Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (7 page)

Even if we focus only on contemporary dietary crimes, I’m convinced they were much more prevalent in the 1970s, when I grew up, than they are now. Compare like for like, and today’s consumers eat better on almost every count. Breakfast cereals were generally very sugary, such as Sugar Puffs or Frosties, or nutritionally thin, like Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies. Now, there are many more high-fibre cereals, and even the sweeter ones have had their salt and sugar levels reduced.

Then there is the bread, which if anything was worse than in Orwell’s day. Sliced white ‘plastic’ bread, such as Mother’s Pride, was all the rage, and wholemeal was still more or less unheard of in many households. Much bread continues to be terrible today, but at least more of it is wholegrain, while supermarket in-store bakeries have led to a revival in the consumption of fresh bread.

The range of fruit and vegetables available was very limited, and ‘kiwi fruit’ was still just a rude way of referring to a gay New Zealander. What’s worse, many foodstuffs that had traditionally contained plenty of fruit and veg were being supplanted by synthetic, processed items. Knorr dried soup mixes were very popular but were little more than stock cubes to be dissolved into hot water and served as part of an apparently square meal. Fresh orange juice in the morning was still considered a bit of a luxury, and many preferred to buy Rise and Shine, a powdered orange-flavour drink. Even the perennial favourite the potato was getting short shrift, as the instant mashed potato Smash reached its peak of popularity.

The list could go on. It may well be true that where once schoolchildren were sent off with a small Penguin chocolate biscuit and a pack of crisps, they now also pack a larger Twix and a can of Coke. Not everything has got better since the ’70s, but I would wager more is better than is worse.

Take the contemporary era as a whole, and it would be hard to argue that we would be better-off eating a pre-war diet. Despite all the gloom about how we’re poisoning ourselves with junk food, we continue to live longer and healthier. Female life-expectancy in the UK rose by 3.6 years between 1981 and 2001, while males gained on average another 4.8 years of life. The number of years we could expect to live healthily also rose, less impressively, but still by more than two years for both sexes.
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Although we would surely be better-off if we ate less fast food, it is hard to justify the strength of feeling against it when you realise that this growth in life-expectancy mirrors the growth of McDonald’s in the United Kingdom: in 1983 there were 100 branches of McDonald’s in the UK, and by 2001 there were nearly 1,200. In other words, increased healthy life-expectancy is positively correlated with increased consumption of McDonald’s food. Of course, it would be absurd to infer from this that eating more Big Macs is a cause of longer life, but it at least should make us question whether our diets were really better before fast food became a routine part of the mix.

If you are concerned about our eating habits, it is important that your complaints are not backward-looking ones, for the past should not provide the model for how we should eat in the future. Poor diet is an avoidable problem because we now have the resources to eat better than we do and did, not because we have lost touch with an older, better way of nourishing ourselves. We can enjoy greater variety of food with little environmental impact, owing to cheap and efficient shipping of foods from around the world. Technological advances have meant we can keep food fresher for longer without having to rely on dubious chemicals. We also know more about what really is
good and bad for us, so we can rely on modern dietary science rather than old wives’ tales to inform our eating. To complain that our current dietary problems are the result of losing touch with a mythical healthy past is nostalgic complaint of the worst kind, because by misidentifying the source of the problem it blinds us to the best, forward-looking solutions.

Nostalgic and Luddite impulses are often interpreted as being symptoms of neophobia, and hence wrong complaints that spring from them can be seen as reflecting a failure to see the opportunities offered by the new. However, I am not convinced that newness per se is usually the problem. The real cause is, I suggest, kainotophobia: fear of change. The difference between neophobia and kainotophobia is so subtle that you often see them defined as virtual synonyms, but I think the difference can be illustrated by the example of a typical pedlar of nostalgic whines.

Imagine a recently retired man, Ed. He will constantly tell you that life used to be better in the old days, but he is no neophobe. He lives in a new-build bungalow, drives a new car, has embraced the CD and the DVD, and uses a mobile phone. He is comfortable with anything new, just as long as it doesn’t change his way of life in any fundamental way. What he doesn’t like is that he no longer knows all his neighbours, that he feels unsafe walking the streets at night, that women are no longer ‘ladylike’, and that the kinds of jokes he likes telling are now ‘politically incorrect’. The world he now lives in is not the world he knew and felt comfortable in, and, rather than change himself to fit the changing reality, he prefers simply to complain about how we’re all going to hell in a handcart.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy for people like Ed. Maybe he really is too long in the tooth to change, and so he should carry on complaining as a form of catharsis. But although some of
things he dislikes about modern life are regrettable, it would be undesirable to try to turn back the clock. The sense of safety and belonging he once felt cannot be replicated, because it has been undermined by greater social and geographical mobility, which is on the whole a good thing. Similarly, though it may be uncomfortable for Ed that women behave differently these days and that you can no longer crack jokes about ‘Sambo’, the gains for women and ethnic minorities that are linked to these far outweigh any loss to Ed and his ilk.

Not all change is for the better, and even good changes can have bad side-effects. But change is inevitable, and the old saying that we should try to guide change rather than stop it is no less true for being a cliché. Nostalgic and Luddite complaints are species of wrong complaint because they bolster a kainotophobia which stops us from adapting to and changing the transformations going on around us. We don’t need to be neophiliacs to see this: novelty for its own sake is one of the shallowest of human pleasures. The right advice is ‘Neither a neophobe nor a neophiliac be’. In the spirit of the serenity prayer we need the wisdom to see what is good in both the old and the new, and not to prefer one to the other merely because it is new or old.

One of the main reasons why we abuse the noble practice of complaint is that constructive complaining is often so hard, whereas futile moaning is so easy. Most human beings are critical pessimists, always quick to see signs of fault and decline. It’s not just that putting right all the ills of the world would take for ever: analysing all the ills correctly would take almost
as long. Hence most of our complaints are issued prematurely, without sufficient thought, and, though provoked by genuine cases of things not being as they ought to be, they are fired off without any accuracy and either miss their targets or hit the wrong one.

Such misdirected complaints come in at least three forms: they can be
displaced
,
disproportionate
or
easy gestures
. The word ‘displaced’ is used here in its literal psychoanalytic sense. Displacement occurs when the mind redirects troubling emotions from a problematic object to something where the emotion can be handled more safely. This enables the potentially threatening nature of the emotion to be neutralised by finding an outlet in a safer form.

Psychoanalytic concepts such as ‘displacement’ are problematic to the extent that they give therapists power over their patients (as most still call their clients). An analyst may tell a man who devotes himself to the growing of asparagus that he does so merely because he is unable to confront the reality of his homosexual desires, and thus displaces his love on to phallic vegetables. If the gardener protests that this is nonsense, how are we to tell if it is the gardener or the therapist who is deluded?

Fortunately, however, we do not need to buy into the idea that analysts know our minds better than we do to see some merit in many of their conceptual tools. Where the analyst might see the strength of our denial that displacement is at work as an indicator of the likelihood of its reality, a more empirical reason for thinking there is something in the idea of displacement is that we can recognise when it is genuinely going on. Suggest to someone who really is focusing on work in order to avoid domestic problems that this is the case and, whether they admit it or not, they will probably be stung by the suggestion.

Displacement complaints are often the result not so much of denial as of following the path of least resistance. Consider the case of school dinners in England and Wales. The issue became a metaphorical hot potato after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made a television programme in which he revealed that most children were eating not much more than literal, fried ones. A generation was being raised on shaped and coated mechanically recovered animal matter with chips.

Oliver’s exposé was genuinely shaming, but the reaction to it from a large part of the middle-class public was so strong that the suspicion was that the issue had become a lightning rod for something. Or perhaps some things: lightning struck more than once on this occasion.

The least edifying bolt came from a sector of the public which was basically disgusted by the working class. To put it crudely, many viewers found themselves thinking, ‘No wonder they grow up to be fat, lazy, unemployed hooligans when they’re raised on non-organic filth.’ This claim may seem far-fetched, but in my experience a visceral abhorrence of the proletariat is remarkably common among the English middle classes. They happily use words like ‘oiks’ and ‘chavs’ to describe the poor, white working class, even though they would never dream of saying ‘nigger’ or ‘coon’.

However, even these people know very well that it is not acceptable to despise someone on the basis of their social class or (lack of) education, and this distaste is something they don’t merely try to disguise but wish they didn’t actually feel. Hence if an opportunity arises to direct all that disgust, not at the poor little urchins themselves but at something else, why not take it?

Jamie Oliver’s campaign provided just that outlet. All that disdain for the proletariat could be displaced on to school
dinners, which could shoulder the majority of the blame for everything that is wrong with working-class life. Let them eat organic lemon polenta cake, and in the absence of chemical additives they will become less unruly, better able to concentrate, slimmer, more cultured creatures. The dividend is double: not only is the complainant absolved from any prejudice against the working people, but a socially unacceptable hatred is given an apparently moral outlet.

The furore was also the focus for a second displacement, almost a mirror image of the first. Here the displaced complaint was not against the horribleness of the working class but against the injustice of their plight. Despite over sixty years of the welfare state, with universal healthcare and education, life chances remain stubbornly dictated by accidents of birth.

Consider, for example, the depressing headings of a PowerPoint presentation to the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit on life chances and social mobility by Stephen Aldridge, now its director: ‘Those at the top and bottom of the income distribution are less likely to move between income groups than those in the middle’; ‘People in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations are at much higher risk of unemployment than those in professional and managerial occupations;’ ‘Deprivation tends to be concentrated in certain geographical areas’; ‘The infant mortality rate and the incidence of childhood mental illness are higher in unskilled and lower-income households’; ‘There has been no narrowing of differences in life-expectancy by social class over the past thirty years’; ‘Households on lower incomes are more likely to be victims of crime – and less able to protect their property from theft.’ The litany goes on. What is shocking is that such findings are no longer shocking. We know that social inequality is stubbornly resistant to change by government policy, and few now believe we can do more than ameliorate it.
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To those who wish for a more equitable society it should be obvious that constructive complaint about inequality requires addressing issues of great complexity and intractability. This, however, is hard work, and aside from the plight of the less well-off, there are other problems that demand attention, such as choosing a new people-carrier, moving into the catchment area of a good school or cancelling the organic vegetable box delivery while the family decamps to a gîte.

Lucky, then, that something comes along which one can wholeheartedly support and which promises genuine changes in life chances for the poor. It turns out that we needn’t worry about Marx’s analysis of capital or Gordon Brown’s harnessing of endogenous growth theory to fund redistribution: all we need to do is feed people properly. The poor needn’t live on their knees; they can diet on their feet, standing taller than ever before, owing to stronger growth fuelled by five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

The idea that better lunches can transform lives may seem extreme, but it’s one Oliver overtly promoted. He made one family change what they gave their children for lunch and went back to discover that the kids’ afternoon behaviour had been dramatically changed for the better. No one pointed out the obvious possibility that the presence of cameras, rather than vegetables, might have had something to do with this. Although there is indeed evidence that diet is important for concentration and energy levels, the idea that a square meal is a magic bullet for the ills of relative deprivation is absurd.