Newspeak

This morning my eye was caught by the label on the bottle of milk from Yeo Valley Farm, all mountains and daisies, complete with fake informal layout and fonts. All of which I found rather tiresome, thinking that the actual place was probably something like that illustrated, as it happens a Yeo Valley Farm production facility, somewhere near Bristol. A facility which looks even larger in Google Maps, a little to east of Blagdon, while the corporate HQ is a slightly smaller collection of sheds on the southern perimeter of the village proper. Not a mountain or a daisy in sight, although there must be some hills as Cheddar Gorge is not far away.

Not satisfied with this, went off to Wikipedia, which explained that, as large scale dairy product producers go, this one was actually fairly cuddly, a model of entrepreneurial  innovation with a co-operative flavour. So probably quite a good thing; pity about the faux cuddly packaging.

Then moved onto the packet of xylitol and got to wondering about how this ever so natural stuff managed to taste like sugar without clocking up the calories therein. How did it manage to trick the taste buds or whatever part of us is responsible for the taste of sweet? One can see that liking sweet is adaptive for sub-humans, hungry a lot of the time and well up for high calorie snacks. But only highly adaptive if the taste of sweet is only triggered by things which really do pack a lot of calories. And the fact that it is no longer adaptive more or less irrelevant on the time line of evolution, with obesity only checking in for the last 50 of a 50 million year trajectory.

A few minutes with the Professor reveal that xylitol is one of a family of chemicals called sugar alcohols, of which sorbitol is another, so presumably the answer is that xylitol works because it is very close to being a sugar while only carrying half the calorific punch, and the mix-up over tastes was not a problem for evolution as xylitol while ever so natural, was not so natural as to crop up in a sub-human diet. It also seems that xylitol is widely included in various food products and widely enough used to warrant an elaborate web site, rather smelling of Big Pharma but also explaining what a good thing it is. See http://www.xylitol.org/.

Closed the session on newspeak with a glimpse of the Guardian's headline explaining that the government's bedroom tax is, according to some inspector from the UN, a shocking erosion of human rights. Which to my mind just brings the UN into disrepute. One might think that trying to reduce the number of families living in subsidised housing which is rather larger than they need in this particular way is wrong, very wrong even, but to lump it in with human rights violations is an abuse of the term. All rather odd given that the inspector concerned has spent a lot of time in countries where there are far more serious rights issues: why does she feel the need to have a pop at us in this way? Is the UK a tad late with its subs. this year?