Evolution, fat-shaming, David Aaronovitch on drugs, an anecdote from the 1970s, bonkers arguments .... and cats (again).
Each and every one of us is only here because at many stages in the past some (probably most) of our ancestors stuffed themselves silly during rare periods of plenty. Throughout history, and across the globe, food was often in short supply, and the threat of starvation was very often just around the next corner. There were strong evolutionary pressures to develop strong compulsions to consume large amounts of energy-dense food whenever this was available; and most of us did. Those who didn’t often died and failed to leave offspring.
Now that energy-dense food is available to almost everyone almost all the time, it is a miracle that anyone manages to maintain a healthy weight, and (generally speaking) those lucky individuals who do simply have lower hunger drives than the rest of us.
And it’s not just humans of course. If my cats ever figured out how to open the packets and help themselves to cat food, they would rapidly come to resemble a pair of beach balls.
Enter David Aaronovitch who has just written an excellent piece on his own experiences injecting semaglutide and on various negative reactions from others to the very notion of taking a drug to control appetite and, thus, calorie intake. He also draws some interesting parallels between such negativity and similar reactions to other medical treatments.
Figure 1 David's piece on Substack
In reading David’s piece – which I urge you to do – I was reminded of an experience back in the mid to late 1970s:
I was hitching down to London from West Yorkshire at night and had ended up at Leicester Forest East Service station. Not many cars were passing through, but then a white transit van enveloped in a huge cloud of smoke appeared and then pulled up beside my outstretched thumb.
A man whose robes I recognized as those of the “International Society for Krishna Consciousness”1 got out, confirmed he could take me further south, and opened the rear doors of the van. More clouds of smoke – which my nose had, by then, identified as incense smoke – billowed out and I climbed in. As the smoke cleared in the van, due to the sudden injection of fresh air, I realized there was a fellow long-hair already sitting in the back of the van, also in, and on his way to, “The Smoke”. He, it transpired, was from South Yorkshire and called Pete.
Figure 2 Me, circa 1975.
My fellow traveller had similar hair.
There were three Hare Krishna devotees in the front. As we pulled away down the M1, the one in the middle opened and lit a packet [sic] of jos sticks and placed them in a special holder on the dashboard. He then picked up a pair of mini cymbals, the man on the left picked up a mini drum, and they both began “playing” their instruments. By way of accompaniment, all three then began chanting “Hare Krishna”, and rocking their heads back and forth in an alarming manner. They kept this up for the entire journey. None of them seemed to be paying any attention to the road.
Figure 3 Some Hare Krishna devotees
(without a van).
The chanting trio then invited my fellow hitcher and me to join in.
Pete rolled his eyes and took a deep toke from the large spliff he had just rolled. “They explained to me earlier that if you chant like this for about 10 hours you eventually start tripping.” He took another deep toke. “I think I’ll stick to mi acid.”
Now at this juncture, many people might opine that striving to achieve states of extreme mental derangement is not the best way to spend your life. In fact, David A was one of the few people in the general milieu we both shared who actually held such opinions back in the day.
Other people might opine that taking drugs is bad for your health in various ways.
I simply note here that - since they were obviously dedicated fans of achieving disordered mental states, and were driving down a motorway while breathing air containing precious little oxygen and lethal particulate levels while paying attention only to what was going on inside their own heads - neither of these theses were available to our lift providers.
Instead, the arguments used by these, and other similar, religious cult members against taking drugs were not really against the goals of drug takers or any potential harms, but were based on rather puritanical notions that such goals could only justifiably be attained through hard spiritual “work”.
Of course, losing body mass is a more worthy goal than getting out of your tree. I draw no analogy there. But some goals (such as improving one’s health) are “universally acknowledged”2 to be “good things”3. And the idea that some courses of action are somehow immoral or a form of cheating if they provide an easier or more effective way to achieve such goals is (as David notes) a pervasive one; and one that crops up in his case and in all kinds of other unexpected places.
I have encountered similar moral stances being taken in respect of things as diverse as artificial sweeteners, painkillers, nicotine delivery systems for quitting smoking, and low-fat spreads.
Now there are sometimes quite sensible debates to be had about the actual merits or drawbacks of such aids to living a better life, but the argument that we should abjure any such things and endure any resulting pain or discomfort - on the grounds that that is the only truly righteous thing to do - is more bonkers than anything any of us got up to in the 1970s.
Known colloquially as the “Hare Krishnas”.
See Jane Austen.
See Yeatman and Sellar.