It is early evening. I sip my coffee, read my papers, wait for my painkillers and mobile phone to do their respective jobs. The papers, once again, are full of the obesity crisis. Government officials and obesity experts are bristling with enthusiasm for the battle ahead. They cite the villains: fat, sugar and salt. Carb is off the agenda. In my Guardian, Susan Jebb, we are told, 'called for the government to act and set real targets for bringing obesity levels down'. At the International Obesity Task Force conference, President Philip James says that the wellbeing of children is 'systematically undermined by the intense marketing and sales of foods high in fat, sugar
and salt'.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Physics has been studying the diet of Homer Simpson. 'We watched lots of Simpson
videos,' says the Institute's Michelle Cain. Analysis reveals that Homer consumes an average of 3,100 calories per day, including 129 grams of fat. His body weight, which is remarkably steady, is 239.8 lbs. Nearly 4 lbs heavier than me at my fattest, at least when I positioned the scale correctly. `Homer's current lifestyle is putting him at risk of coronary heart disease,' comments Deborah Allen of the British Heart Foundation. There is a picture of Homer eating a doughnut. The picture's caption is: 'Homer Simpson: eats too much fat.'
Barry, an overweight character in EastEnders, is trying to lose weight. He's exchanging cooked breakfasts of bacon, egg, and sausages for something apparently healthier cereal.
The paradigm is solid.
I flick through newspapers, magazines, waiting for my painkillers to kick in, waiting for my phone to ring. Sophie Dahl's weight is still decreasing. After several years as a token `oversize' model, Dahl's career briefly flourished as a normal-sized model, and now she is conspicuously thin. Her greatest moment was a much-maligned perfume ad in which a beautifully-proportioned Dahl was depicted on her back, legs spread, apparently being ravished by invisible forces. And this, I guess, is how she must have felt as an oversize model supine, ambiguous, trapped. Anyway, she is now famous for being thin, for having shed the bulk that defined her, which means that she is, of course, still defined by bulk, or rather its absence, which, in turn, drives her to shed yet more pounds.
I'm looking at a picture of Sophie Dahl, and I'm thinking of Cyril Connolly's phrase: 'Inside every fat person there is a thin one wildly signalling to get out.' And that's what this picture of Dahl looks like the thin person wildly signallingto get out. In the picture, Dahl is thin. But look into her eyes, and what do you see? The eyes of a fat person?
Jennifer Aniston steady. Cameron Diaz steady. Kirstie Alley still gaining. Alley is puffing up like Robbie Coltrane. I happen to know that her diet, the diet she recommends, involves fasting. Dolly Parton does this, too. I once interviewed Parton, and she told me that fasting made her feel cleaner and more clear-headed; being empty physically makes her feel less empty spiritually. In the case of Alley, though, I can imagine what might have happened. Fasting led to hunger, which led to bingeing. In pictures, she is beginning to take on the pyramid shape of the truly obese.
Was that ... ? No. Just somebody with the same ringtone. My hand is clutching at my phone, stroking it. Academics studying mobile phone users recently referred to phones as `electronic pets'. People leave buildings to take their phones for a walk, to check messages, rearrange settings. I saw an ad the other day in which people were trying, fruitlessly, to describe a sporting moment. The solution? Send a video-clip of the moment to all your friends. The messy business of talking is replaced with the very thing you want to describe. Every day, we are more connected. Every day, we are less connected.
This morning, my homepage had an article about celebrity eating. There was a picture of Cameron Diaz eating an unidentifiable piece of food, possibly a burger.
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`Cameron: how does she stay so thin when she obviously loves her food so much?'
The answer comes from Lucy Liu, Diaz' co-star in Charlie's Angels. Liu describes Diaz as 'a genetic freak because she can eat whatever she wants without piling on the pounds.'
Liz Hurley was eating fries. Renee Zellweger was eating either fish or scampi. Sarah Jessica Parker 'didn't do anything, honest' in order to lose weight after giving birth. 'I'm just one of those people who doesn't gain weight.'
Renee Zellweger, it is reported, did Atkins after gaining weight for her role as Bridget Jones, but did not slim down enough to prevent a glossy magazine from dropping her as the cover girl 'for being too fat'.
Elsewhere: it is reported that the woman who plays Kat in EastEnders has been told she is too fat to play romantic storylines, and so must slim down. Jennifer Aniston says, of her youthful plumpness, 'I wasn't really fat. I was just Greek.'
Maybe that was my problem all those years. Maybe I was just Greek.
My painkillers are beginning to take effect. Interestingly, even though aspirin was discovered in 1899, nobody knew how it worked until the 1970s. It works by fooling the brain, by messing with the signal that tells the brain something is wrong. When you take a painkiller, you are treating a symptom rather than a condition. You're still in pain, but you no longer know it.
Are painkillers a bad thing? We're certainly spending more money on them than ever before. In 1997, the British painkiller market was worth �309 million. In 2001, it was worth �398 million. Is this because we are in more pain? A pain specialist, Dr Raj Munglani, told me he believed that our society tolerates pain less well than before. So we're not in more pain. On the other hand, 'Pain is what the patient says it is.' So we might be in more pain.
These days, our expectations are higher. We want fast-acting pain relief in the same way that we want fast-acting diets, fast food, speed elevators, speed-dialling on our mobile
phones.
One thing about painkillers is that they are more widely available than they used to be; in 1996, the government relaxed restrictions on ibuprofen, allowing it to be available in supermarkets, newsagents and corner shops. This was part of a drive to save money by taking pressure off doctors and pharmacists; as citizens, we have been taught to be self-medicating when it comes to pain. Now, when we are in pain, we are no longer in the hands of the doctor we are in the hands of the marketing man.
My painkillers might, and might not, be working. For a moment, I take in what Howard Schultz, chairman and founder of Starbucks, calls 'the experience'. The experience is the same here as it is in the two other Starbucks outlets in my neighbourhood the same easy chairs, the same bright colour-schemes, the same soft-rock and jazz piped at the same soothing volume, the same high-tab cappuccinos and espressos. The Frappuccinos. The macchiatos. The mochas. The experience makes me feel relaxed and uneasy in shifting proportions.
Intriguingly, some doctors now believe that painkillers, when taken frequently, actually cause the problem they set Out to solve; Dr Timothy Steiner, of Charing Cross Hospital in London, believes that one in thirty people suffer chronic headaches as a result of painkiller overuse. 'If painkillers reduce the sensitivity of pain pathways, there is likely to be, Over time, a compensation for that,' Steiner told me, 'which results in those pathways becoming more sensitive, leading to the requirement for more analgesia.'
Painkillers give you pain.
Carbs make you hungry.
Mobile phones make you feel disconnected.
So what do people do? They take more painkillers to get rid of the pain, they eat more carbs to stave off the hunger pangs, they clutch their mobile phones to make themselves feel less edgy and paranoid.
Bad medicine.
The scariest thing about painkillers is that they now exist in a no-man's land between medicine and product. Which means that they don't need someone to prescribe them they need someone to market them. Don Williams is the man responsible for designing the Nurofen packet on my table. He works in Notting Hill, west London. His office is just what you'd expect minimal furnishings, blond-wood floors. In the upstairs lobby there is a shopping trolley full of products designed by his company, Packaging I
nnovations Global: Double Velvet toilet paper, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Pot Noodle and Nurofen. A former session guitarist from Middlesborough, Williams is tall and slim, with wonderfully tasteful clothes and a shaved head. 'That's our philosophy,' he said, looking at the trolley. 'That's what we believe in. Getting things in trolleys. At the end of the day, that's what we're paid for.'
One of Williams' innovations was to place the target in the centre of the pack, with a chevron radiating out to the sides. He also wanted more of the silver foil on the packs to be visible. Consumers, he told me, are visually literate they see the pack design before they read the words. When he took over the pack design of Benson & Hedges cigarette packs,
Williams made sure that every pack was gold, even the packs containing low-tar cigarettes, which had previously been silver. 'We believe that brand identities should be recognized at a distance,' he said, 'even through half-closed eyes, or suboptimal conditions, or in peripheral vision.' In supermarkets, said Williams, 'we want a blocking effect on the shelf. The
a
chevron links all the packs together, so you get a wave effect.' As I left, he said, 'I get more kicks out of seeing a pack in a bin than on a shelf.'
I pick up and fiddle with my phone and sip my coffee and cast my eyes around the Starbucks. I look at the easy chairs, the blond-wood tables, the cheerful mugs on shelves. Everybody I know professes to hate Starbucks, although most of them still come here and drink the coffee, which is not great, and sit in the easy chairs. I think Starbucks makes us uneasy because it tells us something important about the world we live in; it tells us that we need somewhere like Starbucks. When I interviewed him in 2000, Howard Schultz said, 'The environment that we create has given people a respite for themselves, or a sense of gathering and community with people at a time in their lives when there's no human connection. The PC, the hand-held wireless devices facilitate levels of communication that are singular, that are not based on communicating with a human.'
We were in Seattle, attending the annual Starbucks Employees' conference. In the conference hall that morning, people had been buzzing with corporate pride and near-religious zeal. One manager of a Starbucks outlet said, `Howard will tell you that it's not just about coffee. It's about People.' Another employee looked me in the eye,
and said, with quiet intensity, 'It's not only about enjoying the beverage, but also the service, the aroma, the comfortable chairs.'
At the time, Starbucks was worth $7.2 billion, but had tangible assets of only $1.2 billion it was rich in extrinsics, or, as one executive put it, 'what's parked between your ears'. In other words, the value of Starbucks consisted mostly of the consumer's need. Starbucks, it might be said, was a billion dollars' worth of real estate and coffee products, and six billion dollars' worth of human need. Scott Bedbury, Starbucks' vice president of marketing at the time, has said that, `Consumers don't truly believe there's a huge difference between products.' A former head of marketing at Nike, Bedbury has also said, 'With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people's lives, and that's our opportunity for emotional leverage.'
We took our seats in the conference hall. A man arrived on stage and unveiled a number 46.38. Everybody cheered. Starbucks stock had just gone up, and, since most people in the room owned Starbucks stock, they were now a little bit richer than they had been a short while ago.
One after the other, Starbucks executives took the stage, and made speeches. The first guy told us that Starbucks was the 'most preferred' restaurant in Tokyo, that Koreans loved it, that, for the first time in UK history, the consumption of coffee had exceeded that of tea.
`Take a moment to congratulate yourselves,' said the executive.
Later, he quoted Winston Churchill (`Success is never final') and Tom Hanks. 'I don't often quote Tom Hanks,'
he said, 'but he did get it in A League of Our Own when he said, "If winning were easy, then everybody would be doin' it. It's the hard that makes it great."'
Another exectutive said, 'Our stores really are theatres. The store manager is the director.'
Schultz arrived on stage. Like the self-help guru Anthony Robbins, he has the air of Ted Danson from Cheers. He wore a black shirt, no tie, black suit. Halfway through his speech, he told us that, as he watched the conference proceedings, he shed tears, thinking of his dead father, who would have been proud. People in the audience began to cry. Schultz defined the Starbucks concept as 'something that is true, that is authentic, that is relevant, that enriches people's lives. We've touched their heart. You've touched their heart with the things that you do.'
He said, 'We have changed the landscape of America! Not only have we changed it we have enhanced id'
He said, 'People said there would never be a time when the Japanese walked down the street holding a cup of coffee! But now, you can't walk down the street without seeing it
He said, 'What they can't copy, what they can't take away, is the heart and soul of what makes this company great. Don't allow this moment to be dismissed!'
He said, 'I believe and I hope this is not coming across in some soppy way take the moment! Seize id'
Later, in the penthouse of the Westin Hotel, with views all the way across Puget Sound, Schultz described the experience of being in a Starbucks outlet: 'You hear the music, you smell the coffee, you see the people. The lighting and the design have been put in place to almost take you away.'
I sip my coffee. I cast my eye around the Starbucks, at the easy chairs, the blond-wood tables, the cheerful mugs on shelves.
At last! Some progress with my headache. The painkillers I have taken are beginning to deactivate a chemical in my brain called prostaglandin H synthetase, the catalyst that turns a chemical called arachidonic acid into messengers of pain called prostaglandins.
My brain has bad news: I am in pain.
My solution: shoot the messenger!
And, finally, my phone lights up, and rings, and the man sitting in an easy chair a few feet away from me, whose phone has the same ringtone, snaps his head towards his own phone, as if waking from a dream, and turns away again, disappointed, and I pick up my phone and put it to my ear.
`Leroy,' I say, and then, 'When?' and then 'Yes', and then, `Good.'
On the way out, I toss my Nurofen packet into the bin, where it nestles brightly against the beiges and browns and coffee-stained whites of the lava-jackets, the napkins, the waxed paper cups that Japanese people are now more willing to hold as they walk down the street.
Don Williams would get a kick out of it, if he happened to be passing.
A Net Loss
You know you shouldn't do it, you know it's not good for you, you know that, even if snorting coke will make you
happier than you are now for a brief period, it will make you more miserable than you are now for a longer period; you know that, with coke, the economics are not good, that you'll end up with a net loss.
You know that coke works by fooling the brain, by telling the brain to release large amounts of feel-good chemicals, and you also know that, when these chemicals, dopamine and serotonin, are released, the brain neutralizes them with brutal efficiency, leaving you with lower levels than before, and a raging hunger for more coke.
And you know that, when you snort more coke, you will not feel as good as you did the first time, and, soon afterwards, you will feel much, much worse, with disastrously low levels of serotonin and dopamine, and a raging hunger for yet more coke, and a bitter, twisted gleam in your eye.
One thing that irks me is that, if you have problems with alcohol or drugs, some people think that you're just bunking off for a while, having a great time. Just like some people look at a fat person stuffing pizza into their face, and think it's all about enjoyment. People think greed is all about enjoyment. But it's not. Greed, as any self-help guru will tell you, is a compensation for pain. Greed is about deprivation. I was talking to a compulsive eater the other day, the one who didn't want to be identif
ied, and I asked him or her to tell me what he or she had eaten during a binge the night before, and he or she listed the items the two small frozen pizzas blitzed in the microwave, the sandwiches with avocados and cheese, the single doughnut, the chocolate bar. All this after having dinner a salad. And I asked him or her if any of these things had given him or her any pleasure, and for a moment he or
she looked shocked. The very idea! No, this was pure masochism, pure self-harm, every mouthful a self-administered laceration.
You know you shouldn't do it, but you go ahead, you soldier on. The mind of a coke fiend, pre-binge, is like the babble of an unpopular government leading a nation into war there are evasions, omissions, calculated abuses of intelligence, outright lies.
It will make you feel bad, but that doesn't matter, because you will feel good first.
It will cost you money, but that doesn't matter, because it will also save you money. How? We'll come to that point later.
When you walk into the bar to meet Leroy, you will have the briefest and most formulaic of conversations, and soon you will find yourself in a dank, smelly toilet, scraping some powder on to the toilet lid, snorting the powder up your nose through a rolled up banknote, fretting about germs. But that doesn't matter, because cocaine is an appetite suppressant, and you will not eat any more food today.
And, before you leave the cubicle, you'll have a nasty moment of clarity. For a second, you will see yourself. And you won't look good. But that doesn't matter, because very soon, you will forget about all these things. You will forget about the suspicious crusting on the toilet lid, the mulch of wet tissue on the floor, the fuzz of lichen on the grouting between the tiles, the money you have spent, the Faustian pact you have set into motion.
Leith, William Page 19