NUGGETS

It’s difficult to know who to blame – Hursley town planners for allowing the Family Feeder to be built or the company that owns the franchise.  They were responsible for the aggressive marketing campaign, telling children to nag their parents into submission and reassuring Mums and Dads that children are guaranteed to eat the tasty food.   There are also the parents who took their children to that ‘restaurant’. 

People should be taught about primordial tastes.  The ‘tasty’, high sugar, high fat food produces an intense reaction in a child’s brain – like crack cocaine.  Would you feed crack to your child?  Of course not, but you’ll take them to the Family Feeder and give them chicken nuggets surrounded by fatty batter, burgers dripping with grease and chips made with more sugar than potato, teamed with an over sweetened milkshake or cola.  Nice work!  In the absence of the drug, the user craves more.  Children’s insulin levels are raised so high by the sugar assault on their body that they are starving just an hour after their visit and guess where they want to go and eat again.

The good folk of Hursley realised what was going on and stopped taking their children there.  In response, the Family Feeder upped its marketing campaign, urging children to go on hunger strike and calling them to war.  Be as objectionable as possible – Pester Power, it’s a military campaign!  I’ve heard stories of parents compromising and taking children once a day, or caving in completely and going to the Family Feeder for breakfast, dinner and tea.

What the Family Feeder don’t know, is that this is the same food the military gives to their soldiers because they identify that it’ll make them more inclined to kill.  Food high in antioxidants creates cheerful, useful citizens (and children).  Food high in saturated fat and sugar turns people into angry, depressed risk takers full of self loathing and willing to do anything for their next fix.  The lack of fibre creates constipated kids with aching bellies and the caffeine in the soda will cause sleeplessness.  Well done, Mums and Dads of Hursley; your children have lost all sense of proportion in their desperation to obtain what is essentially crack to them and the physiological effects I’ve described have turned them into mini Incredible Hulks.

Now I, the Child Health Psychologist, must sort it out.  I’m standing outside the Family Feeder with a loudspeaker, absolutely fed up of being called to this sort of crisis.  At 2.30pm this afternoon, the junior schools of Hursley emptied.  The children marched, zombie-like, in a three hundred strong mob, to the Family Feeder.  They shut the doors behind them and barricaded them with tables.  They pulled the blinds down in the windows.  The fate of the restaurant staff and adult customers is as yet unknown, but I must act quickly before they run out of chicken nuggets and chips.