Augustus Gloop, the minor antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, proudly introduces himself to Willy Wonka by announcing, “I’m Augustus Gloop. I love your chocolate.” Indeed, during his relatively short appearance in the film—before being unceremoniously sucked up a pipe after falling into Wonka’s chocolate river—we learn that young Augustus, a less-than-lovable and impressively chubby boy from Germany, has developed a complete lack of self-control when it comes to food, particularly the sweet, chocolatey kind.
Perhaps unfairly, the film places deliberate emphasis on Augustus’s lack of discipline, which consistently lands him in trouble as he lunges at every sugary treat in sight. This is used, predictably, to symbolize the sin of gluttony. What goes mostly unspoken is the addictive nature of the so-called foods that consume Augustus’s mind—and swell his increasingly large belly. The narrative suggests that he is round not because the foods he eats are engineered for addiction, but simply because of his insatiable appetite.
Which brings us to the point—yes, this is the sticky centre of the toffee apple for The Slow Human: our own collective and insatiable desire to eat highly addictive foods, stuffed with nasty ingredients, and the uncanny way these foods transform our bodies in return.
I like to believe I grew up in a pre-internet world that wasn’t yet obsessed with diets and superfoods—a time when people still clung to the humble origins of nutrition and embraced wholesome fare born from a kind of “down-on-the-farm” thinking, long before the farm-to-table movement was coined. My childhood, for example, was filled with nostalgic, post-war food tales of the “good old days,” when sausages were 100% meat, chicken breasts didn’t shrink when cooked, and roast beef left behind a thick yellow dripping you could spread like butter on toast.
The actual life-on-the-farm reality I lived in the early 1980s, however, was quite the opposite—as I was soon to learn.
In early 1983, the body shape of my late brother John—who was about to turn eight that summer—began to change quite unexpectedly. His lean, wiry frame transformed almost overnight into something more hefty and rotund. In short, he had become a walking brick that moved like molasses.
Little did we realize that John was, in true Roald Dahl fashion, starting to grow like our oinking farmyard friends. His body—particularly his chin—became noticeably round and plump, to the point of looking almost unnatural. To my parents’ alarm, their once-sprightly son was now both pudgy and sluggish.
It wasn’t long before they discovered the truth: John had been sneaking biscuits from the pig feed bins. Mistaking the feed for cookies, he had unknowingly become the control group in an experiment no one ever intended to run.
So what exactly was in those surprisingly tasty and alarmingly moreish pig biscuits that triggered such dramatic ballooning and shape-shifting in my brother? Much to my parents’ dismay, the feed—intended to bulk up pigs, not small boys—contained more than just dietary fiber in the form of wheat bran, rice bran, fish meal, and bone meal. Hidden among the powdered ingredients were growth-promoting substances: trace antibiotics, vitamins, amino acids, flavour enhancers, growth hormones, water retainers, assorted additives, and artificial colourants—all designed to supercharge a pig’s metabolism and accelerate physical growth. As it turned out, by skipping the middleman (the pig) and going straight to the source, my brother had unwittingly subjected his own physiology to a swine-optimized regime. The effects were swift and startling.
In many ways, my brother John was the Augustus Gloop of his time—a farmer’s son who developed a taste for the wrong kind of food, one intended for an entirely different species. If there’s any silver lining to this tale, it’s that he didn’t sprout a curly tail or grow a snout, and, mercifully, was never carted off to market.
Whether we like it or not, industrialized farming remains the backbone of most meat production today. Driven by the values of speed and efficiency, the industry has, over the years since my time on the farm, developed increasingly sophisticated formulas to ensure that pigs and other livestock digest their feed with maximum ease and convert it rapidly into body mass. It’s a system built for output, not nuance.
Still, SLOW alternatives to Fast Agriculture and mass-produced meat do exist. If you’re curious about more sustainable approaches, take a look at the Resource page.