Another classic sentence from the you-know-what, care of concerned reporter Peter Walker:

Health experts blame passive overeating for global pandemic, warning in the Lancet that governments must tackle obesity now. 

One more time.

Health experts blame passive overeating…

Much as I hate to question the wisdom of “health experts,” let alone the even greater wisdom of Guardian contributors, I am tempted to ask how exactly passive overeating works. Is it, as the term implies, like passive smoking? Is such a thing physically possible? Mr Walker seems to believe so, as does Lancet contributor Professor Boyd Swinburn:

Swinburn’s paper comes up with a clear primary culprit: a powerful global food industry “which is producing more processed, affordable, and effectively-marketed food than ever before.”

Yes, those utter bastards are making available cheap and tasty food. And – and – you can actually go out and buy it. Will the madness never end?

He said an “increased supply of cheap, palatable, energy-dense foods,” coupled with better distribution and marketing, had led to “passive overconsumption.”

Again, the mind reels at the implied physics of it. Passivity alone has yet to make that extra slice of blackberry cheesecake merge with my good self. So far as I’m aware, tasty cheesecake molecules can’t be absorbed by osmosis or accidental inhalation in sufficient concentrations to add to my mass. Maybe it’s based on some kind of quantum spooky action – someone in Derbyshire scarfs a doughnut and – somehow, miraculously – my cells metabolise it.

Nevertheless – clearly – something must be done:

The journal begins with a strongly-worded editorial arguing that voluntary food industry codes are ineffective and ministers must intervene more directly.

In case there’s any doubt as to what direct intervention means, Professor Swinburn has already made his ambitions clear:  

“They [the government] have to look to how other epidemics, like road injuries and tobacco, have been handled and almost always it has been through taxes and regulation.”

According to our crusading professor, the issue of obesity should not be left to the individual, who is at best a victim and simply can’t be trusted. Family attractions should be “junk food-free zones” and the advertising of such food is, he says, “unethical.” Foodstuffs of which the professor disapproves should be taxed heavily. Making food more expensive is, we’re told, “a benefit.” Provided, that is, raising the cost of popular foods “does not cause disadvantage to poorer people.”

Yes, of course. Consumers must once again be saved from themselves.

Update, via the comments:

Some things can’t wait ‘til Friday. How to make luminous gin and tonic jelly.

Glenn Ricketts and Peter Wood on “diversity,” uniformity and things best left unsaid.

The “diversity” doctrine… urges students to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale [application] question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity… Would the Yale admissions office look favourably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.” No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbour insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.

Eve Binder notes the rise of Fat Studies.

Jacqueline Johnson knows what it’s like to be shunned because of her weight. In the early 2000s fat activism was edging into existence, and Johnson, a weight studies scholar, was deemed too skinny to take part. “I tried to join a fat activist group, and I was rejected because I was not of size,” she remembers… Today it’s a different story. Johnson, who teaches a course on weight and society at George Washington University, is currently a professor with 25 students of all heights and widths. Her Fat Studies class is one of a handful popping up on campuses across the country, teaching students to think about body size critically, politically, and regularly. But despite such courses’ popularity among students, critics worry that such classes emphasize bleeding-heart politics over intellectual rigour.

And Jeff Goldstein on the same.

The only epidemic at issue here is the epidemic of grievance-mongering passing itself off as legitimate “scholarship.” A course on the psychology of creating and empowering ever more oppressed victim groups and the new politically correct vocabulary (and corresponding “hate speech”) that will grow around them… would be far more valuable for students.

Feel free to add your own.

For newcomers, some short films from the archives.

Temptation. Small children, marshmallows and delayed gratification.

Misremembered. Just whose memory is it?

Tempted by Sunlight. Two words. Goth Cruise.

500 Flavours of Soda. Carbonated pleasures.

The Whale That Exploded. It can happen, people.

Photograph of Jesus. Strange goings-on at the Hulton Photo Archive.

And by all means mosey through the greatest hits.

This, since you ask, is crystallised soy sauce, magnified 16 times. Imaged by Yanping Wang. One of these.