Fat police

‘Waist’ not,want not

Musings
Sonia Kelly

IT WAS very gratifying to learn recently that the Japanese have put into practise a strategy that was recommended previously by this column. Fat police are now employed to monitor the waist measurements of the citizens.
Spiralling costs of health care, due to obesity, have prompted the authorities to arm these officials with tape measures while on patrol and target those who appear to be transgressing the law. The legal limits are 33.5 inches for men and 35.5 inches for women.
Anyone who exceeds the limit must change their diet, see a doctor and face higher insurance costs. However, the penalties are somewhat milder than those proposed by myself, when I advocated compulsory attendance at a health farm until the goal was achieved.
In Japan, it is expected that the forthcoming market for ‘fat farms’, as they call them, will reach 100 billion yen (which sounds like a lot of money), presumably because they will be run by private enterprise. My version would have the convicted lodged in state institutions, which would actually be health farms, where they would grow their own food – much like the one operated by the Christian Brothers in Connemara in times past. (Perhaps the Brothers could take on these older labourers and run the new-style farms?)
Apparently, according to a report in ‘The Irish Times’, some 27 million Japanese suffer from fat-related problems, such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, the middle-aged being the worst affected. That’s a lot of people. One wonders if there can be a single healthy person in the country! Perhaps the entire agricultural needs of the nation could be met via health farms, and the money saved in imports and in treating fat-related diseases could be used to boost treatment for non-eating disorders.
The idea of punishing those who have over-indulged in food by getting them to actually produce their own is so apt that the idea could easily be expanded. The most obvious development would be enforced enrolment in the army for anyone convicted of using, or possessing, lethal weapons. Their subsequent deployment could depend on the severity of their crime, rating from Iraq downwards.
Driving offences would seem to be related to roads, so how about setting up a corps of road-maintenance workers or, indeed, road-builders, to knock some of the stuffing out of these individuals? Chain gangs might be appropriate here.
As for drink-fuelled occurrences – any episode in which alcohol is involved should be dealt with by making the offender scrub the streets of the relevant district, which had probably been befouled by the same person previously. A special uniform could be worn by such scrubbers.
Public disorder offences could be dealt with by sending the convicted off on spells of service with NGOs around the globe. Let’s see how they get on in places like Darfur.
Drug-dealing is something else…Perhaps a specially created construction company – composed of convicted dealers and perhaps headed by Niall Mellon – for building houses for the homeless and elderly. This might atone for all the lives that would have been deconstructed by their efforts.
Now for sex criminals: What more suitable than employment in stud farms? And not just in farms that breed horses. These people would be available to any organisation trying to propagate dangerous animals – with precedence for crocodiles.
We are left with thieves. Well, set a thief to catch a thief. A special security force indicated here with a pardon for each success.
It remains to be seen which of these solutions to illegal activities will be adopted next. And by whom.