During the relaxing, post-Christmas period, I like to declare a holiday from
newspaper reading. For a week, at least, I may taste the luxury known by those
who manage to live without exposing themselves to “the news.” But this
December, as I allowed myself idly to page through a copy of the London
Sunday Times, I came across one of the most delightful stories of the
year. On page three of the front section was the headline: “Revealed: the
Elvis Presley killer diet.” It claimed that the King’s favorite,
“Fool’s Gold”
sandwich—a foot-long baguette filled with bacon, peanut butter, and strawberry
jam—contained 42,000 calories—and that he ate two of them a day, besides his
two other large meals. There was even a helpful little bar graph comparing the
daily caloric intake of an office worker, an active young man, a polar
explorer, an Asian elephant, and Elvis. Elvis consumed more calories per day
than all the others put together.

Now, although it was written by the paper’s arts correspondent, that was
my kind of health story. It had everything—
except, perhaps, a claim that the
recipe had been given to him by aliens. It informed and entertained and so
accomplished the main purpose of good journalism, which is what, after all, we
turn to the “quality” papers for. Yet in America, such a story would have been
relegated to the supermarket tabloids. The health stories run by the
mainstream press here tend to be about nerdy