Ministry of Nutrition.

Snacks are great, aren’t they?

They help you to live the life you live the life of, without breaking for one moment longer than it takes to nosebag a few grams of nutritionally enhanced sawdust down your over-anxious gut-funnel.

But the problem with ordinary snacks is that they all contain one element that scientists* agree will eventually kill you. It’s not just fat, sugar and salt you should be worried about. Every snack you eat contains food.

Food wears down your gut and erases you from the inside out.

Until now, that is.

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Snacko Liteliteplus™. Go on, starve yourself.

* Footnote removed for reasons of plausibility. ** Does not contain pies. *** Removal of Snacko from body will require a corkscrew, a willing friend, 10 Newtons of force and a clean towel.

This feature appears courtesy of the Infotainment Guerrilla Directorate of the Department of Social Scrutiny

The government, through its Ministry of Nutrition, MiniNut, has noticed that the rate of rise in the increase of speed of the trend of growth in fast-food consumption is now beginning to level out. So, you may well ask, what does this actually mean?

It means that while we cannot be complacent about the figures, we are winning the battle against the fight mounted against the argument that we need to stop. While recognizing the strains placed on hard-working families, we would urge you to be uncomplacent.

There are a number of ways to combat the trends. First of all, you could simply eat less fast food – but this is probably too radical a solution for most families who rely, to some extent, on releasing a tide of subtly addictive flavours and mind-altering cattle hormones into their children to get some peace and quiet.

An alternative to radical measures like eating less has emerged with a new wave of medical non-foods. Styled using consensus notions of what constitutes “delicious”, medical non-foods contain almost no nutritional value whatsoever, yet satisfy your appetite and craving as if they did.

The BowelBunga range of quasi-biscuits was one of the first non-food products to come to market and its success was instant. The next product to be launched is expected to be the Polypizzylene, an inert, spongey dough with epoxy cheese and a replicant tomato on top.

Another method is to eat to excess those foods that are good for you, in the same way that you eat too many unhealthy things. Healthy food contains vitamins, minerals and roughage, as well as guilt-relieving properties that directly balance-out bad food. And the worse it tastes or the more unfortunate the texture, the greater the value to you. A typical tactic would be to eat a whole raw cabbage in order to eat a pound of Belgian chocolate.

The process of compensation applies to the circumstances and manner of consumption as much as the taste. Lunch taken at your desk, for example, contains less harmful guilt than even the healthiest sandwich taken at leisure in the park.

The Ministry of Nutrition is now trying to send these kinds of messages to the British people, so that we can win the battle against the fight mounted against the argument that we all need to stop and eat safely. Having said that, Britain is still a much safer place to eat than some parts of Europe. France, for example, has an astonishing knack of consuming meals prepared from garden pests, while Italy regards a sparrow as a delicacy.

Remember that the next time you order pizza.

Vegetarianism

You may have heard of this – but don’t be put off by the fact that most vegetarians look unhealthy and exhibit poor taste in popular music. There are routes to becoming vegetarian, without giving up meat. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Become a piscovegetarian. These vegetarians eat fish because they have examined their consciences, and believe that fish are hopelessly stupid and deserve to die.
2. Eat only white meat. The argument is extended to encompass other intellectually inferior animals, such as the chicken.
3. Become a vegetarian-once- removed and stop consuming animals that in turn eat other animals. This is handy because it passes the moral dilemma down the food chain one step, and allows you to eat cows.

Shall we do lunch?

A quick bite “on the hoof” can take a number of forms in Britain from gazelle-like nibbling of an unlikely sounding sandwich at lunchtime to a full-blown after-pub gut-buster.

A light lunch usually means a cold meat pie, pasty or sandwich wrapped in cellophane with a card insert that details its various nutritional qualities, while rustic prose about cows that have not been fed on other cows effortlessly rambles on about how all the ingredients come from places with poetic-sounding names.

Most of these place names are made up and play on the concept of unaltered countryside with no industrial slurry pits, gassed badgers or farmers who store the bodies of recent trespassers in deep freezes located in semi-derelict outbuildings.

Most Britons are happy to make-do with fairly plain fare, but upmarket female consumers are often tempted by more exotic “wraps” because they colour co-ordinate with their pashminas.

Every effort is made to convince the consumer that the food is healthy, despite the fact it must be inhaled during a 10-minute lunch break, avoiding the maniacal, pink-eyed gaze of a mutant pigeon with one and a half legs in a small park thick with the slightly sweet smell of dog faeces.