Let Them Not Eat Cake!

The apparent fact is: people don't like people who don't like cake. Or chocolate. Or sweets. Or most forms of unhealthy food for that matter.
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It's reactionary scenario time!

Someone is making their way around the office, kindly offering slices of cake to co-workers. They approach your desk and thrust the plate towards you expectantly.

Now - you have two options.

A)You accept the cake.

B)You reject the cake - perhaps with a polite excuse such as 'I'm not hungry', 'I'm trying to eat healthily', 'I can't eat gluten', or 'Lactose makes my bowels weep.'

If you selected Option A, you're safe. The cake bearer will ask no further questions.

But if you had the audacity to select the wild and wicked Option B; oh dear, my friend. Prepare yourself for judgment, tutting and some serious questioning of your character.

The apparent fact is: people don't like people who don't like cake. Or chocolate. Or sweets. Or most forms of unhealthy food for that matter.

People who reject these foods also reject our (increasingly tiresome) Western bonding exercise of indulging in an excessive quantity of sugar-packed, oil-slicked food and then complaining about how terrible we feel afterwards.

So what's the alternative? Well what if - instead of buying seven bags of Pick-a-Mix from Morrisons and a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and giggling about how naughty we are before lying on the sofa groaning and whining for an hour - we eat home cooked dishes at appropriate meal times? We stop eating when we're full and then do something memorable and life affirming, fuelled by the vitamins and antioxidants surging through our positively functioning systems.

Unfortunately if one was to make this suggestion, the chances are they'd soon find themself feeling like Sandy from Grease amongst a gaggle of bashful 'Pink Ladies'. They'd be rebuked and mocked for their absurdly wholesome suggestion before being progressively moulded into a leather-clad floosie, strutting around a carnival singing You're The One That I Want to the KFC Colonel.

Grease would no longer reference hair gel. It would be about what was pumping through poor Sandy's veins, leaving her irritable and lethargic just like the majority of us who, willingly or reluctantly, embrace a caffeinated, sugar-fuelled, fast-food guzzling way of life.

Why has it become the norm to feel like shite all the time? Why are people who take positive steps to improve their health ridiculed? Why is it that in order to avoid being labelled 'whimsical health freaks', wholefoods advocates - such as Davina McCall, Ella Woodward or the Hemsely sisters - always have to excuse their nutrition-friendly lifestyles with appeasers like:

'Don't get me wrong, I love chocolate...but...'

So much research is available to us now about the detrimental effects refined sugar, excess salt and artificial flavourings have on our wellbeing. In fact we're all sick to the teeth of hearing bitter truths about our sweet 4pm pickup provider.

And yes, it's a crying shame. It would be wonderful if Cadbury Fabulous Honeycomb Fingers didn't systematically destroy our organs without symptoms. It would be brilliant if Chicken McNuggets didn't contain delirium-inducing tertiary butylhudroquinone. And it would be simply marvellous if your average Chinese takeaway didn't have the potential to start a small industrial revolution inside our intestines.

But let's face facts. They do. So if people around you have decided to embrace alternatives that don't do heinous things to their body (coincidentally, the body they have to live in on a day-to-day basis, for the rest of their life) then wouldn't it be lovely if we could just leave them to it, no questions asked?

Possibly even lovelier than that big slab of cake.