Having my cake and leaving it
RECENTLY, I had some chocolate cake made from beetroot, and I don’t mind telling you: it was awful.
You may, like me, have come across chocolate cake made from beetroot on TV cookery shows try to kid you that you can eat all the things you like and not get fat.
So they do pizzas on pitta bread, and lasagne with most of the beef replaced by courgettes.
Or, in the case of chocolate cake – made with beetroot. It’s a cake where most of the flour and fat is replaced by a root vegetable. As a result, it only has half the calories of normal cake – but it tastes like hell.
At first, you get a taste of it and you think: "Y’know, they might have something here. This is all right."
Then a sour taste sneaks into your mouth, and it keeps on coming until you think: "My God, there’s beetroot in my chocolate cake. It tastes like nothing I ever want to have in my mouth ever again."
Because you can’t Cook Yourself Thin, can you? You can exercise yourself thin, but cooking and then eating is by its very nature an activity that can only make you
add weight. The essence of the posh lasses’ programme is that you really can have your cake and eat it (or in this case, have your cake, eat it and hope that you drop a dress size).
As such, it’s escapist nonsense, but I think perhaps it is also instructive of the way many of us now want to live.
Instead of losing weight, the only way possible – by exercising and eating more healthily – we want a magic wand that allows us to eat cake all day and still end up looking like Kate Moss.
Now a number of big corporations are exploiting this "something for nothing" attitude in a cunning drive to pretend they are all environmentally-friendly.
Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury and Tesco are all boasting about their green credentials, but the fact is that you can’t shop to save the planet any more than you can cook to get thin.
To save the planet, the first thing you should probably do is simply consume a lot less – but that’s not a message they’re ever going to embrace. If the big supermarket chains were really interested in climate change, they would shut down tomorrow so people didn’t drive miles to get their groceries.
So, if you want to eat chocolate cake, then eat it. Just eat the real thing and let it make you fat.
