Kirstie Allsopp hosts a British Television show about real estate. Apparently she’s looking for a second job as an officer with the food police.
It seems that someone had the gall to be in a cafe, eating a breakfast that Kirstie didn’t approve of. So like any nosy, inappropriate busy body with an over-exaggerated sense of self importance and a cell phone, she memorized his meal and then Tweeted about it.
“Just saw a guy have a glass of coke, a cappuccino, a croissant and a ham & cheese sandwich for breakfast #OurNHSistoast #worldgonemad
In addition to being ableist language, with everything going on in the world right now, the idea that some dude eating a big breakfast is an indication of the “world gone mad” seems to indicate that Kirstie may struggle to prioritize.
I have some hashtags of my own I’d like to add, including:
#WTFKirstie
#IfIWantTheFoodPoliceI’llCallPie11
#MindYourOwnPlate
#YourBeeswaxIsInAnotherCastle
Some people are even sending her descriptions of their meals on twitter – after all, she’s obviously in charge of judging all of our food and she can’t be in every cafe at the same time…
Luckily most people who responded to this had enough sense to know that this it is stunningly inappropriate. Happily Kirstie realized her mistake and apologized…
…Just Kidding! She doubled down with these gems:
My point is that if we all want a functioning NHS we all need to take a pull. #ourNHS #ourlives #ourresponsibility #nomoneytree
and
We judge that someone who doesn’t use a seatbelt is an idiot, yet decide to eat yourself to death and it’s all about not *judging*#ourNHS
Let’s dispense with the ridiculous comparison and move on to the actual situation (and not totally rando comparisons thereof) We don’t know the circumstances at all – various responses mentioned that he might have just finished a long workout, or a long overnight shift, or had to fast for a medical test and been starving, or he was just hungry. To be clear, the guy had a sandwich, croissant, soda and coffee for one meal but Kirstie (psychically, I guess?) knows that he’s “eating [him]self to death?”???
It’s time to get real here – does anybody actually believe that Kirstie seriously thinks foodshaming strangers on twitter is the key to healthcare? Or maybe, just maybe, does she simply enjoy being cruel, and is willing to try to try to hide behind the hand-wringing “WON’T SOMEBODY PUHLEEEZE THINK OF THE NHS” drama as a way to mask the fact that she’s nothing more than your average, garden variety, internet troll.
I’m also curious who Kirstie thinks should get to shame and control her food choices for the good of the NHS? Is she simultaneously a vegetarian, vegan, paleo, raw food, and macrobiotic practitioner? If not, then lots of people out there don’t think she’s doing everything that she could for the good of the NHS. Who gets to choose Kirstie’s food? Anytime we’re talking about these “I’m the boss of the personal decisions of other people because of my tax dollars” nonsense, we’re going down a bad, illogical, slippery slope of a road.
The idea that we should judge people for their food choices, or impact on the healthcare system at all is crap (somebody remind me, what do you call it when someone suggests that people who are “expensive” for society shouldn’t be allowed to exist?) But the idea that anyone can or should judge a total stranger’s impact on the healthcare system based on a single meal they see them eat as they walk past in a cafe is absolutely ludicrous . If you see food shaming happening, here are some ideas for what you might do.
As for Kirstie, hopefully she’ll find ways to occupy her time besides tweeting out random people’s breakfast orders and concern trolling. We can only hope.
Did you miss the
Fat Activism Conference?
It’s not too late!
You can still register to get access to all the recordings, transcripts, speaker handouts, and the conference goody bag! Get recordings of all 30 speakers talking about everything from “Re-Imagining Fashion from an Inclusive Framework” to “Activism for the Introverted and Anxious” to “Building Fat Patient Power While Accessing Healthcare” and more. The pay what you can option is still available so that money is not a barrier.
Click Here to Register!
Registration closes October 9th (though of course you’ll have time after that to listen and download.)
Like this blog? Here’s more cool stuff:
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
Book and Dance Class Sale! I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!
Book Me! I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!
I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com
If you are uncomfortable with my offering things for sale on this site, you are invited to check out this post.
Dances With Fat 
Hey Ragen,
I normally don’t get involved in internet drama, but I’m so sick of your trolls and I see an easy moneymaking opportunity. Feel free to ignore this if you have better things to do, but…
If you want to file civil suit against some of your trolls, go after the ones who live in California, but not in your part of the state. Find an instance of unambiguous libel (e.g. people stating you are mentally ill without evidence of a diagnosis to back it up) and make a claim of harm to reputation resulting in financial loss. Your trolls probably won’t show up in court, and you can automatically win significant judgments. Work with a percentage-rate plaintiff’s attorney and file in magistrate court, because judges are reluctant to dismiss small no-show cases when an attorney is involved.
Step 3 is profit. 🙂
I just tweeted her a picture of some pringles “I had @Pringles and water for breakfast, how many hail Mary’s do I need to say to atone for my sin?”
Not to mention that she doesn’t even know what she THINKS she knows!! The “Coke” could easily have been Diet Coke, and she has no idea if the dude added sugar to his cappucino or not. If he didn’t, then the cappucino is basically a large cup of milk. Does she disapprove of milk? So she’s accusing him of “eating himself to death” based on her ASSUMPTIONS about the calorie content of one meal … and her assumptions are as likely to be wrong as not. Aaaargh.
Just as a side note, I spent several weeks in France and Spain this summer. A breakfast of cafe-au-lait, a croissant, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich (called a fancier name, but basically a sandwich) is a completely normal, standard breakfast in both those countries. Some people eat TWO croissants!! OMG!!!! Call Kirstie! The French are all gonna DIE!!!!
Lots of places eat larger breakfasts (and other meals) than the Americans. I know that Ashkenazi Jews eat gefilte fish and a bunch of other stuff for breakfast. I think this woman would throw a hissie fit if she saw that meal.
Several of the hotels we stayed in in Spain had wonderful breakfast buffets, with several kinds of bread and pastries, cakes, cheeses, sliced ham, sausages, cereals, lots of fresh fruit, yogurt, jams, butter, and honey. I noticed that what people ate ran the whole gamut from two slices of bread with nothing on them and a cup of black coffee, all the way through a plate heaped with bread, jam, two kinds of cake, cheese, meat, and fruit. And guess what? There was no visible correlation between the amount of food a person took and their body size!!
You know, I’d almost think that different people have different appetites in the morning, some of us are very hungry at breakfast and some aren’t, and that people should eat what they want …. Naaaaah. The food police would never go for it. [That was sarcasm, just to be clear!]
Myself, I tended to take several slices of cheese, a little bread, and a little fruit. That kept my glucose nicely in control and made my tummy very happy. I love Spain.
Wow, I normally have a pretty thick skin against food-judging, but I’m now feeling weirdly embarrassed thinking of her opinion of my usual breakfast. To me, the tweeted meal isn’t even a notably large breakfast, unless the sandwich is way larger than I’m imagining (not that her comments would in any way be ok if it was!).
I will channel this into finally getting around to picking up more cheese to make omelets, because darnit they are delicious and that sort of breakfast seems to work best for me in terms of keeping me happy and fueled and not chewing on the walls by 10am.
Curiously, these very same people would never judge athletes, professional dancers, shift workers or any people who look skinny but choose to have unhealthy jobs or habits for their impact on the healthcare system. (Smokers being an exception.) I think this proves your point: the overbearing concern for anyone’s and everyone’s health is just fake.
Yeah, I’d like to see some “Our NHS” people try to shut down a coal mine or power plant, on the cry of “it’s too expensive to care for these unhealthy people who do unhealthy things!”
Oh, and while we’re at it, I hear that dentists and legal assistants have really high rates of suicide. Can you imagine the high rates of expensive mental-health care that must correlate with that? We should, therefore, ban all dentists and legal assistants, to protect “our NHS.”
Oh, but wait. Dental care is important to good health, especially as dental infections can go systemic and actually cause heart problems, and even heart attacks. Yes, you can die from a rotten tooth. Hmmmm. And legal assistants are pretty necessary, too, come to think of it. We may not like people doing nuisance lawsuits, but there are plenty of real, needful lawsuits, and the legal assistants do the grunt work on those.
But the jobs are unhealthy! The people are willfully doing unhealthy things! They are “working themselves to death!” Won’t you think of #OurNHS?
BTW. I vote for Comic Sans as the official sarcasm font.
Yeah, it doesn’t really sound excessive? Sammich and coffee – yup. Croissants are basically just air, so not exactly filling, and if the soda had been an orange juice, would that have been okay? Gahh!
I used to like Kirstie Allsopp. Then she started saying very weird things (something like hoping her daughter finds a rich husband so she wouldn’t have to work, or something like that) and it made me go off her completely. This reinforces that.
And for goodness sake, the way to save the NHS is to stop underfunding it and stop mismanaging it! Not through food- and fat-shaming.
As in, coffee & sammich is like standard breakfast fare, so what on earth is she on about? Had it been the Full English challenge which is available somewhere … that would be something to raise an eyebrow about perhaps, but that would still not have been any of her business.
Oh, Kirstie Allsopp gives me a pain in my face. This latest outburst from her doesn’t surprise me. She has form. She was in the news a while back for saying that had she any daughters, and I’m grateful she currently doesn’t, she would advise them all to avoid third level education if they were thinking of going, so as to stay home and have babies instead.
#IfIWantTheFoodPoliceI’llCallPie11
#MindYourOwnPlate
Best hashtags ever!
I’m particularly fond of #YourBeeswaxIsInAnotherCastle.
*tilts head sideways* What’s the freakout here? I mean, what’s the trigger for this hatred of people visibly eating? Was it quantity? Because that’s…not a lot of food. Two servings of caffeine-sugar drink, one bread, and another bread with two proteins? What, has continental breakfast become a new marker of virtuous eating? I missed that memo.
Was it the lack of unrefined this and that? But that’s not what she said…was she implying it?
Or was the man visibly not thin or “cut”?
I’m willing to bet that the person eating the breakfast was fat. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have bat an eye (and probably wouldn’t even have noticed what they where eating). It’s all about staring at and scrutinizing the fatties, dontcha know?
It’s currently 2:24 am here, I’ve just woken up. (I went to bed at 6pm to save anyone the bother of trying to figure that out!)
Anyhoo, for breakfast I’ve just had pasta in a cheese sauce and a slice of bread for wiping my bowl out. Plus two cups of tea with one sugar in each. I don’t know what the calorie count is. I don’t care. It’s what I wanted. It wasn’t a big portion, but if it was, it still wouldn’t be anyone’s business.
Later on… (whispers) I might just decide to partake of a couple of Jaffa cakes too!
Kirstie… whilst you’re worrying about what everyone else is eating. Other people are worrying about important things in life. Like Mr Trump, The situation in Syria, illness or problems with loved ones. A death. An exam, paying the rent etc.
STUFF THAT MATTERS!
In short get a life! Your own for preference.
I made some really good beef stew a couple of days ago. There was still a bowl of it in the fridge this morning. It needed used up, so I had it for breakfast. Some nutritionist out there is probably reading this and shrieking with horror. I don’t care.
I have Brie that needs used up, and some mini sweet peppers ditto–so that’s breakfast. Ooooooo I’m gonna dieeeeeeeee.
I’m diabetic. I have two standard breakfasts these days that I rotate — 1) full-fat Greek yogurt with some blueberries, plus 1 slice of whole grain toast with peanuts-only peanut butter; and 2) the same dish of yogurt and blueberries, plus 3 eggs, scrambled in butter and with some cream and some grated parmesan cheese stirred in .
Guess which breakfast keeps my blood sugar down in the not-even-pre-diabetic, flat-out NORMAL range??? If you guessed breakfast #2, you were right. Breakfast #1 is okay; my blood sugar is acceptable. But the scrambled eggs with cream and cheese pretty much makes my blood sugar for the day NORMAL.
My 3rd breakfast choice, 2 soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast with butter (plus the yogurt and blueberries), falls somewhere in between. The boiled eggs help, but not as much as the scrambled eggs. And when I’m not very hungry and just eat the yogurt and blueberries, my blood sugar is a little higher than when I eat the larger Breakfast #2, as well.
So — apparently my metabolism wants lots of protein and a good deal of fat first thing in the morning, and when I give it those things, it settles in happily and purrs away contentedly all day. Anyone who wants to tell me that this breakfast is “too much food” and is “killing me” can just go take a flying leap to wherever.
Oh, FFS. This kind of thing makes me insane. I’ve been on both sides of being food policed. When I was skinny, and got a salad or some other light meal, it was “girl, eat a sandwich”. I happen to like salad and sometimes the crisp freshness of it, and if I went for a light meal it was because I wasn’t very hungry at the time. Now that I’m overweight, I’ve gotten the side-eye when I “over-order”. Sometimes I order a lot of food because I am really damn hungry! Sometimes it is because I’m buying two meals simultaneously and will split it up when I get home. Sometimes, like this morning, it is because I know lunch is a long time coming and I don’t want to be hungry at my usual lunch hour. And sometimes I just want to indulge. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. It’s my food, it’s my body, it’s my money, and it isn’t anyone else’s business.
How does Kirstie know that this guy eats like this every morning? (And even if he did, how is it her business?) The “typical” breakfast is smaller than this, and it’s more likely that this particular man eats an average breakfast more often than a large breakfast, so it’s a good assumption that the meal was atypical for him. Maybe he was extra hungry? Maybe he was eating a big breakfast because he knows he won’t have time for lunch? Maybe he just wanted to indulge? Maybe he’s like my parents, who tend to eat big breakfasts and then “mini-meals” throughout the rest of the day (and whose doctor had approved that eating style as part of good diabetes management). Who knows, and who cares?
Ooops, I didn’t proofread well! Corrections:
“I happen to like salad and sometimes *crave* the crisp freshness of it….”
and
“….it’s more likely *than not* that this particular man eats an average breakfast….”
Not to go the “but he’s not even that fat” route, but seriously, that’s not even that big of a breakfast. two drinks, a roll and a sandwich is not that big of a breakfast, at all. I see bigger breakfast meal-deals at fast-food joints, diners, and the like, all the time.
Three eggs, three strips of bacon or sausage links, hash browns, biscuit and gravy, side of pancakes, with juice and a coffee is a “big breakfast,” and people eat them all the time without shame, because a lot of people eat their largest meal in the morning, as we are frequently told it is the best choice to eat our biggest meal at the beginning of the day, to rev up our metabolisms for the day ahead of us.
For all she knows, that was his ‘big” meal of the day, and he was going to have a salad for lunch and a cup of milk for dinner. For all she knows, that could be his ONLY meal of the day. I know people who only eat one meal a day.
Or maybe she was objecting to the ingredients in the sandwich? Was it the coke she objected to? The caffeine in the drink? She didn’t specify, just “he’s eating himself to death.”
Unless he’s choking or having an allergic reaction or being poisoned, he’s not eating himself to death. He’s eating, and he’s still alive.