In my novel “Carrots and Jaffas” a whitefella doctor working in an outback Aboriginal community has a recurring daydream. The doctor’s dreaming is of a pathway into a healthier unobese, normotensive, undiabetic, heartwell community. That pathway is the path of a sugarless past, a path followed by gatherers and hunters, who are not fast and fizzy food consumers.

That dreaming, a sort of longing for escape from the simple carbs that destroy his flock, that widen the Gap, is born from the reality the Doc sees at the checkout in the community’s foodshop. The local people stock their trolleys, proceed to the checkout, proffer their paycards and wait. The cost of the foods frequently exceeds the funds in the card. The customer removes this food, that food, the next – until the tally equals the funds. First to go are milk, vegies, fruit. Then meat. Finally the customer is left with white bread and brown fizzy cola.

The Doc reels at the choices, at the grip on appetite and taste of these poisons: “more harmful – because more widespread  – than alcohol”. The Doc, an old utopian, dreams of a switch to the Zero option, the sugarless drinks that will please the taste for sweet and the pull of caffeine…The Doc does not fear the scaremongering over artificial sweeteners; thirty years ago these were going to cause cancer. Thirty years on he is still waiting for those cancers. Meanwhile sugar’s harm is here, everywhere…

The experience of that old doc is my experience precisely. In fifty communities, over twenty five years, I have seen these carbs at work on babes in arms, on youths and matrons, on aunties and uncles. In go those carbs and the gap widens that we are successfully closing elsewhere.