Today’s Observer’s editorial is concerned, very concerned… 

Only radical action will begin to win the challenge of obesity. 

…and swollen with the usual urges: 

If the answers, whatever they are, involve challenging corporate power and practices, legislating to improve the content of food or even limiting individuals’ freedom to consume junk, then so be it. 

Found via Julia, whose commenter, Katabasis, adds, 

One to show people who think “progressive” is synonymous with “freedom.” 

We’ve been here before, of course. Readers may recall the Guardian’s unveiling of “passive overeating” and its sympathy with Professor Boyd Swinburn, who wants the state to “intervene more directly” in what and where other people may eat. Apparently, individuals cannot be trusted and the public must be corrected by its betters. Making food more expensive is, we’re told, “a benefit.” As I wrote at the time, 

There’s something vaguely unpleasant about a group of richer people – say, left-leaning doctors, columnists and academics – demanding constraints and punitive taxes on proletarian food. Taxes and constraints that would leave themselves largely unaffected. It seems Professor Swinburn believes the population is too stupid to live unsupervised by the state and by extension people much like himself. Our food choices must therefore be taxed or denied and we must be prodded firmly by our betters: “Soft policies such as education programmes… [are] not going to cut the mustard anymore.” 

And again, it’s all because they care so very, very much.