There are plenty of places to buy food, ranging from a little taco-vending operation on wheels to a machine in the courthouse basement, to some enormous marketplace as big as an entire town might be in a different geographical area.
In much of America, the consumption of all this food is not just a thing we must do to support life, but an entertainment to alleviate boredom; a perverse sport; a status symbol; a “branding” activity meant to convey to onlookers some essential fact about oneself; an emotional bandage; a defiant gesture aimed at the parents and other authority figures who no longer hold power over us…
This list could be greatly expanded. Humans have a lot of reasons for doing a lot of things, including recreational eating, an activity that has, essentially, nothing to do with nourishment to keep the body functioning.
Through other eyes
Confronted with common grocery store items, visiting space aliens would be hard-pressed to identify many of them as having any connection with the function of supporting life. In fact, a scholar from another planet might be totally mystified by some products that are categorized as food. Even a starving human from a different sector of Earth might bypass certain alleged foodstuffs because they are not recognized as edible.
Sure, trading money for things is the entire basis of any national economy. People need to buy commodities and services. Companies need to sell them because otherwise, they must lay off all their workers, which creates another subgroup of Americans who can’t afford to buy anything. All of this is just the way things are supposed to work, under the system we have agreed to live by.
A slight problem
But how useful is a functioning system of commerce, when enormous fortunes are spent on things that make people unhealthy, and on patching up the damage done by those unwise purchases? Where wide varieties of food products are concerned, their main common characteristic is the tendency to cause obesity.
By strange coincidence, obesity is the very thing that keeps other companies in business. To those interplanetary visitors, humans would appear to be cartoon figures, handing out money from one pocket to buy things that make them fat, and dispensing money from another pocket to pay for substances, objects, and activities that they hope will prevent them from being fat.
Speaking of cartoons…
Research has shown statistically several ways in which obesity and poverty are linked. Remember that study released a few years back, whose headline proclaimed that “obesity is linked to higher rates of bankruptcy”?
How crazy is that? Sure, let the scholars relate going legally broke to alcoholism or drug addiction. That concept makes sense, not to mention a reasonable basis for the plot of the occasional dramatic film. Those are tragedies we can wrap our heads around. But for an individual or a family to face ruin on account of being too fat? Could that plot line support anything other than a comedy?
Economics professor Masanori Kuroki wrote,
Given the extent of the obesity epidemic facing the United States, the economic costs of obesity have been one of the most important topics in public health.
In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control reckoned that yearly American obesity-related medical costs added up to an estimated $147 billion (or around 220 billion today). According to an associated statistic, “There is a 70 percent chance that children who experience obesity will remain overweight or obese in adulthood.”
Another level
An additional factor here is that a whole major subcategory of philosophy is devoted to the error of conflating correlation with causation. Obviously, in this instance, any attempt to grasp the entire subject could easily lead to getting bogged down for a while.
We are taught that in the past, and even today in some places, to have a fat wife would earn a man status and respect, because her girth demonstrates to the world that he can afford to feed her above sustenance level. Another aspect could also foster a lengthy digression: the demonstrable fact that poverty and obesity are almost inevitably linked, and the price tag is enormous.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Obesity is linked to higher rates of bankruptcy, according to a new study,” TheLadders.com, 09/13/20
Image by agence-jaweb/Pixabay
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