Dialogue: It's long past time we gave it beans

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

I was talking to a physician at the Auckland Public Hospital the other day and casually remarked that if the authorities wanted to convince the public at large of the close link between obesity and illness, they should video patients in the hospital lobby and around the corridors and play it back on network television. The day I was there, anyway, a huge majority of those milling around the hospital were overweight.

The doctor, a whippy, fit-looking guy, agreed. He said that if he had his way there'd be a fat tax, adding that he would then be called a fascist.

"By me as well," I said.

But it would be as rational to impose a fat tax as it is to have the high excise on tobacco and alcohol. The damage to health by obesity and the consequent strain on medical resources is, I understand, as severe as the effects of heavy drinking.

This argument would be impeded, though, by our long puritanical tradition that regards boozing and smoking as morally lax but gluttony as venial.

The Tax Review 2000 committee's claim that the excise on booze and fags penalises the poor was the sort of syllogism that only tax lawyers and accountants could come up with - unchastened by the presence of more politically and socially aware people - at the same time as proposing to penalise the mortgage-free ownership of the family home. I wonder if they considered a fat tax.

But how would it be applied? As a preventive measure on top of the price of high-fat and high-sugar foods, an FT on top of GST? Or would it be better applied as a punitive measure on the excess volume of adipose tissue carried by any taxpayer at the end of the tax year? On or before the last day, everyone would have to check in on Inland Revenue-approved scales and a calculation made on the weight in relation to height and body type.

This would lead us to other interesting relationships between tax and turpitude. The Green Party, for example, might propose a tax on beans because they stimulate the production of greenhouse gases and thus contribute to global warming. I can see Sue Kedgley, lips pursed in stern moral indignation, as a future Minister of Culture and the Farts, upbraiding bean growers for damaging the environment.

She would be in a proud tradition of attempting to proscribe beans or, to put it botanically, any of various papilionaceous plants of the widely cultivated genus Phaseolus producing edible seeds.

(The correspondent who recently chastised me for using "androgynous" and "polemical" because he didn't know their meaning should have a lie down after papilionaceous.)

Indeed, and the following is all true. Pythagoras, the well-known Greek mathematician, philosopher and cult leader told his followers in the sixth century: "Abstain from beans!" He apparently didn't feel the need to say why, probably because he was a champion wowser and - they usually go together - a bit of an authoritarian, too.

A couple of centuries later, Aristotle wrote that Pythagoras didn't like beans because they resembled testicles. But then Plutarch, Cicero and St Jerome decided Pythagoras' reason was that they were an aphrodisiac. Next, the Elizabethan writers, John Lily and Thomas Fuller, reckoned that, because beans were used by Greeks to vote for magistrates, Pythagoras was warning his followers to stay out of politics. (Hence bean-counters, by the way.)

So, with the simple exhortation, "Abstain from beans!" the mad mathematician from Samos challenged thinkers for generations. My own opinion is that because he founded a commune in southern Italy, he wanted to avoid among his flock what the Prophet Isaiah once described as the aftermath of bean-eating: "My bowels shall sound like a harp." Excuse me, but this is scholarship, this is.

So the belief that you are what you eat predates Kedgley and her Greenies by thousands of years. Back in the 16th century a bloke called Andrew Boorde wrote: "Lettuce doth extynct veneryous acts," which means the leafy green suppresses sexual drive. If this is true - and I certainly have no anecdotal or empirical evidence to support it - then it might have been better for Randy Andy Boorde to have gorged on salads because he became the Bishop of Chichester, was unfrocked and went to jail for spending time in female parishioners' beds.

So there you go. Coffee, cocoa, wine and even water have been called deleterious to one's health over the centuries. And taxes have been imposed to force abstinence right up to the present day - as we Aucklanders know who pay not only for water but for dirty water.

One last historical thing. If you pay more than your share of the excise on alcohol, carry in your pocket as a reminder this verse written in the 16th century by one Charles Cotton:

The drunkard now supinely snores

His load of ale sweats through his pores;

Yet when he wakes, the swine shall find

A crapula* remains behind.

* For the benefit of my lexically challenged correspondent, crapula was a word used for sickness following excess.