Clean

Just as the church has made people feel guilty about sex, the diet industry has been very effective in making people feel guilty about one of life's other great pleasures - food.

It's simple marketing - make people feel bad about themselves and then offer them a product which makes them feel less bad about themselves. Milk is bad so here is reduced fat milk. Chips are bad so here are some that are baked not fried. Butter is bad so here is I can't believe it's not butter.

We have bought in to this concept so much that even junk food is marketed to arouse feelings of guilt. Watch an ad for ice cream and you'll hear that their "wickedly indulgent" product is a "guilty pleasure" and you must "give in to temptation".

Having played the guilt card very effectively for the past thirty years or so the marketers now have a new weapon. It's the word "clean".

In the past year or so I've heard a scary number of people say how they are "eating clean". Obviously this implies that many foods are unclean, which is a totally stupid yet very powerful concept. Jews, Muslims and Samuel L Jackson's character from Pulp Fiction all just don't dig on swine "because the pig is a filthy animal". Chinese bbq pork from Tim's in Chatswood is however one of the most beautiful things in the wold and they are all missing out. 

Clean is an incredibly emotive term. One of the first things we hear as children is our mothers hysterically screaming "don't put that in your mouth, it's not clean". That's probably fair enough when it is a dead cockroach you found under the refrigerator when you were two years old. But do you really need to hear that voice coming back into your head when you are 36 years old and just want to have an Iced VoVo?

There is nothing unclean about Iced VoVos and we should all be able to enjoy them in their full fucking glory without feeling guilty or dirty.