommended for an adult male, it’s hardly surprising the meddlin’ mafia have taken it upon themselves to slay this diabetic beastie. In fact, Toby Carvery’s interpretation called the ‘unicorn freakshake’ has the equivalent of 39 teaspoons of sugar or in numbers 1’280 calories. Trust the generation who turned their backs on sex, drugs and booze to find solace in an edible drink that would make Mr. Kipling wretch.

Long have the anti-sugar collective of fat fighting, calorie cappin’, dessert dodging fun sponges sought a head to lop of the gelatinous body of modern Britain. And finally they have found their grand villain; their Hans Grubber, Nosferatu, that guy who shot Bambi’s mother, something so monstrous it cannot be defended, a true turning point in the war on sugar.

A GLUTTONOUS CHOICE?

But is this the first step up to a healthier happier society or down to a nanny state and the loss of self-choice? Now, I must admit I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, personally I’d leave pudding, skip it, step over it, even drop kick into touch. So I may be wading into a war zone backwards, pants down and looking for a cheese board, but I won’t let that holster my thoughts on the matter, after all the best fight is a food fight.

It seems to me that we have a rationale with a viewpoint from atop a rather high horse. Now this perspective allows foresight, an ability to see far and wide, to spot the problem of obesity and the causes from miles away. Obviously, high sugar diets have a direct link to tubby tummies, and tubby tummies, leads to diseases like diabetes, heart disease, general ill health and an untimely unpleasant death. But, and is often the case with having all the best intentions, you come across like a jobs worth twit, an authoritarian joyless miser, intent only on ruing all the fun.

Unfortunately for these do gooder types the British public despite all of our peculiarities of queuing, good manners and compression of basic human emotion will never be recommended a best health practice, it’s just not in our DNA, or is it? It is 2018 and the British mindset has shifted, we are changing, we have changed. Maybe this time we will listen. We’ve already put the fags out and put the seatbelts on, learnt to eat our five a day and only drink the one (bottle), perhaps we can ditch the white stuff too…Oh wait, it’s Christmas, never mind, let’s leave it until next year.

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