My Week of Government-Approved Eating Left Me Hungry, Miserable, and Absolutely Certain This Has Gone Too Far

By Alistair Bogg | Nonsense Watch UK

It began, as so many of my worst ideas do, with a press release. Specifically, one from a body called the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities — a name so magnificently bureaucratic it sounds like it was generated by an algorithm trained exclusively on NHS internal memos. They had, apparently, issued fresh guidance suggesting that cheese should carry clearer labelling about its saturated fat content.

Cheese. Cheese. The thing Romans brought to Britain. The thing that has sustained Welsh farmers, French philosophers, and hungover students for millennia. Now requiring a government pamphlet.

And so I thought: fine. Fine. I'll play along. I will spend one working week eating only foods that have not attracted a sugar levy, a salt reduction target, a calorie cap, a packaging restriction, a reformulation demand, or a strongly worded press release from any publicly funded health organisation. Surely, I thought, there will be plenty left.

Reader, there was not plenty left.

Monday: The Illusion of a Fresh Start

I began with optimism. Plain porridge oats — no syrup, no honey, obviously, because sugar — with water. Not milk, because whole milk has been side-eyed by Public Health England (now absorbed, hydra-like, into various successor bodies) for the better part of thirty years. Just oats. Just water. Just despair.

For lunch I attempted a sandwich. Bread: technically permitted, though the salt content in most commercial loaves has been the subject of ongoing reduction targets from the Food Standards Agency since 2006, meaning the bread I bought tasted primarily of resignation. Butter: flagged. Cheddar: see above, now apparently a public health emergency. I settled for cucumber on unsalted crackers.

By Monday evening I had a headache and had written a strongly worded letter to no one in particular.

Tuesday: The Sausage Roll Incident

I should be transparent: I nearly broke on Tuesday morning. There was a Greggs. There is always a Greggs. And in the window, glistening with what I can only describe as patriotic defiance, were the sausage rolls.

Now, Greggs sausage rolls have been the subject of such sustained nutritional hand-wringing — salt, saturated fat, calories per portion, the sheer joy of them apparently being medically inadvisable — that they represent something close to a controlled substance in the eyes of the public health establishment. I walked past. I did not feel virtuous. I felt like a man who had been told he could no longer attend his own birthday party.

For lunch: plain chicken breast, boiled. For dinner: more plain chicken breast, boiled, with some broccoli that I ate with the enthusiasm of a man attending a compulsory training day.

Wednesday: A Brief Philosophical Crisis

By the midpoint of the week I had begun to notice something interesting. The list of foods that haven't attracted official disapproval is not merely short — it is, philosophically speaking, the list of foods no one has yet gotten around to disapproving of. The government's relationship with food is essentially that of a particularly anxious parent at a children's party, gradually removing items from the buffet table until only the carrot sticks remain.

The sugar levy, introduced in 2018, reshaped the entire soft drinks market. Salt reduction programmes have quietly reformulated hundreds of products over two decades. Calorie labelling requirements now apply to large food businesses. The HFSS advertising restrictions — that's High Fat, Sugar and Salt, a category so broad it encompasses most things that taste of anything — have reshaped what can be promoted and when.

I am not, to be clear, arguing that vegetables are bad. I am arguing that a country in which a sausage roll requires more regulatory navigation than a planning application has perhaps lost the plot somewhat.

Thursday: The Plain Lentil Situation

Thursday was lentils. I will say nothing more about Thursday.

Friday: Conclusions, and a Sausage Roll

By Friday afternoon I had had enough. Not in the dramatic, table-flipping sense — more in the quiet, tired sense of a man who has spent a week being lectured by institutions that were, it bears noting, funded by his own taxes.

I went to Greggs. I had a sausage roll. It was, and I mean this with complete sincerity, one of the finest experiences of my adult life. Not because it was objectively extraordinary — it's pastry and processed pork, I'm not writing a Michelin review — but because it represented something the government's various food enforcement arms seem constitutionally incapable of grasping: that pleasure is not a policy failure.

Britain is a nation that will, regardless of what any quango publishes, have a second sausage roll. It will put full-fat milk in its tea. It will eat crisps on the train. It will, on a rainy Saturday, consume an entire packet of biscuits while watching something terrible on television, and it will feel, on balance, fine about this. Not guilty. Not in need of intervention. Fine.

The Actual Problem With All of This

Here is what a week of approved eating taught me, beyond the obvious lesson that unsalted crackers are an affront to civilisation: the relentless expansion of food-shaming by publicly funded bodies doesn't make anyone healthier. It makes the entire subject so saturated with guilt, restriction, and bureaucratic finger-wagging that people either ignore it entirely — which is rational — or develop a genuinely miserable relationship with eating — which is not.

The quangos multiply. The press releases accumulate. The reformulation targets creep forward. And meanwhile, actual Britain — the Britain of chip shops and corner stores and office birthday cakes and pub lunches — carries on largely as before, because it turns out that telling people their cheese is dangerous is not, historically, a winning public health strategy.

I spent a week eating what the state considers acceptable. I lost two pounds, gained nothing in wisdom, and arrived at Friday with the firm conviction that the people issuing these guidelines have never, in their professional lives, genuinely needed a sausage roll.

Some of us have. Some of us always will.

Alistair Bogg is a staff writer at Nonsense Watch UK. He is available for comment, provided you don't ask him about lentils.