The Coleslaw Cascade

Dear friends,

Who the f#ck likes coleslaw? Actually, I don't want to know. Whoever you are, you shouldn't. It's dire. Shredded cabbage and carrot drenched in mayonnaise. It makes me want to type onomatopoeic approximations of the sound I imagines being sick a little in my mouth would make. Both because the coleslaw makes me feel sick, and because it so closely resembles it.

But coleslaw might be our friend, albeit our ugly and foul-smelling friend, as I try to get my head around the socio-economic demographic transitional model for fashionable but ultimately harmful behaviours. I am sure the reader will forgive me for calling it instead the Coleslaw Cascade.

The idea goes like this. At some point a misguided behaviour, lets say eating coleslaw, becomes part of the culture among a group of people susceptible to picking up, uh, exotic or new behaviours. This is normally better off young people (but could include eccentrics of any age or socio-economic background, or bored middle-life crisisers). As they grow up, because People Are Boring, they carry on eating coleslaw, but because they become better off middle aged people it becomes a behaviour associated with success. Now everyone wants to eat coleslaw.

The thing is coleslaw is horrid tasting, makes you smell and costs you friends (eg me). It also has dire implications for your mortal wellbeing as complete strangers are gripped with a not always controllable but always violent hatred towards you. So the only people who copy the coleslaw habit are people who have not been significantly exposed to the horrors of coleslaw or are incapable of applying the power of their imagination to the contents of their lunch box.

The more general point I am making with the Coleslaw Cascade is that behaviours which command an appearance of sophistication, whether because they are expensive or are associated with high status, but which have significant negative effects, tend to be sticky within a generation as habits are hard to drop, but over generations will gradually descend in terms of the social status that they are associated with until they are mostly dropped altogether.

A couple of examples will help to illustrate this point. Take being fat. There is nothing wrong with being fat per se. A lot people, though some secretly and more recently there has been a trend against this, think that being fat can be quite beautiful. It is sometimes the product of a healthy enjoyment of life. In past times being fat was a clear sign of great wealth as it signified both being able to afford an abundance of food and not having to do physical work. However as the health costs associated with being fat became clearer it fell out of favour.

Since then being overweight has increasingly in Western societies been seen as a signifier of lower social status. This is actually one of the reasons why so much horrible hatred is directed towards fat people, which people for some stupid reason is an okay thing to do, because they subconciously associate fatness with low social status and thus behave like fat people are fair game for picking on. Obviously this is a brutal and horrid way to behave and anyone who is mean about people being fat should stop and feel ashamed of themselves and punch themselves in the nose at least twice. Still, my point stands in that generally being fat has become more common among the less well off and, quite a different thing, those of lower social status.

Similar things have happened to lots of other behaviours. Opium used to be a lot more classy, now heroin is more associated with poverty. Interestingly, car use is one that seems to be going a similar way. Among younger people it tends to be people from working class backgrounds who are quicker to get cars, with many of middle class backgrounds failing to get them at all. Meat eating could quite possibly be another example, as could watching large amounts of television.

These are all behaviours which due to cost or association have at some point or another been deeply aspirational, and which can have negative side effects. A couple of notable exceptions are some other sorts of drugs, which are presumably less bad for you or something, alcohol, which everyone drinks too much or irrespective, and smoking. Smoking was actually behaving very similarly for a long time with the predicatable wealthy-consumption, peak consumption when it was most aspired to,  followed by a tailing off as the health effects became better known. Now the profile of smoking is one where it is disproportionately the practice of younger people, who are reasonably likely to give up as they get a bit older. This is easy to explain: smoking is cool. Young people are cool, and so they smoke, which is cool, and besides we don't fear death anyway because we're young and cool. I'm not actually a smoker - I'm not cool enough. I wouldn't get behind the wheel of a car either: those things are dangerous.

So there it is, the Coleslaw Cascade. Over time coleslaw eating descends the socioeconomic scale, going from a rich persons folly to mainstream to another object of ridicule for the least well off, who people weren't making fun of enough already. It's a bit shit, but that's how it goes. Of course there's an easy solution. Everyone just stop eating coleslaw and we''ll have fixed it, we can all live in peace and harmony.





I could have used sausage rolls. The Slippery Sausage Roll Slope. Or liking Oasis. The Liking Oasis Process. It must have been trendy to like Oasis at some point, I don't see how else they won that Battle of Britpop thing ages ago that means nothing to me.



God! And then they put f#cking cheese in the foul stuff. Cheese coleslaw! Ever heard of voluntary human extinction?