by Tom Watson
‘Ha, that’s a proper midlife crisis bike,’ said my brother, laughing, when I told him about my new purchase.
‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ I replied. ‘The modern-day equivalent of an MGB soft-top…’
I took my new bike out for a few test rides in London, preferring to cycle along wide park avenues rather than congested cycle lanes while I (quite literally) found my feet. Negotiating the cleat mechanism wasn’t easy; whenever I came to a halt I had to master the technique of quickly twisting my heel outwards to disengage it from the pedal, in order to avoid crashing down like falling timber. A cyclist pal of mine had joked that I couldn’t call myself a proper cyclist until I’d keeled over on my bike at least a dozen times, having failed to release those pesky cleats in a timely manner. By the spring of 2019 I was definitely edging toward that tally.
A few weeks later, I decided to join up with some friends for a camping weekend in Hay-on-Wye, in Herefordshire. One of my favourite towns in the UK, it boasted some awe-inspiring scenery, and was renowned for its glut of second-hand bookshops. I reckoned this mini-break would be the ideal opportunity to give my Izalco a run out along some country lanes – and I really wanted to practise moving through the many gears – so I made plans to take the train from London to Hereford, and to cycle the rest of the twenty-mile route to Hay.
Let’s just say I underestimated how difficult and daunting this excursion would be. Even the act of loading the bike onto the train at Paddington was an ordeal. This process was second nature to seasoned cyclists, of course, but as a novice I had no idea which part of the train to use, or how to work the storage racks, and as the departure time loomed I got myself into a bit of a lather. One of the Great Western Railway train managers must have seen me dithering around and came to my rescue, guiding me to the appropriate carriage and demonstrating how to stow the bike safely and securely. GWR, I’ve since learned, is one of the more cyclist-friendly train operators.
‘You’re Tom Watson the MP, aren’t you?’ said the manager, once I’d thanked him for all his help.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ I nodded.
‘Thought you were. Didn’t recognise you in your Lycra.
You used to be quite a big fella, didn’t you? No offence, like…’
‘None taken.’ I smiled.
Three hours later I alighted from the train at Hereford station, gently lowering my bike onto the platform and affixing the panniers containing my belongings. It was an unexpectedly warm spring day – the mid-morning sun was beating down – so I donned my peaked cap and took a few glugs of water before starting my pedal to Hay-on-Wye.
I knew I should have brought that suncream, I thought to myself as I squinted through my cycling glasses.
I had expected the landscape to be quite challenging (there was a lot of up-hill and down-dale), so I roughly estimated my journey time to be around the two-hour mark.
However, about halfway through the journey, and in the middle of nowhere, I got horribly lost. Like an idiot, I’d left my handlebar phone holster at home, so had been unable to track the route as I’d cycled and had clearly taken a wrong turn. The signs for Hay-on-Wye had petered out, and there was neither a house nor a human in sight. When I stopped at a lay-by and fished my phone from my pannier, I discovered there was no signal and, without anything as sensible as a backup map in my bag, I realised I was on my own.
Things became even worse. As my body flagged, and my water dwindled, I found myself faced with a steep, snaking hill, probably amounting to a 1:4 gradient. It was the kind of zigzag slope that experienced cyclists tackled with consummate ease, but that biking beginners viewed with sheer panic. Yet, that said, I was bloody well determined not to get out of the saddle and walk it. I had bought this bike as a vehicle, not a prop.
C’mon, Tom, give it all you’ve got… I said to myself. Just imagine you’re Bradley Wiggins climbing the Alpe d’Huez…
About halfway up the incline, as my energy finally began to wane, a huge tractor suddenly roared past me, straddling the white lines in the road and spluttering diesel fumes in its wake. Taken by surprise, I instantly stopped pedalling and swerved out of the way to avoid the tractor. I failed to take my feet ’n’ cleats out of the pedals, though, and tumbled into a verge of stinging nettles, turning the Herefordshire air blue as I did so (Sir Bradley would have done the same, I reckoned). I slowly dragged myself up and dusted myself off, but then noticed a trickle of blood dripping down my leg where I’d gashed it on a rock.
Tom, you fucking idiot…
After cleaning up the wound with the last dregs of my water bottle, I continued the half-mile trek up the hill (albeit on foot) and, once I’d reached the summit, I clambered gingerly back into the saddle. The road was riven with boneshaking craters and potholes but, as I freewheeled to the bottom – hallelujah – I finally spotted a sign for Hay-on-Wye.
An hour later I turned up at the campsite with a bloodied leg, a sunburnt forehead and a mouth as dry as the Serengeti. Weirdly, though, I’d never felt so exhilarated. Though my Tour de Hereford hadn’t exactly gone to plan, I’d completed my first ever long(ish)-distance countryside cycle. It was something that, three years previously, I’d never have thought possible.
When I returned to London, still smarting from the nettle stings, I thought it might be wise to attend a Bikeability course. A cycling training programme – a modern-day version of the old Cycling Proficiency Test, in many respects – it teaches practical skills to participants in order to increase their confidence on the road. As someone who had returned to cycling later in life I found it immensely useful, and I learned a heck of a lot from the Bikeability instructors, Gavin and Michael. They noticed that I rode far too close to the kerb, for instance – for my own safety, I needed to properly survey my road space – and I was nowhere near decisive enough when I turned left or right at junctions. Taking these observations on board, and understanding my rights on the road, made a huge difference to my day-to-day cycling. After three lessons I had the confidence to cycle along Regent Street and around the roundabouts of Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square, something that had always terrified me in the past.
Attending the Bikeability course prompted me to think more deeply about cycling policy and culture. I read a marvellous book called Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World by Peter Walker, which explored the different attitudes to cycling on highways across the globe and investigated the problems that cyclists faced, from aggressive truck drivers to obstructive town planners. I also started to speak at various cycling-related events, including some organised by Labour Cycles, a lobby group campaigning for ‘social justice on our roads and active travel for all’. During those meetings I called for increased investment into cycling infrastructure – including a fundamental change in UK road design, and the reallocation of highway space for cycle lanes – and I challenged workplaces to offer more bike-friendly facilities, from secure storage lockers to staff shower blocks.
I also talked about the role that cycling could play in reversing health inequalities and reducing carbon emissions, and how local, regional and national government had a duty to make it safer, easier and more enjoyable for people to get into the saddle and become more active. ‘Stealth-health,’ I called it: improving your fitness while at the same time having fun, whether that meant reaching the summit of Lambeth Bridge, or freewheeling down a Herefordshire hillside.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tackling Big Sugar
When I woke up from a lifetime of abusing my body with a poor diet, I felt a little like Jim Carrey’s character at the end of The Truman Show. When his boat struck the metal dome masquerading as a skyline, I was reminded of my own sense of dismay and disillusion after realising that, for decades, I’d effectively been duped. Truman, like me, came to learn that everything he’d been encouraged and programmed to presume was natural was in fact fabricated, in order to trap and exploit him.
For me, the boat scene was the perfect metaphor for how the foo
d industry has synthetically reshaped what we eat in order to trap and exploit us. They tell us that we choose what we eat and how we feed ourselves, even as they knowingly manipulate us into becoming addicted to an unnatural and unhealthy diet. We are all Trumans, living in a world that has been carefully constructed by industry. And that architecture, that world remade in the interests of massive industrial corporations, is making us fat.
Key to comprehending these food ‘choices’ is the understanding that human beings do not need sugar. Seriously. It is not a case of ‘we need to eat and drink less sugar’; it’s a case of not needing to eat sugar at all. Way back in 1972, the renowned physiologist and nutritionist John Yudkin argued this case in his groundbreaking book, Pure, White and Deadly:
‘First, there is no physiological requirement for sugar,’ he wrote. ‘All human nutritional needs can be met without having to take a single spoon of white or brown or raw sugar, on its own or in any food or drink. Secondly, if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.’
When you realise this, you can’t help but see that the food industry – driven by so-called ‘Big Sugar’ corporations – has fundamentally reformed the basic assumptions that underpin our relationship with food, diet and nutrition. Once you accept that sugar is not a nutritionally necessary part of any foodstuff, it is hard not to feel real anger at the absurdities of manufacturers producing ‘lower-sugar’ versions of their products (which needn’t have had sugar added in the first place). Our taste buds and our expectations have been re-engineered to make us pliant addicts to a product that human beings don’t need, and which has potentially deadly consequences, but which we have been trained to desire and expect in every mouthful.
As Christof, the control-freak director in The Truman Show, says: ‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.’
These things start in childhood. What our kids learn about food and about eating – what is often taught as ‘normal’ – shapes their habits and their choices throughout their life. When I was a kid, around the time that Western society began its transition from home-made fare to factory-produced food, we didn’t unduly worry about sugar content. Indeed, mass-produced cereal was considered the ideal breakfast option in the 1970s – ‘They’re grrreat!’ growled Tony the Tiger in the Kellogg’s TV adverts – and I’d shovel down two or three bowls of Frosties in one sitting, savouring every mouthful of those sweet ’n’ crunchy flakes. My brekkie would be accompanied by a glass of ‘fresh’ concentrated orange juice, which, in those days, was the height of sophistication since it was a step up from luminous orange squash. My siblings and I had got through three or four bottles of squash a week – we’d often guzzled it undiluted – until it was taken off supermarket shelves due to it containing the synthetic colouring E102 (tartrazine), which was found to cause hyperactivity in children. I seem to remember the scandal being reported by Esther Rantzen on her consumer show, That’s Life!
Concentrated orange juice, however, was still deemed a much healthier option.
‘Anyone for a top-up?’ Mom would ask, brandishing a carton. ‘Full of vitamin C, it says here…’
‘Thanks, Mom,’ I’d say, as she filled up my glass.
As we approached our teens, however, it became common knowledge that sugary cereals actually weren’t the best way to start the day, and had a detrimental effect on your dietary and dental health. My mum decided instead to embrace the en vogue continental breakfast, and began filling our bread bin with croissants, pain au chocolat and French baguettes. I often preferred a ‘proper’ loaf, though – white Mother’s Pride in a waxed wrapper, bought from Vera’s local shop on Hurcott Road – and would fix myself three or four slices of toast and butter before school. Sometimes I’d slather on a thick layer of strawberry jam, blissfully unaware that, within a few years, my sweet tooth would develop into a full-blown sugar addiction.
In the 1980s, convenience food was king. Processed meals that you warmed up in the oven (usually served with McCain’s Oven Chips) were commonplace in the Watson household, and Indian or Chinese takeaways became regular weekend treats. As a boy, I distinctly remember the day that Mom took delivery of our first ever chest freezer. She had watched a news report on Nationwide about families who’d saved a fortune by bulk-buying from specialist frozen food centres, and there was no way she was going to miss out.
‘I’m off to Comet… they’ve got a sale on,’ she said one Saturday morning, and a week later our brand new appliance arrived, ready to be plugged in and stocked up with Ross Quarter-Pounders, Findus Crispy Pancakes and a multicoloured selection of ice creams and lollipops. Meg, Dan and I relished this treasure trove of frozen goodies, in particular the Bird’s Eye Arctic Rolls. We thought these ice cream ’n’ sponge desserts were a taste sensation, so much so that we went to the ridiculous lengths of measuring each portion with a ruler to ensure equal slices.
Plenty more time-saving gadgets appeared in the kitchen, too (or ‘mod cons’ as we called them), including a newfangled Breville toastie maker. Such was Mom’s resourcefulness, she’d bag up left-over sandwiches from family gatherings, put them in her handbag and freeze them at home, to reheat them in the Breville a few days later.
We didn’t appreciate the damage that convenience food was doing to us – there was no food education in this respect, and very little in the way of public health guidelines – and my parents would have been horrified had they realised the long-term effects these products were having on their offspring’s health. And besides, back in the 1970s, fake food was being sold to working-class people as liberation. Why slave away in the kitchen making tea for the family when you could throw in some fish fingers and oven chips and keep everyone happy, with hardly any fuss? We wolfed down mountains of chemically reconstructed, additive-stuffed synthetic imitations of actual food. We drank lakes of sugar that burst with bubbles and never quite quenched our thirst (I glugged bottle after bottle of dandelion and burdock, a treacly concoction distributed by our local ‘pop man’). And we got fat.
But we didn’t blame the food that we ate or the fizz that we drank. No, we blamed ourselves. Because the industry that had spent billions refining that food to make it ever more convenient, and ever more addictive, was cleverer than us. They had already taught ordinary people that the fault was not the food, the fault was the people eating the food. So, as childhood obesity increased, a clamour went up – in the media, from think-tanks and from organisations funded by the sugar industry – that Western kids were getting porky because they didn’t do enough exercise. That argument, conceived in (and promoted by) the food-factory owners, came to dominate any discussion of this massive public health crisis. It served as a distraction. It bought a lot of people off. It kept us eating, and it taught us to loathe ourselves and others for lacking the get-up-and-go of previous ‘more active’ generations.
If you have to admire one thing about the industrialists who control what we eat, then it has to be their chutzpah. You or I would be compelled to act if we discovered that the product we made and sold was harming children. We would reduce the sugar and the additives that we knew were turning ordinary members of the public into addicts. We would warn people to stop treating what was once a convenient snack as a staple of their diet. We would halt the production lines that churned out food that we knew was giving individuals diabetes and was clogging their arteries. Not these fellas, though. They did none of that. Determined to thwart any efforts to modify their products to reduce their harmful nature, they instead re-engineered public discourse and public policy. Like I say, you can’t accuse the food industry of lacking ambition or cunning. Just basic morality.
Some people will say that this is over-egging the pudding a little. Surely these firms didn’t really know the harm that they were doing? And there’s nothing wrong with telling people to get
off their sofa and start exercising, is there? Let’s take each of these in turn.
Did the food industry know what it was doing? Absolutely it did. As I began to dig my way out of my obesity I read everything I could get my hands on about the history of the food business. I wanted to understand how we’d arrived at where we are today. I wanted to know why I felt like Truman, discovering that what I’d believed to be normal had in fact been fabricated in order to exploit me.
One of the books that really transformed my understanding of the food industry and its machinations was Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist. No one who read even the introduction to that book would have dared plead ignorance in defence of Big Food Inc. It includes the following:
Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They’ve discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine, and this knowledge is useful, not only in formulating foods. The world’s biggest ice cream maker, Unilever, for instance, parlayed its brain research into a brilliant marketing campaign that sells the eating of ice cream as a way to make ourselves happy.
Moss, a brilliant investigative reporter, unearthed some fascinating nuggets of information. He recounted an extraordinary (and clandestine) meeting in 1999 that convened the MDs and CEOs of America’s largest food corporations. Representatives of Kraft were in attendance, as were others from Tate & Lyle, Nestlé and General Mills. And one of their own – a brave soul named Michael Mudd, a Kraft vice president – stood up before them and laid out exactly the harm that they, collectively, were doing to public health. He showed them the evidence, he told it straight and he pleaded with them to take action to reduce the poison in their products, and to review the marketing strategies they employed. They said no.