The Joy Police

January 18, 2023 Longrider General News, General Rants, Health and Fitness, misanthropy 11

These people really do worry that someone out there is enjoying themselves.

If you work in an office, you know the drill. It’s someone’s birthday and the unwritten rules mean they or a generous boss supplies cake (or cakes) for all.

But is it time to kick the cupcakes, to get the gateaux away? A food adviser says workers should not bring in sweet treats – to avoid tempting colleagues.

Food Standards Agency chairwoman Prof Susan Jebb compared being around cake in the office to passive smoking.

Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off and keep fucking off until we can no longer hear your puritanical whining. If I want to eat cake, I’ll damned well eat cake. If you want to take cake in for a colleague, then do so. It’s the little things that bring a little joy into the world and puritans like Prof Jebb who do their damndest to suck it out, like a vampire.

She argued that being around cake in the office was like passive smoking, which though not identical also inflicted harm on others.

No it doesn’t.

11 Comments

  1. Bringing in cakes on your birthday was a tradition at my workplace. When I was first diagnosed as a diabetic, I cut refined sugar out of my diet completely. When people brought in cakes I politely refused, it wasn’t difficult. In any case, providing that you don’t have a weight problem, the occasional cake isn’t going to do you any harm.

  2. Quite so. The New Puritans appear to believe it quite acceptable to assume that ordinary people cannot exercise self discipline. So obviously some apparatchik must exercise ‘benign’ control on their behalf.

    It’ll be shorts and singlets for street exercises at dawn next.

  3. I witnessed this at a large organisation I worked at for several years. Big open plan office, maybe 300 people per floor, with the desks situated in short rows around the outside and the main walkway in a rectangle going around the lifts and facilities in the centre. At the end of every row of desks was a set of file cabinets / short cupboards which served as a convenient serving counter for whatever had been brought in that day.

    It would take maybe 3 minutes to do a lap around the floor and in that time you could easily pick up enough sweets, cakes, biscuits (and occasionally fruit) to feed the average obese family for a week.

    I rarely indulged, though did occasionally contribute some savoury items for the menfolk, as it was nearly always women hanging around the hoard complaining loudly that their latest diet plan was not working out. There were also some people who would extend their grazing sessions to laps of multiple floors (via the lifts, not stairs – obviously).

    The organisation in question really did, and I presume continues to, employ some very stupid people.

  4. “The New Puritans appear to believe it quite acceptable to assume that ordinary people cannot exercise self discipline.”

    Projecting their own inadequacies onto the rest of us.

  5. If passive smoking is as harmless as eating a cake, we need to bring back smoking in the office immediately. Particularly now that it’s so cold outside

  6. Wait for it – ‘third hand passive eating costs the U.K. x bullions yearly’! Next month ‘Passive Racism’…

  7. “ Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off and keep fucking off until we can no longer hear your puritanical whining.”

    Yep.

  9. This story is being lambasted all over the web at the moment, so all is not lost just yet. A thought occured to me, I being a diabetic, have a really good low carb chocolate cake recipe that uses ground almonds in place of flour. I know that people have an assumption that, if something is low fat, low calorie, low whatever, that it’s going to taste like crap but it really doesn’t, I don’t think that it is possible to tell the difference. Of course the joy police will then just switch their attention to nut allergies won’t they?

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