TAX for fast food is the Major Irritant of the Week.

I was reading this morning that plans are afoot to tax fast food to promote healthy eating. We'll tax fast food and use the extra cash to subsidise healthy fruits and vegetables, suggested Debbie Jones, a local nutritionist.

She wants to do this because obesity and diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes sometimes brought on by lifestyle, is a growing problem in Bermuda. What an out-of-touch-with-reality solution to a very real problem.

First of all, how does Ms Jones define fast food? Hamburgers, Chinese food, pasta, a certain chicken establishment on Queen Street? What about celery sticks and peanut butter? That's pretty fast. And, as my husband puts it, how fast is fast? We've waited 15 to 20 minutes in line at some of these fast-food places, just to collect a telephone order.

The implication is that people eat fast food in Bermuda because it is cheap. There is nothing cheap about fast food in Bermuda. Without blinking, a Bermudian might pay $10 for a hamburger and fries, compared to the United States where Americans would pay $4.95 or less for the same meal plus drink.

What can be said is that it is to order fast food than it is to go to the average Bermudian restaurant. Bermuda has two restaurant classes: expensive and outrageous. Aside from that chicken place on Queen Street, or the occasional parish pizza joint, there are very few places for a low-income family to go and enjoy a meal together.

Fast food in Bermuda may be fast, but it is teetering over the affordable line. If you added tax, it would leave off any semblance of affordability. Therefore, some customers would stop buying it. So where would the extra money come from, to subsidise vegetables?

There wouldn't be any extra money, and furthermore, many people employed by the fast food industry, many of them unskilled single parents with small children, would find themselves on the street. In fact, I think Ms Jones' plan would bring island-wide economic disaster as so many people depend on the fast food industry for their livelihood.

Minister Nelson Bascome got it right when he said that education is the answer. Many Bermudians don't want fast food because it is cheap, they want it because it is fast, convenient and tastes better than what they can cook at home.

Does the average person lining up for French fries each night actually know how to prepare anything better? The average Bermudian view of broccoli is that it should be boiled into flaccid, tasteless submission.

One way that the Government can improve the health of the population is by putting healthy cooking on the school curriculum. This is especially important when you consider the high number of teenagers who become parents before (if) they become high school graduates.

Also, consider that many kids come home to an empty house in the afternoon and have to prepare their own snacks and meals.

I was one of the last groups to be taught cooking and home economics at the Bermuda High School, and it is something I am forever grateful for. It didn't teach me to be a star chef, but it taught me the basics, that allowed me to learn to cook for myself later on.

This is the one class out of the entire curriculum that I use almost every single day of my life.

And, yet, it is the one class that schools now deem pass? and unnecessary. Schools today act like everyone is going to grow up to live in Tucker;s Town and hire a five-star chef/housekeeper/nanny/pool cleaner. If only. . .

In terms of the farmers' markets that offer lovely cheap vegetables, I will pass on some thoughts of a friend of mine.

My friend, a life-long Court Street resident and business owner, wants to know why farmers' markets are held in the middle of Hamilton where few people actually live.

"Why don't they come up to Court Street?" he wanted to know. "This a real neighbourhood where people actually live."

He said holding a farmers' market there would benefit the neighbours in a number of ways. It would give them something to do, and it would give an economic boost to North Hamilton merchants.

See also on page 5.