First they come for our pizzas: next thing, we could be living up a Munro

We live in an age characterised by many curiosities. Future historians chronicling the social mores and arrangements of early 21st-century Scotland will be overwhelmed by our behavioural furbelows.

One of these would be our insistence on claiming to be progressive while allowing a few hundred individuals to own more than half the country by virtue of illegal land grabs in the 17th and 18th centuries. Another could be our purported horror at the mere suggestion of cruelty to animals while queueing round the block to celebrate the daily psychological torture of a couple of giant pandas at Edinburgh zoo.

Nothing, though, is as strange and unnerving as the implacable desire of our intellectual and political elite to impose its will on the living arrangements of Scotland’s working-class citizens. We’ve had the insidious named persons project and minimum alcohol pricing, aka the Buckfast tax. This is what happens when politicians have no idea how to deal with the effects of long-term deprivation and health inequality.

Now we are faced with the great Jamie Oliver two-for-one pizza grab. Since the dawn of the internet, families’ lives have been transformed by pizza deliveries. The easy and unlimited access to this Italian feast has allowed hard-working households labouring under low wages and long hours to come together for that precious family time that’s been eroded by modern fast living.

Pizzas will never feature near the top of any list of healthy food. This puzzles me. Italy, the nation that has been stuffing itself with them for more than a century, has won four World Cups by virtue of being absolutely hoaching with sleek and athletic footballers who epitomise human physical perfection and can trap a ball coming out of the clouds without even looking. Scottish footballers require two days’ notice that a ball is coming towards them.

Certainly, we’d all like to settle down with a good Nigella recipe and, after a couple of hours scooting around Waitrose looking for the baby leeks and the Turkish red pepper flakes, then whisking up something spectacular and virtuous. Yet, with good judgment and adroit deployment of the mix-and-match options of a reputable delivery service, families can obtain their five-a-day all on one pizza: tomatoes, green peppers, mushrooms, artichokes and onions, maybe a wee bit of spinach – all feature prominently on the flyer that was shoved through my letterbox last week. You might then have expected Jamie to be extolling the virtues of the humble yeasted flatbread, especially if it’s a two-for-one night for a family on a budget. Sadly, you’d be mistaken.

In a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, the pair decided that the hitherto much-loved two-for-one deal was a blight on Scotland’s culinary landscape. Pizzas and easy and unlimited access to them, they decided, are one of the causes of Scotland’s childhood obesity problems. Apparently in some disadvantaged communities they just can’t be trusted to go for the artichokes and red onion option and instead they stuff their barras irresponsibly with wretched meatballs and sausage.

I’m hoping this is part of an overall strategy of state intervention that could be rolled out all over Scotland subject to the input and a few million in consultation fees from Ernst & Young and KPMG. Here’s a few ideas of my own for their consideration.

The Fitbit challenge

I’d issue every citizen with a dodgy BMI reading with a Fitbit that’s connected to a big government mainframe. Any chiel who hasn’t reached 10,000 steps by 6pm on a weekday night will be picked up by roaming detector vans and ejected at the local park, where municipal fitness instructors will be waiting to put them through their paces.

Supermarket Sweep

All supermarket check-out machines will be fitted with scanners that can instantly tell how many calories are in your basket. By also measuring your weight they can make an instant calculation on how healthy or unhealthy your trolley is. A loud buzzer will sound for offending shopping loads and the miscreant must keep returning to the aisles until their trolley gets the green light.

Jaikie tai chi

This has the ancillary benefit of addressing the homelessness problem. At the crack of dawn, lorry-loads of volunteers would be dispersed throughout those areas most favoured by our jaikies and rough sleepers. They would be taken to Glasgow Green and invited to try some basic tai chi movements just like Chinese old people. This would be brilliant for their mental health and induce them to rethink their lives. Then they could all sit down to a breakfast of porridge and bananas.

Head for the hills

All over Italy and Latin America, there are villages built on hillsides. These look spectacular and are brilliant for tourism, like yon Machu Picchu in Peru. More importantly, the people who live in these places are all as fit as butcher’s dogs and live until they’re about 97 on account of them climbing the equivalent of a Munro every day as they attend to their chores. Scotland has stacks of hills yet curiously we don’t have any settlements on them. So I’d be rolling out loads of social housing and starter homes on Scotland’s hillsides but designed to blend with the environment like the Hobbit houses in New Zealand. You’d also be struggling to get a pizza delivery service in these places, so it’s a win-win situation.

• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist