I saw a photo on Twitter today, Easter Sunday; you know, the sort of thing someone puts up to piss on people's bonfires. Not content to let everyone enjoy their chocolate eggs (or Jesus's resurrection, depending on your own personal wish list of desirable vices), this doom-monger was keen to show us just how much sugar there is in a Cadbury's Crème Egg. The pile of sugar was illogically larger than the actual crème egg, which prompted some scepticism in my mind. But maybe it reduces in volume or something, I don't really care, I wouldn't eat one of the fucking things anyway, because they are more sickly sweet than those inanely grinning Glee-rejects who greet you at the door of a Disney shop.
Anyway, it got me thinking about chocolate and sweets and how I managed to get through the 70s and 80s with all my own teeth and no signs of diabetes or other disorder associated with years of sugar abuse. One filling in all that time. ONE. Remarkable. (Oh and one tooth extraction. But let's ignore that as it might undermine my point.)
Before I recount these sugar-coated tales, let me first clear my mum of any culpability in regard to the shit I shovelled down my throat growing up. She fed us a very healthy, well cooked and delicious diet. But it was the 1970s and you could label the culture as either (a) dangerously disregarding of health and safety (a modern view) or (b) far less over-protective and paranoid than parents of the subsequent generations (a retrospective view of those who survived and enjoyed a childhood of dangerous disregard for health and safety). That means that high levels of sugar consumption were tolerated and often encouraged.
You could best encapsulate the approach to eating with the directive to self, 'Stick some sugar on it!' Whilst I would never subscribe to such eating habits these days, I feel that this sentiment serves as a neat metaphorical summation of the need to cope with life's miseries and gloom. Sugar symbolises escapism. Are you ever distressed by the actions of your fellow human beings, the economy or the impending environmental apocalypse as you watch the news? Stick some sugar on it! Meaning, joke about it, ignore it, turn over to watch some fatuous nonsense on Channel 5 or purge your fears through the therapy of a sardonic tweet or satirical blog post.
In reality, back in the sweet old days, sticking sugar on it was so habitual that it is only now that the lack of logic attached to such a wanton action becomes apparent. Let's start with breakfast cereals. We all sprinkled a spoonful or two of sugar on top of a bowl of cereals. Now that would make sense if someone plonked some corn flakes in front of you, because cornflakes are so lacking in any flavour that their tastelessness leaves you undistracted from the fact that they have the texture of dead foot skin. But we put sugar on Frosties. Frosties come sugar coated. They need a second layer of sugar about as badly as a sheep needs to wear a sheepskin coat from C&A.
Then there was fruit. I was in my 30s before I knew that fruit has its own 'natural sugars'. I grew p eating sliced apple, thickly coated in sugar so that it tasted better. A bowl of strawberries? Cover them in sugar (then some cream). A grapefruit for breakfast? Stick a pyramid of sugar on that fucker. And a cherry. (Actually, I hate grapefruit and no amount of sugar could disguise its foul taste, anymore than spraying air freshener can disguise the smell of a good poo.)
The thing was, we felt we were eating healthily because we were eating fruit. We didn't need to be conditioned by the state / retail/ media/ society (whatever) to believe that '5 a day' was the nirvana of healthy living, we just knew that fruit was good for you. It just tasted a bit boring without sugar. And fruit is high maintenance food, making your hands sticky, needing to be cut up or peeled, etcetera. I tended to stick to those 'Fruit Salad' chewy sweets. In which case (given that they were only a ha'penny each) I had far more than 5 a day. I used to buy them with Black Jacks, but those sweets seem to have been discontinued. Maybe because of the picture on the wrapper, who knows?
The obvious point to make here is that with all that sugar inside us, spending 12 hours a day playing outside, riding bikes and climbing trees and just running for the sake of running, meant that few of us got fat. If you were a fat kid in the 70s, then fuck knows what you must have had to eat to maintain such a physique. A big bowl of sugar for breakfast, with a light sprinkling of crushed corn flake on top, no doubt.
These days, with no desire to spend 12 minutes never mind 12 hours riding a bike, climbing trees or running anywhere - and with no desire EVER to visit a gym, as my brain would explode into a mass of pulped dog meat through sheer utter boredom - I avoid having too conspicuous a middle-aged muffin-top by eating very little chocolate or sugary shit. But I won't get into the psychology behind that, as people's diet descriptions can bring on a coma in the listener after the second sentence. I like to think that I had enough sugar between 1970 and 1988 to provide enough energy to keep me moving about until I am well into my 90s. That's partly due to the 'Stick some sugar on it' philosophy of those days and partly due to limiting my movement these days.
So that's enough of a work out for my fingers for today. I have an arm chair to warm and a chocolate bunny whose arse I might allow myself to bite off tonight as a treat.
