In an ideal world, human cultures would change at an equal rate to the environment in which they operate. Of course, that doesn’t happen. Cultures can continue to operate against all logic – and politicians can continue to operate within these cultures, making patently irrational decisions. That’s what happening with the correctly labelled obesity “epidemic”. More than 20 per cent of adults and a very high proportion of children will be obese by 2010, the latest figures suggest. Yet still Patricia Hewitt is trying to say this is a personal problem. That’s an awful lot of personal problems.

Well here’s my tale of how I, more-or-less, stopped myself heading down the path towards middle-aged obesity on which I was set, like so many others, as a child. For when I was small, my parents struggled to get by. When my mother went shopping, she bought the cheapest bulk items available – “No name” supermarket brands of cereal, of tinned meat and similar. She mightn’t quite have thought about getting the most calories for every cent, but that was the framework.

“Luxury” items were high-fat and empty of nutrition – chocolate, ice-cream, crisps. Fruit and vegetables were high risk – they might go off; as a poor cook what she did with them mightn’t be a success. She didn’t know how to judge what items were ripe or good – no one had ever shown her.

Because food was in some sense a luxury, she treated herself, and me, when things went wrong, with food – comfort eating. My increasingly round shape was dismissed as mere “puppy fat”, “healthy growth”, “nothing to worry about”. As I entered my teens at some level I knew that was wrong, but I also found comforting eating a great crutch through the pains of adolescence, and there was an element of self-harm in it – if I was fat, I wouldn’t have to deal with that whole business about boys…

Food was comfort, it was necessary fuel to be shovelled in, it was not something to be savoured, appreciated, tasted. Luckily, along the way, I had the occasional accidental exposure to good food – the Indonesian-language teacher at school had an Indonesian wife who cooked us chicken satay: the peanut sauce was a revelation. But that was an odd shock in a diet of leathery meat, fake mashed potato and frozen peas.
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That’s what 600 million in Asia live on – then again 250 million have got out of that situation (although many of those probably only just).

The percentage of people living on $1 a day in South Asia, which includes India and Bangladesh, dropped to 28.4 percent in 2003 from 40.9 percent in 1990, the report said. In East Asia, which includes China, it fell to 14.9 percent from 31.2 percent.

There’s no gender breakdown in those figures, but I suspect women would be significantly over-represented.