Binge society: when will enough be enough?

This week, we learned firstly that the adult tendency to binge on box sets is causing depression and loneliness (I presume that means them, not me – although it can get a bit lonesome when the entire dinner party chat, from pre-prandial nibbles to retro After Eights, revolves round Season 4 of Breaking Bad). Meanwhile children are gorging on so much food and sitting like such motionless zombies in front of screens that four in 10 of them aged between 11 and 15 are chronically overweight.

Most of us are too hefty, yet we still, on average, buy far more food than we eat. Christmas’s most shameful statistic was that on December 25, £64 million of food – that’s 10 per cent of every festive meal – was thrown away.

In 2015, things don’t look any less wasteful; UK families bin enough groceries to make six meals a week. I reckon we should somehow collect it all and rustle up a huge humble pie because we need to pause and take stock and remember that mindless consumption does not bring out the best in us.

Binge drinking, once declaimed as a scourge of town centres, is now so commonplace it barely merits a mention. Apart from which, any anxieties tend to focus these days on its less dramatic incarnation: the slow, unsteady, glugging sound of middle class wine consumption.

Before I start sounding too holier than thou, I must own up to a bog standard sugar addiction. Eating an entire box of Tunnock’s Teacakes, having first cracked the shell of chocolate on my forehead by way of a personal ritual, is nothing to be proud of. Actually, it’s something to be ashamed of because it’s greedy. But calling it a sugar addiction not only pathologises my gluttony, it implies that I’m a victim rather than a perpetrator.

If one person is a bit of a gros gourmand (me) then I only have myself to blame and, frankly, a little general approbrium wouldn’t go amiss. But the trouble is, we’re all pigging-out as a culture, whether it’s on sweet snacks or social media. Once we start tweeting or eating, we find it extraordinarily difficult to tear ourselves away.

Worse, our thoroughly modern addictions are all socially-sanctioned so a collective overindulgence in pleasures – and it’s amazing how treacherous endorphins can lead us all astray – is regarded as perfectly normal.

Is a roomful of grownups playing Candy Crush on smartphones normal? What about families at home, all individually texting people who aren’t in the building rather than speaking to one another? Is that the 21st century definition of civilisation?

Identifying the problem is all very well. Solving it quite a different thing altogether, because we need to take both personal and collective responsibility.

Car manufacturers have admitted they are upsizing vehicles to accommodate fatter drivers and passengers. While it would certainly be helpful for the few, is that a good message to send out to the many: that morbid obesity is no big deal?

If millions of British people were starving themselves to death rather than eating their way to an early grave, society would be tripping over itself to offer support.

A great many “addictions” are just medicalised habits, as attested in a brilliant YouTube sketch by ascerbic US comedian Bob Newhart, called Stop It, in which he plays a therapist.

His patient is a young woman who comes to see him with a fear of being buried alive in a box.

“Stop It!” he yells.

“I have bulimia,” she says.

“Stop it!” he rages

“I have self-destructive relationships with men.”

“Stop It! Don’t be such a big baby!” he bellows.

“I can’t,” she objects.

“Stop it or I’ll bury you alive in a box!”

There must be a way to rein in our crazily addictive consumption. At some point, enough must surely be enough. But let she who who has the willpower to leave the last Tunnock’s Teacake decide when that is.