No Wonder We're A Nation Of Fatties












I don't eat chocolate, I haven't done so for years - nothing to do with my health but as I got older I just fell out of love with all those chocolate bars that had provided sustenance through my youth and twentysomething years: twix, milky way, double decker etc. My personal favourite was Cadbury's Aztec Bar which came in a purple wrapper and had everything in it that had ever been considered suitable for a chocolate bar: biscuit, nougat, cherries, raisins, coconut - eat more than one of those babies a week and you'd end up wearing false teeth before you were ten.

I worked in a Mars Bar packing factory on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings as a teenager, it was one of those typical student jobs - reasonable physical work for a lot of money, and the whole place had a sort of youth club vibe as everybody else who worked there was at school with me. Anyway we used to pack Mars Bars, Snickers (they were called Snickers everywhere else in the world but the U.K where we clung tenaciously to the name Marathon), Bounty, Twix and Christmas Stockings.

The thing is, just as music from the Seventies was loud and brash, men's trousers tight and uncompromising and beer warm and flat, so Mars Bars were huge. Not big, not even 'f**k off' big, they were the confectionery equivalent of your Granny's old radiogram (which if I remember rightly could sleep four and still have room for a turntable) - they were huge.

Now look at them (the women at work are partial to them), they are feeble - they are almost the same size as the original fun size Mars Bars that boys of a certain age used to stick down their speedo's to impress the ladies. I mean no wonder we have obesity problems, you must have to eat about half a dozen to get the same Chocolate buzz as the old days - perhaps that's why they are sold in packs of six these days.

It's the same wherever you look across this once great land of vegetable fats, milk solids and cocoa, chocolate bars are shrinking whilst waistlines and prices are increasing.

Some Economists use the Mars Bar as a guide to price changes - you convert the chocolate bars price into consumables, the number of MB's you would need to exchange for a certain luxury item for example. As an example in 1940 the Morris 8 would have cost him MB 19,200 while the Mini costs 19,333 today. I think they'd be better off measuring the amount of chocolate you get for your money rather than the number you need to buy a car!

Just to confuse matters the Mars Bar is known as the Milky Way in the States.