Nicola Sturgeon is, rightly, worried about Scotland’s growing childhood obesity problem. Statistically 29% of children in Scotland are at risk of being overweight. But within that statistic there is another, more important – but also more ignored – percentile; that those from deprived areas are nearly twice as likely to become obese. But rather than focusing in on this fact, rather than realising that there could be more to it than simply the idea that cartoons on food packaging make children fat, Sturgeon has been bitten by the eye-rolling, meme-generating, Jamie Oliver bug. The SNP leader met healthy-food activist and chef, Oliver, to discuss joint action to tackle unhealthy eating in the country. She announced a plan to half childhood obesity by 2030 and hopes to achieve this through a dramatic crackdown on the sale of junk foods in Scottish supermarkets and stores. This will mean banning price-cutting and two-for-one style promotions on sweets, crisps and other foods which are high in salt, fat and sugar. 

Now, Oliver is not the most well-loved of health-focused celebrity chefs. He’s no Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. In my opinion, everything he does comes across as, well, a bit more than patronising. It is not just patronising because he’s a celebrity chef worth about £400 million; nor is it patronising just because he’s trying to tell people what kind of pizza they can and cannot eat when he himself owns a failed, sub-par chain of Italian restaurants. It is patronising because of both of these things and more.

Sturgeon and Oliver’s plan contains a lot of implications. By making ‘unhealthier’ options more expensive, the plan implies that the people who will now have to stop buying two-for-one pizza deals (for example), because it now costs too much have other, healthier, options that they were intentionally avoiding before, and that we, the healthy-and-enlightened, need to help them see the error of their ways by taking away their choice. Moreover, it also implies that the people who could afford healthier alternatives anyway were not also, perhaps, over-indulging in pizza’s and the like, thus suggesting that the obesity crisis is an issue that strictly affects low income families. 

It is a fact that health and wealth are linked, that the former cannot be tackled without the careful consideration of the latter. Whilst the statistic stated at the start of this article does highlight the fact that children from more disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to become obese, it does not highlight them as the only ones who are. Sturgeon and Oliver’s plans with their underlying implications does.

Tackling childhood obesity isn’t just a matter of making unhealthy foods more expensive (especially without making alternatives cheaper in response). It’s a situation that requires a careful analysis of the socioeconomic factors that are in play, in order to develop an effective, multi-step plan. It is most certainly not a simple case of ‘let’s make this more expensive so the silly people don’t eat it and get fat!’ which is, unfortunately, what Sturgeon and Oliver seem to have made their way of taking on childhood obesity all about.