Ban the burger, can the coke
5th February 2011

Placing a ban on undesirable behaviour is without doubt the least effective way of stopping it. Consider the Roman Empire’s ban on Christianity (which backfired spectacularly) or the Chinese government’s ban on freedom of speech.
A ban can sometimes reduce the behaviour; enforced vigorously it may even appear to have wiped it out. But as long as the desire remains to perform the activity, imbibe the substance or conjure the impure thought the behaviour will evade or outlast the most punitive sanctions.
Nowhere is this more true than in the behaviour of teenagers. The most enduring achievement of Western Civilisation over the past 70 years may be the raising of successively more wilful generations of teens whose apparent purpose in life is to harm themselves.
So you have to roll your eyes when a recent study claiming New Zealand secondary schools are hedged with dairies and takeaway bars peddling a wave of junk food to vulnerable students is met with calls to ban such products from all outlets near schools.
While I struggle with the image created by the report of waves of students streaming out of afternoon school straight to the pie warmers and coke cabinets of surrounding food bars, and the equally ludicrous response of a ban, we do have a growing problem of obesity and associated health issues among the young, and I don’t doubt we have teens hooked on sugar and fat just as others are hooked on nicotine and alcohol.
Accepting that a ban on pies and fries will not remove the desire to eat them (and forgetting for a moment, as the authors of the study clearly have, that most teenagers can eat vast quantities of fat and sugar with nothing more serious than a few pimples) let’s imagine a response that strikes to the root of the problem – that to most kids junk food is irresistible.
Very simply, we must convince our youth of a simple proposition: junk food is bad.
Totalitarian regimes throughout history have devoted armies to manipulating social behaviour, but for a really effective strategy we need look no further than the principles of dog training, and the training of one dog in particular – Jess.
Jess (now deceased) was our much loved Labrador/Pointer bitch. When Jess was still a young dog we rented a house on a farm and Jess discovered the joys of unauthorised mustering. We realised if we wanted to come between Jess and a bullet from the farmer she had to learn a crucial lesson – sheep is bad.
So Sylvia took to walking Jess down the long gravel drive every morning, hemmed on both sides with paddocks filled with sheep. She walked Jess at heel on a tight lead and discreetly carried a short stick behind her back. She chose the early morning so she could observe Jess’s behaviour by watching her shadow and not draw Jess’s attention to the behaviour modification strategy.
Every time Sylvia noticed Jess’s shadow turning to look at the sheep she gave her a sharp tap on the backside with the stick. Jess never noticed the stick and after a while she came to associate sheep with a sore bum. The strategy improved if Sylvia accompanied the tap on the backside with a deep growl – the message for Jess being that an interest in sheep was displeasing to the head of the pack (i.e. Sylvia).
After a few months of this Jess’s behaviour was transformed. She walked down the drive looking neither left nor right and with no more interest in harassing sheep than in reading the evening paper. If occasionally she glanced at a sheep from the corner of her eye she quickly corrected herself, with a very guilty expression.
I say let’s apply the same strategy to our kids. From a very young age we should walk them daily up East Street and down West Street with a short stick and a deep growl if they so much as glance towards Makkers or KFC. By the age of 5 all desire for junk food will be eliminated. Even if the school gate is corralled with pie carts and burger barrows they will walk past looking neither left nor right. Civilisation will be saved and we can congratulate ourselves on our cunning. Simple.