The German E coli bean sprout scandal offers damning evidence that all fruits and vegetables are dirty beyond reason, toxic timebombs that have secreted themselves at the very heart of global cuisine in the form of trusted dietary staples. Yet government food eggheads continue to bray from their state-sterilised laboratories, demanding that we eat at least five portions of the crusty filth a day.
In the UK, the gustation boffins have even created a persuasive website showing a photograph of a bald man smiling at a pile of yams. But why? What evidence is there for the supposedly health-giving properties of these soil-encrusted tubers and these repulsive, squashy sacks of sticky juice and seed? Isn’t it time we rejected fruits and vegetables?
I never eat fruits or vegetables at all, ever, and neither did my father before me, and while I am constipated, fat, breathless and weak, I am not yet dead. I can still manage to slither across the floor to my laptop every day to dribble out my interesting thoughts for money. Open your eyes! What actual evidence is there for the benefits of vegetables, the worms of the food world, scrabbling in the dirt, or of fruits, hanging limply from branches, like plastic bags full of dog excrement hurled into the trees of an East Anglian layby?
Indeed, humanity’s relentless forward march of progress has been a journey away from the soil, away from the dirt, away from dependence on mere fruits and mere vegetables. When the futurists sang hymns of praise to velocity and volume, when the vorticists sought to stir up civil war among the peaceful apes, it is doubtful they did so with mouths full of leek and onion.
When the mighty, clanging factories of Matlow, Maynards and Trebor first rose out of the north to spew forth processed sweets – individually wrapped Black Jacks, Refreshers and, ironically, Fruit Salads – containing no natural matter at all, we were at last free of the tyranny of the dirt. And as our children’s teeth gnashed into these angular and unnatural solids, they were tasting the future. But our masters would not have it so. They fear our freedom.
Google the words “David Cameron”, “fruit” and “vegetables” and you will find literally thousands of fruit-and-vegetable-laden images of the barely elected nest-cuckoo. Taxpayer-funded public relations consultants guide their photographers to snap at the laughing leader as, like some cycle-helmeted Marie Lloyd, he sits amongst the cabbages and peas, encouraging his followers to guzzle these putrid foods themselves.
Secretly, Cameron exists solely on a diet of nothing but Eton mess, a dessert concocted from strawberries, cream, meringue, mess and pieces of digestives left over from the historic “biscuit game”, still played in Eton dormitories on the day of the costly school’s annual cricket contest against Winchester College. But, typically, while Cameron guzzles the mess of the elite, he expects you and I to suck our nourishment from the dirt.
Why this sudden national mania for fruits, this state-sponsored enthusiasm for vegetables, despite the warning emanating, as it has done so many times before, from Germany, historically the land of long shadows, where even the bean sprouts carry the curse of Cain? As usual, the blame lies with a predictable unholy trinity of big business, our old friends on the right in global politics and an immortal race of psychic space-squid committed to the destruction of humanity which, even now, slowly but surely, are drawing their plans against us.
Let me explain. Google again, but this time add to “fruits” and “vegetables” the names Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe and Vince Cable and you will see a similar visual smorgasbord as before. Where once they would have cuddled babies or posed in front of war planes, now they nestle up to nectarines and pat parsnips.
The power brokers of the world are all friends of fruits and they are all in bed with vegetables, literally in the case of Berlusconi. (Though it must be stressed that the vegetables received no payment for the time they spent with the Italian president and were at his villa only to appear in a lasagne.) Our leaders promote fruit and vegetables and use state-subsidised health bodies to exaggerate the vile organisms’ nutritional values, because they are in league with the real global superpowers – the supermarkets.
Tesco, Lidl and the Co-op are hellbent on flogging their valueless vegetables and their foul fruits to saps such as you and me for enormous profits. When Ahmadinejad gave planning permission to knock down Sheikh Lotf Allah mosque and build the world’s largest Tesco, full to the brim of fruits and vegetables and slap bang in the middle of Isfahan’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square, alarm bells should have rung at the emergence of the ultimate evil alliance. Instead, we sleep-munched our way to oblivion. Are you enjoying your celery? Yes. Idiot.
Understand this. It is obvious that those who most enjoy fruit and vegetables seem to have little to show for their sordid enthusiasms. Perhaps our ancestor the monkey’s failure to evolve is directly linked to his fondness for fruits? The very name of the fruit fly speaks of a distinct lack of dietary ambition. The peach potato aphid likewise. Our enemy the slug is happy to live on purloined lettuce, dying cloaked in shame with little to show for its life. And a dedication to the cause of the carrot seems to have done little for rabbit civilisation, doomed to a network of stinking underground burrows or to degrading hutches in infant-school play areas.
Eating fruit and vegetables keeps you simple and stupid. It is no coincidence that they are the favoured foodstuff of athletes and sports people, simpletons who can be tricked into leaping and running upon the sound of a pistol, for no obvious practical purpose. And this is the way the Masters of the World want us dancing to their tune.
Ever wonder why our leaders seem so blase about global warming and the imminent collapse of the planet’s ecosystem? It is because their seats on the shuttle out of here are already booked. The deal is done. The psychic space-squid orbit the Earth in vast clouds, protected from military attack on the understanding that they will preserve our leaders on some faraway world, while we obediently eat the vegetables and fruits our governments recommend to us, deadening our spirits, priming us for the first horrible probings of the tentacles from the stars. Eat your five a day. Eat them all up. There’s a good slave.
Al Murray, Comedian
Al Murray, Comedian
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