Gulliver's Waistline

I believed that higher food prices would lead to more obesity, not less. However, with the massive drop in commodities pricing that will eventually lead to a drop in food prices, for the moment I'll not be able to test my hypothesis.

Now that gas is less than three bucks, more people are filling up with premium grade -- a grade that many of their cars needed to begin with. The exact same thing applies to food -- when the price goes up, people buy the cheapest shit; macaroni and cheese (refined starch and fat), top ramen (refined carbs, fat and sodium), soda in lieu of milk (sugar in lieu of animal fat and sugar), and Taco Bell fifty-nine, seventy-nine, and ninety-nine cent menu items (refined flour, the cheapest cuts of beef and some token lettuce and onion for vegetables).

Bad food leads to bad waistlines. Now your Monologueonian is certainly not immune to fat; far from it. I prefer to eat 1,500 calories a day in excess of my needs. But, I've kept at my local CSA and I eat my veggies; I eat ~45 grams of fiber a day with a long term goal to eat less than 60 pounds of meat this year.

The world average is 90 pounds of meat per person per year, so my intention is to eat at or below this value. Aside from the potential health benefits, there is growing awareness of the massive fossil fuel inputs necessary to support meat based diets. If I'm going to criticize Fat Merikans and our wasteful energy practices, I need to walk the walk.

Walk? Ha! In our auto dominated world, there is no walking:



With gas now below three bucks, even walking the dog is considered too much for us. When someone in the US goes on a program diet, it usually means nothing more than some over-fed under-nourished cretin paying top dollar for what's essentially a third world diet. Merikans are the Gullivers of the world -- bigger, fatter, and unhealthier than every other nation's citizens.

But the tide is lapping at our waistlines:


In my opinion, we cannot continue to grow fatter without growing poorer. With the tide lapping at Gulliver's waistline, the world's Lilliputian's are already two feet under...