Published at the Libertines Pub, Hong Kong
Recently, there’s one retarded government ad that amuses me a lot. It’s about the introduction of nutrition information labels on pre-packaged foods on 1 July 2010.
In this television ad, seven children and a young girl are dressed in white tight polyester jumpsuits. Each child represents a type of nutrients to be included in food labels and the young lady represents “energy”. The lot keeps jumping and cheering around the corners of a supermarket and triggers my body’s defensive mechanism as they resemble sperm cells.
According to the advertisement, the introduction of nutrition labels is to enable us to compare nutrient contents in food and make healthier food choices, so that we won’t get obese, heart attacks and cancer.
The idea of nutrition labels always sounds Western to me. My first encounter with it is from a pack of Hershey’s chocolate chips. The label says it contains nuts as if it was a big deal. Then I saw nutritional claims like “wheat-free”, “gluten-free” and “dairy-free” on Western foods, which I bought after reading Nigella Lawson’s cookbook and attempted to cook to get laid (which I failed like most readers, I mean, the cooking part).
Thing is, in our culture, people don’t care that much about food allergy or the food pyramid. When our stomach feels funny after eating, we simply solve the problem by excusing ourselves to the bathroom. And maybe because we are born with the skinny gene and eat rice instead of chips, we seldom consciously calculate our calorie intake. In fact, before implementing the scheme, the government only took reference from the experiences of the US, Canada and Australia, where my chubbiest girlfriend would look skinny among the locals. It failed to take our dining habit into account.
Besides, who actually buy food because it has high protein or low trans-fat contents, as the food labels claim? We buy food because we love it, just like we love a person despite the fact that he gives us stomaches and heart attacks. We only care about sodium intake or cholesterol when we are almost dead. Whether we will die of heart attacks or cancer is mostly decided by genes anyway.
And maybe because we are part of Big China, we are in a constant habit of not trusting anything by its descriptions, for example, the cute bag that claims to be Chanel on taobao.com or the law book that claims to give us universal suffrage. Even the pre-packaged food is staying true to its words, it never stops giving us surprises, like a few tiny drops of mercury in a can of pork.
So once more, our Village leader, thank you very much for wasting money on something we don’t need.
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關於我自己
- Bambi CherryBoom
- I look as tame as a deer but I think like an animal. I have morals for myself but none for others. I know love is all you need but lust is what we are after. I can be homey but I love parties.
Here's a different perspective (and like you said, in a very different environment and context) which led me to start paying attention to nutrition labels:
回覆刪除- I've always been thin even by Chinese standards but now that I've entered my late twenties, my metabolism has slowed down and I can't expect my body to be able to handle whatever sloppy food choices I make
- one can maintain their metabolism by eating multiple, regular, small meals throughout the day (and I try to) but your career tends to pick-up right when your metabolism slows down so it's hard to find time in your work day to snack when the project is already late enough as it is
- and hard work only begets even more harder and longer work, meaning more time being sedimentary at the office and less thought & time in putting together a decent dinner when you finally get home (not to mention the utter lack of sunshine from being locked in the office all day)
- finally, you work harder but for better pay so you're inclined to start eating out more and for better, taking in more red meat, sodium and trans-fat on a regular basis
Basically, just when your body is getting less able to handle your current diet, you tend to be even less active and give it an even less balanced diet. That said, I live in Canada and there's a different mindset about consciously living a healthier lifestyle.