Leave us alone to enjoy our simple pleasures - and sins

TO judge by the reaction that one Maccas outlet has started home delivery, you'd think all hell has broken loose. But it hasn't.

Home delivery ... McDonald's Au...

ORDINARILY when a business decides to offer a new service to its customers the market either takes it up or not, goods and services are exchanged for money, and everyone goes on their way.

But when that business is McDonald's, and that service is home delivery, all hell breaks loose.

To judge by the hysterical reaction in some quarters to the news that Macca's North Parramatta outlet has started a home delivery service, one would think Ronald McDonald himself was prowling the suburbs, dashing tofu salads to the ground and forcing unsuspecting citizens to eat Quarter Pounders at gunpoint.

Radio and television programs have run thick all week with public health advocates complaining that the McDonald's move makes it more difficult to re-engineer society in their own virtuous image, and that Big Macs on demand will lead to health budgets blowing out worse than the Qantas bottom line. One newspaper went so far as to declare that the service the "new enemy" of "healthy eating".

Melbourne writer Jen Vuk fretted that "no one needs McDonald's delivered to their home".

Nutritionist Rosemary Stanton howled when she heard about the service, complaining, "we need people eating more McDonald's like a hole in the head. It's not something the community needs … (it) makes it harder and harder for people to make healthy choices".

So, just to get this straight: Having more choices makes making choices difficult. Got it. Clearly what we need is less choice. If citizens could be made to present three times a day at nutrition centres for their government-approved protein rations, we could all live forever.

McDonald's seems to have set itself up for special criticism not only because, hey, it's McDonald's, but because it chose to role this service out in North Parramatta. And North Parramatta, to listen to the critics tell it, is the sort of place where people do not have the sort of refined tastes that would lead them to place an order for pad thai or gourmet pizza at the end of a busy day.

Instead, people out there are overweight (according to much-quoted government statistics).

More to the point, they are too susceptible to McDonald's marketing voodoo to resist, as Vuk put it: "A heart attack in a box … only a phone call away."

And those heart attacks aren't free. Once upon a time an individual's freedoms were said to end at the tip of the other person's nose.

Nowadays, your rights end at the point where they might impact a heath budget or take a toll on that woolly concept - "productivity."

Putting aside the creepy implication that our lives only have value insofar as our impact on the government's bottom line, it tends to be only those who do not have the platform of a position in academia, the media, or politics who find their lifestyles' under fire.

A few years ago the Australian Medical Association suggested that obesity cost the healthcare system $1.2 billion a year. But that wasn't headline-making enough, so they instead declared that "Factoring in lost productivity, obesity cost Australian society and governments $21 billion".

Oddly, no one ever counts up the "billions" in lost productivity from inner-city workers ducking out for a coffee once or twice a day. Add it up and your typical office worker might spend a week each year on the boss's time enjoying a product that can cause everything from increased blood pressure to anxiety to anaemia.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a scare story about how the Big Barista industry is wreaking havoc with health and productivity.

The same blind spot applies to food. Rich curries, salty artisanal smallgoods, and restaurant meals cooked in truckloads of butter and duck fat are not only delicious but often just as unhealthy as a Big Mac value meal.

Yet these sorts of meals never come under fire from the health police. Instead these dishes, and the chefs who create them, are celebrated. Often Sydneysiders will queue like Soviet-era Muscovites to taste them. It is the culinary equivalent of the snobbery that thinks a tribal tattoo is deeply meaningful, artistic, and spiritual - provided the wearer has no actual connection to the tribe in question.

I say this as someone who eats McDonald's a couple of times a year at most, either on long car trips or because of its reputed "morning after the night before" medicinal effects.

My children turn up their noses at the stuff, having been raised from an early age to develop tastes which, once cute, now seem ruinously expensive.

But I also do not begrudge McDonald's trying to serve its customer base and turn a buck.

Eating home delivery is about as "behind closed doors" an activity as one can imagine. So why the need to meddle?