A single body

“Low Fat!” screams a label, in garish three-dimensional fonts. “Zero Calories!” proclaims another. Some stick to Dutch. “Nul vet!” “Minder dan 10 Kalorie!”

One’s customary Friday-evening visit to the local supermarket is inevitably punctuated by such promulgations. It is well known and widely accepted that such things attract customers.

But one is what is referred to back in Gujjuland as a “single body”. This should be especially significant in light of recent sage/tyke schizophrenia, but it’s not about multiple identities at all. A single body is a skinny person. Really. It’s actually pronounced with a fetching Guj accent, if you please, “body” rhyming with “roadie”.

You might think, given the fact that one’s chief activities are eating and sleeping, that one’s appearance would show a certain embonpoint. But, alas, it is not so. One has been compared, by different people at different points in time, to a walking skeleton, a starving chimp, and a stick. And they, one suspects, were being nice.

But it is hardly surprising that one cannot put on weight here despite eating practically everything in sight. See, anything even remotely edible in these parts is quite utterly drained of lipidinous content, as if some overzealous squad of obesity police had single-mindedly attacked the supermarket shelves. Every last drop of triglyceride has been ruthlessly wrung out of the cottage cheese, all traces of fatty acid have been coldly emulsified from the frozen desserts. One spends entire afternoons searching for that elusive tub of full-fat yoghurt, for the one chocolate mousse that does not proudly claim to be an integral part of a dozen crash diets. Milk is available in plenty, but it is all of the skimmed variety; whole milk may be bought only at select stores conveniently positioned at the farthest corners of town.

If one remains emaciated for the rest of one’s life, it is all the fault of those callous profit-hungry FMCG companies. In pandering to the corpulent crowd, they are losing the trust of us reedy folks.