Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  I’d do the latter, I think. It doesn’t really matter what it tastes like because you can show them the bottle and most people can read. So they know what it is, and what that signifies. That’s the point of champagne: it shows a celebratory intention. As well as being extravagant, it symbolises extravagance. Its symbolic role is why we drink it out of funny-shaped glasses and is much more important than its actual cost or taste. Lleonart’s reference to cava suggests that he either doesn’t really understand that or is resistant to it.

  Normal champagnes, by the way – the simpler, shallower, less autolytic sort – should still be guzzled from flutes or that saucer-on-a-stalk type of glass. “Both the flute and the saucer help the aromas diffuse in different ways,” explained the ambassador. “The flute concentrates carbon dioxide at the top of the glass, whereas the saucer’s wide mouth means the bubbles evaporate more quickly.” So, if you’re drinking an inferior wine, you might as well persist with your wacky glassware.

  And this, of course, is the key to the experts’ new champagne-drinking advice. It’s not really about what anything tastes like. They’re not fools. They’re selling a luxury item, so this is all about snobbery. This supposedly taste-maximising advice creates a whole new level of posh above normal champagne-drinking and gives it a visual hook.

  Like calling an eminent surgeon “Mister” because he has been elevated above a mere doctor, drinking fizzy wine in a normal glass is a way of defining a new cut above – a way of making expensive champagne distinguishable from normal, without the need of an expert’s palate. It’s like anglicising your pronunciation of Don Quixote – to those not in the know, champagne from a normal glass will look wrong. But, to the alpha-snobs, the sensation of the bourgeoisie wrongly looking down on them will add a frisson to their feeling of superiority that’s more effervescent than any drink.

  * * *

  Scampi, I remember once reading, used to be very expensive. In the 1950s, ordering scampi in a restaurant was a really swanky thing to do. To contemporary ears, the word had the same connotations that lobster does today. It feels a bit incongruous, like Princess Grace having a cheese ploughman’s at her wedding breakfast. But there it is: scampi was a prized and pricey luxury.

  So what happened to it? Did it somehow get much less delicious, but still basically palatable, so restaurateurs concluded that they couldn’t charge top dollar for it any more and it became the basket-borne bar snack of the 1970s and beyond? Obviously not. It just got more plentiful, and so cheaper. Because of fishing or farming or freezers, I suppose, it was suddenly possible to dish out millions more plates of it, so it lost its cachet and ceased to be a luxury item.

  I realise the term “scampi” probably now covers a wider range of marine biomass nuggets than it did in the dish’s post-war glory years. There’s scampi and there’s scampi. I mean, they were putting horse in lasagne, so I wouldn’t want to be a slow-moving walrus or squid when an unscrupulous scampi trawler breasted the horizon. But in a nice pub, where they might call it “wholetail scampi”, I imagine they’re basically dishing up the same item Noël Coward would have paid through the nose for as he handed over his ration book at the Café Royal.

  Most of us know how that tastes. It tastes fine. It’s OK. A bit fishy, in both senses of the adjective, but a broadly acceptable vector for tartar sauce. But I think we’re clear what we’d do if it suddenly quintupled in price: we’d just stop ordering it. We can all live with never eating scampi again – it’s just slightly gristly fish and chips that you don’t have to cut up.

  So what were they thinking, those people in the 1950s? Never mind all the sexism, racism and homophobia, never mind McCarthyism and Korea and Suez – that’s all very regrettable, but then people have always been absolute bastards. But what were they thinking paying so much for scampi?

  I was put in mind of the cost of luxuries by reports that, according to the Coutts Luxury Price Index, it’s rising way ahead of inflation. Inflation is at 2.4%, but there’s been an overall price rise of 5.5% in the luxury cars, Savile Row suits, private-school fees, posh boozes and other high-end items that make up the Coutts luxury basket of goods.

  This is not the sort of basket in which you might find scampi. Scampi has long since ceased to be a luxury food, so doesn’t qualify. But that actually raises a question about how you measure price fluctuations only in items that are incontrovertibly expensive. If their prices were to fall enough that they wouldn’t be deemed expensive any more, would they stop qualifying for the basket, and so fail to mitigate the apparent inflationary trend?

  The story of scampi demonstrates that all that is required to render an otherwise unremarkable thing luxurious is for it to be very expensive. That’s what drew people in the 1950s to pay so much – the simple fact that it cost so much. Its exclusive price made them keen to be included in the elite group that could afford it. They would then undoubtedly tell themselves they were eating something exceptionally delicious, as people do now with truffles, caviar, paté de foie gras and a whole host of other astronomically pricey items whose flavours range from quite nice to weird, but none of which actually tastes as good as a slice of buttered toast.

  There’s no schaden in any freude we might feel about the fact that the super-rich might have to pay a bit more for the ridiculous stuff they buy. The respectful solemnity with which designer clothes, luxury cars, extremely expensive watches and daft modern art works are viewed makes me well up with contempt. Whenever I see an advert for a designer watch, for example, I imagine all the stupid men looking at it, nodding and seriously muttering, “Nice watch,” aspiring to own it, or perhaps being able to buy it and add it to some prissy collection, and I am mystified at their certainty that this is a more noble use of their finite span than, say, a rampant heroin addiction.

  But what does this inflation really mean? Well, for Sven Balzer, head of investment strategy at Coutts, it means that “anyone looking to maintain the spending power of their wealth in the long term should consider a diversified investment portfolio alongside cash holdings”, but then he’s got products to sell. Some of the price rises are probably a sign of real economic changes and uncertainties – fluctuating currencies, Brexit, Trump’s enthusiasm for a trade war – and it’s nice to think that the jet set are copping a bit of that flak as well as everyone else.

  Mainly, though, it just means that those who make or sell all the overpriced crap have decided to put prices up because they know people will pay them. In fact, people may be even keener to pay them because the exclusivity of the basically-just-a-bag/dress/car/watch/school/bottle of tequila/holiday is reinforced by the higher charge. These retailers aren’t looking to give their “best price”; they need this stuff to cost too much or it will start to seem normal.

  It’s all the inevitable consequence of the widening gap between rich and poor. As the world splits further in two, with a small plutocrat class that’s increasingly distant and separate from the rest of the population, the luxury brands need to nail their colours firmly to the super-yacht mast. These days, some people can pay anything, which means some have to charge anything. Either that or they risk going the same way as scampi.

  * * *

  People won’t take dietary advice from obese nurses, but they will from stick-thin film stars – with terrible results in both cases. That’s the latest nutritional news.

  The first half of the above is an inference from a study in the journal BMJ Open saying that about 25% of nurses in the NHS are obese, a discovery the report’s lead author, Dr Richard Kyle of Edinburgh Napier University, declared to be “deeply worrying”. The depth of his concern surprised me, considering that about 25% of the adult population is obese, which he must have known. So, what he’s found is that nurses are, on average, neither thinner nor fatter than the general population, which, if I were him, is precisely what I would expect to find. Then again, calling the findings “deeply predictable” would probably have been a kick in the teeth for the people who’d ju
st paid him to find them.

  His deep worry stems from two issues: first, the health impact of obesity on all those nurses – “It is vital that we redouble our efforts to take care of our healthcare workforce who do so much to care for others” (maybe he used to work in greetings cards) – and second, that patients will be reluctant to take dietary advice from the very fat. “If someone is visibly overweight people don’t necessarily trust that advice. The public expect nurses to be role models,” he said. Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, echoes this sentiment: “People in the health service are meant to be role models but they’re not.”

  You hear a lot these days about how some people are supposed to be role models. Reality-TV stars are bad role models, footballers should try to be better role models, etc, etc. It makes a certain amount of sense when talking about those who are paid a lot to do something unimportant. But I think it’s a bit much also to lay that burden on those paid a pittance to do something vital. Purely by their choice of profession, nurses are surely already making a contribution role-model-wise, and they can probably do without our heaping on a load of extra pressure to be thin and healthy and beaming with media-groomed joie de vivre.

  In the west today, it can be difficult to be thin. I certainly haven’t got the knack. And, in a cruel reversal of what historical imagery makes us expect, the poor are now more likely to be fat than the rich. Time and money are a huge help in attaining the trim appearance that contemporary visual snobbery associates with success. These days the euphemistically prosperous-looking are probably anything but. And, as time and money are commodities nurses are notoriously short of, I’d say the fact that the profession’s obesity rate is no higher than the national average is already an achievement.

  But what of the concern that patients suffering weight-related health issues will be less willing to take lifestyle advice from a fat nurse? Well, I can’t immediately dismiss it – people can be pretty stupid. Maybe they’d also be less likely to heed safety advice about crocodiles from a zookeeper with only one arm.

  The media have a slight obsession with hypocrisy. It’s like potting the eight-ball early in pool. If someone can be labelled a hypocrite – if you can say they “don’t practise what they preach” – then it’s game over: you can ignore everything they say. That’s not always a very sensible approach. We all know someone can completely sincerely advise you to do something that they’ve tried and failed to do themselves.

  But many of us do seem to find it reassuring to get our dietary advice from the rake-like. The British Dietetic Association is so concerned about this that it brings out an annual list of “celebrity” diets to be wary of. The latest one includes the alkaline diet, favoured by Kate Hudson, Tom Brady and the Duchess of York, the raw vegan diet, advocated by Gwyneth Paltrow, Megan Fox and Sting, and the ketogenic diet, followed by the likes of Kim Kardashian, Mick Jagger and Halle Berry.

  These people are all in good shape, so the idea that they’ve got some glamorous trick for maintaining their appearance is as attractive as they are. But, as you’d probably expect, it doesn’t work like that. According to the BDA, while some of these diets might help you lose a bit of weight (largely because of the extent to which they overlap with the broader scientific consensus on healthy eating), they might also be bad for you if you stick to them for too long (probably not a massive worry).

  They’re fashionable fads cooked up (or left raw) by amateurs, which means they are often, as the BDA says of the alkaline diet, “based on a basic misunderstanding of human physiology”. “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” was how Sian Porter, consultant dietitian with the BDA, put it.

  To my mind, the idea that a film star is thin for reasons primarily to do with diet is as foolish as thinking that nurses might have their facts wrong on healthy eating simply because they happen to be fat. Film stars are weird people – they have a drive to be looked at that, in most cases, has informed a very high percentage of the choices they’ve made. They have a huge amount riding on their appearance, and it is insufficiently cynical to say that it’s primarily money. They are thin from assuaging a different hunger – one that dwarfs the doughnut cravings under which the majority labour. They’re the wrong people to advise the general public about what to eat. It’s like asking a cheetah for techniques to cut out carbs.

  If a problem with our society is that people unquestioningly believe the thin and rich, and ignore out of hand the utterances of the poor and chubby, then I wonder whether pressurising the chubby to slim and the slim to shut up is really the answer. I suspect that’s treating the symptom rather than the underlining cause – which is the utter vacuity of millions of people’s system of values.

  So let’s leave Halle Berry and rotund nurses out of this. It’s not their fault. The unavoidable truth is that you shouldn’t judge the wisdom of someone’s words according to how physically attractive they are. People who don’t realise that are bound to suffer. And their minds won’t be changed by anything I say. Not unless I lose weight.

  * * *

  Speaking as a meat-eater, I find it annoying how many vegans there suddenly are. I suspect a few other meat-eaters feel the same. Do you, some meat-eaters, if you’re really honest with yourselves?

  It’s not a good look, I realise, to appear annoyed with groups of people living their lives in the way they choose without harming others – and, in the case of vegans, taking the not-harming-others to considerable lengths. Nevertheless, I’m going to stick my neck out (also not a good look), because it’s true. I’m not asking you other meat-eaters to do the same. You never have to seem annoyed; just to privately ask yourselves whether you find all these vegans slightly annoying.

  If you do, then the obvious next question is why. Well, there are lots of reasons: for example, some vegans seem so radical and preachy and angry. Though, actually, again being honest, I don’t really mind that. I quite like it. It makes it easy to discount them as weird, which was my view about veganism in general before I started finding the number of vegans annoying.

  I think what I find annoying, deep down – and, again, some meat-eaters, you don’t have to own up to this, but it might interest you to discover whether you secretly agree – is the very fact that I can’t discount vegans any more. The thing that’s annoying about there suddenly being lots of them is the nagging suspicion that they might be right. When there were hardly any vegans, I hardly ever had to think about that.

  After all, it’s not as if eating meat is an incontrovertibly lovely thing to do. I mean, it’s lovely to eat, it’s delicious, but I’m talking about actually killing an animal: you know, an organism that can feel stuff and likes some things and doesn’t like other things, that can pretty clearly experience fear – either that or it can act, which would be an even greater sign of sentience. I imagine that putting an end to that creature’s life isn’t necessarily a particularly great feeling. So, speaking personally, I’m thrilled it all gets handled by other people, because I don’t reckon that if I’d just, say, strangled a goat, I’d be over the moon about myself.

  Look, I can defend meat-eating. It’s perfectly possible to farm meat in such a way that the animals have decent lives and don’t die in pain and fear. I don’t know how often that happens, but it’s possible. Still, it’s hard to frame an argument that it’s actually wrong not to kill them. Not killing them seems, ethically speaking, to be playing on the safe side.

  Now, I’m definitely going to continue eating meat. That’s decided. I don’t like change and I do like sausages. So, as you can imagine, having my mind forced down the contemplative avenues above is somewhat vexing – and, as a result, it becomes emotionally tempting to blame all the vegans for that vexation. So that’s where I am with all this. End of column.

  Except, I suppose, I ought to explain why I’m talking about this now. There’s a vegan in the news – his name is Jordi Casamitjana – who is campaigning to get “ethical veganism” protected as a “philoso
phical belief” under the Equality Act. He’s calling it “ethical veganism” to distinguish it from veganism for purely dietary reasons. “Some people only eat a vegan diet but they don’t care about the environment or the animals, they only care about their health,” he told the BBC. I suppose, to him, they’re like Blairites to a Corbynista. Worse than cannibals.

  Casamitjana’s veganism is full-on. It’s not just about food, it’s his whole life. He has no truck with leather, silk, wool, zoos, aquariums, anything that’s been developed using animal testing, anything that uses captive animals in its advertising, or dating non-vegans.

  He used to work for the League Against Cruel Sports, but it wasn’t vegan enough for him. He says he discovered that the league’s pension fund invested in companies that carried out animal testing and was sacked for telling people, which he characterises as being discriminated against for his veganism. The league disagrees, saying he was sacked “because of gross misconduct. To link his dismissal with issues pertaining to veganism is factually wrong.”

  The employment tribunal that’s going to decide this will also rule on whether veganism meets the Equality Act’s definition of a belief. According to the act, it has to “be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour”; it must “attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance; and be worthy of respect in a democratic society, compatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others”.