There has been an outbreak of bloggers (unfortunately ones I enjoy: Au Currant, James Lileks (still blogging - writes for a living, but wife has just got a job, so constant apologies for blogging less) and Socialism in an Age of Waiting) saying that they are suspending blogging or dramatically decreasing their output, due to having work to do. Hypothesis: rise of blogging was due to unemployment of knowledge workers and assorted computer geeks - now these people are finally working again, blogging will die down, apart from those who write for a living anyway.

I regard fatness as an input and output problem - like most sane nutritionists who don't have some sort of complex about multinational food companies and an insufferably smug look about them (perhaps not funding their research as much as they'd like?). I agree that the USA has an input and output imbalance - any European who has eaten in a restaurant there (that isn't Chez Panisse or similar - nostalgic sigh) will have noted the huge portions. Similarly the sizes of things in American supermarkets is quite mind boggling - chips, dips, icecream etc.

I really do think in European we are getting our knickers into a twist about the input side though - particularly with regard to our children. Yes they may watch junk food ads and be influenced by them but most non-paranoid parents are grateful for their little ones to eat anything, don't want to give them a complex about food and think "well if you can't eat Rocky Road icecream now, when can you?" Where I do get all fascistic is the issue of output - the parental paranoia that stops them from letting their children go outside to play in the street or park on their own, that makes them drive right up to the zig zag yellow lines or double yellows on a corner nearest their school at breakneck speed (yes crazed Windlesham Mercedes mother I am talking about you) because a bus is too 'common 'and bicycling or walking might possibly be dangerous. Dangerous because you might mow them down in your 4x4 with kangaroo bars.

So no to junk food taxes and bullying stores into removing their snack bars from the check outs and yes to making it as difficult as possible for people to drive themselves and their children to work and school. Walk, get exercise, meet your neighbours, note the passing of the seasons....

My local junior school does both - they have a crocodile for children to join in to walk to school (hurrah) and are now trying to bully the school and local council into going organic (oh great, so my child gets to eat unadulterated 'natural' sulphates with his organic locally produced celeriac - all the way through winter). I would predict in ten years time the graduates of our local junior school will have learnt only too well the joys of using food as a weapon. I just hope we've moved or we've managed to persuade our son to enjoy his food, and play lots of sport and not get neurotic and aneroxic and dazzled by crap science.