What men eat that women aren't allowed to
BREAKING NEWS! The Prime Minister eats cheap crisps and food shame is real.
In journalism, August is known as silly season. The month is a series of slow news days where pages still need to be filled, but everyone’s on holiday and nothing, apart from the odd pesky little war, is happening. Pap photos are desperately scoured for emerging trends (“she’s worn the same sunglasses twice, is that anything?”), press releases are actually skim-read for inspiration rather than going straight to trash and 19 tenuous features are concocted about “brat summer” where one would suffice (I’ve written three…).
True to form, last week the Evening Standard published this photo of Keir Starmer and declared that “it gave a worrying insight into his dietary choices”.
Was the Prime Minister caught red-handed washing 19 Big Macs down with seven vodka Red Bulls followed by two boxes of Krispy Kremes? No. He’d grabbed a Greek-style salad, some McCoy’s crisps and a can of Tango, apparently from the Foreign Office canteen but it sounds a lot like a Tesco meal deal to me. Heads of state get Clubcard points too.
On seeing this alleged “car-crash lunch”, someone actually bothered to email a nutritionist, who warned that Starmer will “get sleepy mid-afternoon and probably quite hungry.”
So, what would we have preferred for the PM to eat for lunch, on the off chance that it’s actually one beefy, ridged crisp too many that ends up bringing down the country, rather than years of Tory rule? A piece of fruit, or perhaps a cheeky Muller Light, instead of crisps, to supplement the Greek salad? Water rather than Tango? As well as being diet culturey, clean-eating, wellness-centric madness, judging Starmer for this lunch is pure snobbery; you just know if he’d been eating posh crisps (Torres Black Truffle, get in my gob. Oh wait, you’re a fiver, I’ll have some Wotsits instead), he would have been shamed too: not for eating crisps, but for being too fancy for Labour. But it turns out he’s a Tango socialist after all, not a Champagne one. Phew.
Did Keir Starmer even think for a second that he’d be getting judged for his totally innocuous lunch? Of course not. Men have been eating whatever the hell they want since the beginning of time and, if he was any bloke other than the Prime Minister on a slow news day, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But Starmer is getting a little insight into what women have been experiencing for years: food shame. I feel it every day, do you?
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