Cape Town: Is it time to lean on the fat?

How addiction hobbles our chances

Walking through a cancer hospital to the department where you are receiving treatment reveals a world of great suffering, the unerring will of humanity to survive, the purveyance of hope for which the only currency of purchase is faith that could waver depending on prognosis, pain, confidence, or despair; it is a teaching and humbling moment.

How I have wanted to walk out of that hospital and snatch a cigarette from the lips of a young smoker totally oblivious of what cancer does to the body and how the odds one faces with cancer depends of what it is, where is has been found, if it has spread and if there is a body of knowledge and expertise available to give you a chance to survive.

Then, I do not have to walk far to realise how much of a hold tobacco and nicotine has over people. As at a designated area near the entrance of the same cancer hospital, you will find patients undergoing cancer treatment huddling in corners for another drag of the poison already killing them. They give themselves no chances at all, and if they come through, good for them.

This is obese in plain sight

In Cape Town, there was something we could not unsee, when we stay in Cape Town, we try as much as possible to walk everywhere and everything is within walking distance. Even on days I did not seem to have the strength or the capacity, I made my daily 10,000 steps.

Walking alongside us or coming into view from our vantage point of observation was someone carrying just that extra extra bit of weight on their hips, their bellies, and usually both, then arms and thighs; sights to make you catch your breath.

What you cannot deny is there is an obesity problem which should be registering somewhere in the South African healthcare system. There cannot be any aesthetic value to wanting to tip the scales until the springs broke.

How you address this obvious health crisis will no doubt require tact, wisdom, and some innovative policy initiatives, it should not be ignored. You could see people who could barely move, some were panting every few steps and I cannot put a statistical value on those who might have already acquired diseases of the heart, the kidneys, the pancreas, the liver, and other related serious health problems because of this excess weight.

The fast in fast-food is weight

One other observation we made when we were in Muizenberg, some 25 kilometres from Cape Town, with long stretches of beautiful beaches that more deserted than walked, was the number of delivery bikes that attended our estate at all hours, as if most did no home cooking, but relied on fast food. We do most of our cooking, from quick preparations like stir fries to slow cooking activities, it is about the willingness and timing.

In town, the fast-food outlets are full, taking orders for tables and takeaways for patrons and the ubiquitous delivery bikers, God forfend we dignify those places with the moniker of restaurant. They offer you something to masticate and swallow, but none of it is of value to your body and if you do not work it off, it sits somewhere in your body and accumulates in fatty tissue.

Maybe the new miracle weight-loss drugs might bring respite to the South Africans we saw and give them a fighting chance, but it also must include some desire and the will to do something about it.

While everyone is free to celebrate their bodies and love who they are, while not being shamed for what they have become, we need to square the circle between feeling good and being healthy. That will not come by lying to be nice.

Nando's: Poorly run and rundown round the corner

Cravings for the simple

I have my fast food cravings that I indulge every once in a while and I get it at Nando’s a restaurant chain founded in South Africa serving a Mozambican-Portuguese fare based around chicken.

So I stepped out of my home to visit the Nando’s round the corner, since it was close and I discovered that just a few weeks before.

It was not a good experience, I was in and out within 10 minutes having hardly taken a bite of my chicken before logging on the Nando’s website to express my disgust at the place, the service and much else. They asked for feedback and they got the whole lot of lock, stock and two smoking barrels of irately annoyed.

At the end of the multiple choice interactive questions where most answers tended towards the dissatisfied and strongly dissatisfied, I was offered a free-form text box to give them a piece of my mind below:

Feedback the rotten tack

The staff was sullen and unwelcoming, barely interacted when I got there apart from asking if I had been to Nando's before.

The cable on the PIN machine was all screwed up, simple attention to detail like that became the revelation of bigger problems.

As I went to get a plate and cutlery, a complete order had the receipt slip put on the food, when my order arrived it was all piled up on one plate with the ramekin of coleslaw sitting on my chips, that was just disgusting, I was speechless up to a minute.

Though the waiter offered to replace my order, I kept it, but one taste of the chicken was enough and I just walked out literally leaving the food untouched.

This is the WORST Nando's I have ever been to ever, tables had bits on them and I had to dust off my seat, it is a poorly run and rundown place, it needs many new things from personnel to the look of the place - probably parachute in a manager from one of your better run restaurants to sort this place out.

A disgrace...

Then again

On that note, I still had a craving for a Nando’s still, so I went to another restaurant right in the centre of town where everything was an improvement on the last that it would not have bothered me if one thing was out of place.

Thinking of it, it might just as been the attitude of the staff at the other place that made for my seeing every minor thing wrong in that restaurant, but it goes without saying, I can excuse many things except with it comes to the service, the personality and the engagement that makes a restaurant experience worthwhile.

I do not go to eat out to take aggro with my food, no matter how gracious I am feeling. That is what I had to tell a French waiter in Paris many years ago when he seemed to feel a bit unhappy with his day that he felt he could take that out on the customers, I was ready to leave and by the time I had warned him to behave, he had lost the prospect of a generous tip.

The beauty of the dead cow

Sick-bagging fast food

I could only hold my head in my hands this morning as I listened to the Anderson Copper 360° programme on CNN.

Many of my friends note my utter disdain expressed with vehemence when the idea of ordering fast-food come up.

Ever since over 13 years ago I observed the odd-one out round on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You where three of the most dastardly sick-making and gut-wrenching things like a nematode worm, raw sewage and back legs of a mouse were allegedly found in fast food – I have been completely and utterly off that stuff.

Some episodes on television mark you – big time.

Besides that, I can cook, I like to cook and I do try as often as possible to cook for myself and also for friends.

In some cases, I have to tone down the spices for my European guests whose palate might be complete singed with hot pepper tastes that our African ladies might as well use as eye salve – Just kidding!

Tomato mummies

When I returned to Europe years ago, the first thing that struck me when I got a can of chopped tomatoes was the Best Before date which was about 3 years hence. I lost count of the E-numbers as it looked like the manufacturers were in cahoots with the mummifiers of Ancient Egypt.

Fine, everyone looked like they were going about their business kept and preserved as lively mummies, more excitable than zombies but less so natural.

So, imagine my amazement when I found that they had been tampering with the colour of egg yolks by giving chickens a particular kind of feed containing Lutien.

The farm in your local grocery

Somehow, customers prefer yellow skinned chicken to white skinned chicken – that is the problem; many of these customers probably think you pluck eggs from garden plants.

Aesthetic quality trumps natural quality every time as convenience, availability and cost no matter how unscrupulously provided, lure and entice customers who are so removed from nature that nothing is really what it seems anymore.

This is not a time to explore the amount of colour that goes into food stuff nowadays.

Beauty of the dead cow

However, back to my inspiration for this piece, red meat is just not what it seems anymore; the meat is treated with carbon monoxide to keep the redness that usually disappears in 5 days maximum for up to 40 days.

Basically, we lose one of the common indicators for observing if packaged meat is available or off.

Colour, smell, sliminess, taste and sell-by date as the commentary goes are the options you have to check the quality for edible consumption of beef.

The colouring also masks the workings of pathogenic bacteria - but that would be hidden in some study that gets reveals when the lawyers are ready for court.

As usual when the food agencies collude in this “Customer Irrelevant”-“Industry Fillip” activity, they offer us a lesson in semantics.

Carbon monoxide is considered a colour fixative not a colour additive – take me for an idiot and I’ll be a fool for anyone.

As for the harmfulness of carbon monoxide, which binds too easily with haemoglobin in the blood than oxygen can get access to keep you alive, especially if you work in a mine or have un-serviced gas heating – they say – we have nothing to fear.

Once again we move from the curse of the mad cow to the beauty of the dead cow – history is about to repeat itself – do not say, you’ve heard this before.