More food faddery

When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing like suggesting a quack cure - shoving a banana up your arse to cure colon cancer for instance (peel it first - you don’t want to look foolish). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade. ‘Dr’ Gillian McTeeth for instance, should start each of her ‘programmes’ where she ‘bullies’ ‘chubbos’ by rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course, all cures are found in nature, it’s just that drug companies spend a lot of time and money combining them into the right doses. For instance, they have to get the tiger-bollock to bear-bile to baby-penguin-beak proportions just right to make Viagra actually work (alright smart-arse, you tell me what’s in it then?).

Early man discovered that chewing willow bark could get rid of a head-ache. How the hell did they work that one out? Did some poor sod, desperate for a bit of pokey-fun, just make his wife chew on a variety of stuff until her brow unfurrowed? His research means that we now have effective pain relief and that a ‘headache’ is no longer an excuse to refuse congress. We have gone on to develop more advanced pain relief and more advanced excuses, such as ipuprofen and ‘looking at that girl all night’.

Luckily we no longer have to wander into a health food store to get healthy food - this is good news if you don’t speak Beard. You can simply go to your local supermarket, pick up an apple and admire its smooth glossiness and colour, then put it back, pick up the whizened windfall next to it bearing an ‘organic’ sticker and make your way to the check-out, secure in the knowledge that the purchase of organic food is doing you good, because it costs so much you’ve had to cut down on the booze you were going to buy. At some point in the process you may make the mistake of calculating the value of the apples you used to see lying on the ground underneath a neighbour’s tree when you were a kid. You may want to have a little weep at this point.

To cure this depression, a visit to a health food store is encouraged. This is because it’s impossible to feel depressed when you feel smug, and that’s what health food stores sell, that and bran. The folk behind the counter wear beards, beads, sandals and sweaters that have been ethically knitted by well-paid peasants. Of course people who eat in McDs also wear garments hand-stitched by peasants in the third-world, it’s just that these tend to be trainers and they tend to be put together by children in sweatshops.

A visit to a health food shop usually results in two things: being stalked by squirrels anxious to get their hands on your fruit and nut mix; and the kind of catastrophic bowel movement that is so long you have to send a postcard to friends half-way through to reassure them you are still alive, and so horrific that you have to go to a writing/dance/mime/painting workshop for the rest of the year to find a medium to describe it.

The cure for depression is straightforward. Avoid reading the sort of newspaper that is cobbled together from unchecked press-releases grabbed at random from the slush pile in the bin by the fax machine in the news room - and drink. Hardly a week goes by without a story (probably from an unchecked press-release but what the hell) about alcohol being great for us in some way. Also, it’s an excuse for having pokey-fun, rather than avoiding it.