A cakeist manifesto: let us eat what we want
When a man is tired of biscuits, as Samuel Johnson almost said, he is tired of life. And during this gloomiest of months, many of us have learned that the way to stoke our appetite for one is to secure and consume a steady supply of the other — especially at work. If biscuits can’t be found, cake will do.
But someone is out to spoil our fun. Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at Oxford and chair of the Food Standards Agency, suggested that we are harming our colleagues’ health by bringing sweet treats into the office. Comparing the effects to passive smoking, Jebb called for a “supportive environment” for healthy habits, explaining in a Times interview: “If nobody brought cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.”
This morale-killing message, delivered at a time when many are already confronted with the failure of their New Year’s resolutions, was not so much dry January as just-plain-miserable-and-can’t-take-any-more January. “Why does someone not simply eat Professor Jebb?” was one irate reaction on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Miranda Green
