Tunnock's is not to blame for society's problems

The Herald Scotland

4 hours ago

We know why the government feels this is necessary: we have eyes and the official figures provide the proof. In 2003, according to the Scottish Government, one-quarter of adults in Scotland were obese. Now it's one-third. And with obesity comes increased risk of cancer, diabetes and death and, as the UK Government points out, a cost of billions of pounds to the NHS. We are deep in a serious crisis that's getting worse.
The question is how we get out of it and Tunnock's feels it is being unfairly targeted. Its sales director Fergus Loudon said in Scottish Grocer magazine that the food industry was being blamed for societal problems that were not of its making. 'Banning chocolate biscuit ads on TV before nine o'clock to prevent obesity,' he said, 'is rather like banning foreign holidays to prevent skin damage from too much sun.'
A couple of things are going on here. First, it would be stupid to deny that food ads have an effect and that restricting ads can have some effect on what we buy and eat. The science writer Ellen Ruppel Shell points out in her very good book on obesity, Fat Wars, that Burger King spends more than half-a-billion dollars on promotional efforts every year and does it because it works. Conversely, no or little advertising would have the opposite effect to some extent and reduce consumption. 'Free-market capitalism is wonderful for many things,' says Shell, 'but public health is not among them.'
However, accepting that advertising has an effect is not the same as solving the health crisis because it goes deeper than that. There's been virtually no advertising of vapes and vaping, for instance, and yet vaping has exploded as a habit. It's also worth pointing out that Tunnock's (est. 1890) was around when there wasn't an obesity crisis and is around when there absolutely is an obesity crisis. Of course, a ban on ads will have an effect around the edges, but the crisis will go on until we tackle the deeper trends advertising cannot change – what Mr Loudon of Tunnock's calls societal problems.
I raise this subject whenever I talk to people in the food industry and it pretty much always comes back to the same few things. I had lunch with the French chef Jean-Christophe Novelli in Edinburgh and asked him what he thought was to blame for obesity. He said without a moment's hesitation: mobiles. We're getting fatter, he said, because of what we've done to our brains with technology – the constant messages, the instant gratification – and it means we're more absorbed in technology than in cooking and eating well. 'This is the thing that inflates your stomach,' he said, pointing to his phone.
I agree with chef Novelli – we know phones are changing the way we behave, I can feel it myself. We also know it starts young. Children are much less likely now to be active and outdoors because they prefer their phones but Shell also writes in Fat Wars that no-one is born with a taste for hot, bitter or sour or, for that matter, single malt or cigars: tastes develop with exposure and social pressure – and that's fine as long as the influences are good. However, as Shell points out, in the US and the UK, children increasingly dictate family food choices, which leaves households 'immersed in a miasma of one-dimensional sweet taste that reinforces and entrains juvenile preferences'.
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Anyone who grew up in the 1970s or earlier will know how true this is. I try to avoid using the phrase 'in my day' if I can, but in my day it was your parents who dictated the food choices based on what was good for you and how much it cost. Sweet foods like a Tunnock's Caramel Log, or the greatest British biscuit of all, the custard cream, were allowed as a treat but only a treat. By contrast, children now appear to be able to wield control and a veto on certain foods that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s. Adverts were around then and adverts are around now – it's the parenting that's changed.
How we fix the problem isn't easy – we're now into the second generation of parents who don't know how to cook and have handed food choices to their kids. But another chef I've spoken to is Gary Maclean, senior chef lecturer at City of Glasgow College and a winner of MasterChef: The Professionals. He knows what's he talking about because he lived it. He grew up in the 1970s when most food was cooked from scratch and something like Wimpy was a treat. Now, kids are outdoors much less than they were, and McDonald's and KFC are a ubiquitous part of many children's diets. Result: fat kids.
Maclean is well aware that an important factor in all of this is poverty. Unhealthy rubbish is relatively cheap. There was also an interesting Glasgow University study which showed that fast-food outlets are six times more prevalent in the poorest parts of the city. And it's all borne out by what happens to children and adults. By primary one, five-year-olds in Scotland are more than twice as likely to be at risk of obesity if they're from the most deprived catchments compared to the least. Roughly the same with adults: the obesity rate in the most affluent areas is 26% compared to 36% in the poorest neighbourhoods.
An ad for Tunnock's (Image: Newsquest)
You may think the answer to the problem is to tax unhealthy food, but Gary Maclean's concern is that it just makes life for poorer people even harder. Much better, he says, to try to get in early and encourage good habits at an early stage. If he had his way, he would make cooking and food education compulsory in schools – and it's hard to resist his logic. 'Learning to cook is just as important as learning to write,' he said. 'PE is compulsory and what you eat is just as important as what you do.'
His conclusion is that Scotland has the best food in the world but the worst diet, and only something fundamental such as compulsory food lessons at school will change it. You could introduce all the rules on ads you like – you could ban ads for Tunnock's Teacakes entirely – but not only would that be unfair on a firm like Tunnock's that's trying to promote its product, it would only make a marginal difference on a population affected, and made unhealthier, by deeper trends.
As it happens, Mr Loudon of Tunnock's also believes it's education that will address the problem and he's right: don't change the ads, change how we see them, and react to them. There's nothing wrong with a biscuit or two as part of a healthy balanced diet; all we need to do is to re-learn the fact.