Understanding Childhood Obesity

I’m sticking to my plan of not commenting on my last post, so I’ll try to explain why it’s a problem for the benefit of people who choose not to see it that way.

There’s a lot of factors regarding why childhood obesity is on the rise. One is that in 1940, 66% of households had one wage earner, but by 2000 only 25% did. The idea of having a parent at home cooking healthy meals has become an impossibility for many, and most families are struggling around schedules in an attempt to feed everyone.

Another factor is the complete lack of variety for quick food. One can’t eat Subway every day, and the browning lettuce of a fast food salad gets really tiresome after a while. Having dated a vegetarian more than once, I know there’s very little option in that department, as well. Convenience is the primary reason anyone gets fast food, it’s not because they want to eat unhealthy.

Yet another factor is the barrage of advertising children are exposed to. It’s not an issue of “learning to tell your kids no,” so much as it is an issue of parents getting sick of their kids complaining about it. I think providing healthy options so parents can placate their children while not poisoning them is preferable to parents going on a crusade against advertising, and that is the next step if fast food chains continue to sell garbage.

Theirs is also the fact that fast food quality has sunk over the last two decades. Fat content has increased, high fructose corn syrup is in everything from the chicken nuggets to the ketchup to the sauce on a McRib, and sodium is added in heart-stopping levels. I thought that the suggesting of “providing an alternative” was a good idea, because nearly every facet of the food industry has successfully introduced “reduced X” products with great success, with the exception of most fast food chains.

Also, “providing an alternative” is the answer to the problem of people bitching about things changing. I mean, you got people complaining when fast food thousands of miles away from them is changed, I can’t imagine what would happen if someone actually messed with one of your Big Macs. You guys might have a coronary right there, and for a measure aimed at benefiting public health, that would be counter-productive.

Finally… it was one of the more inconsequential problems I could come up with. I could ask a tough question that requires hours of research (I mean, require hours of research for a good answer, not that anyone would do anything but pull a stock answer from a prominent libertarian from their hamburger-meat-coated rectum). I could ask a question that is complex and requires a nuanced answer with several aspects needing explanation… but I thought I would ask an easy one to start.

Maybe I learned the most important thing I can know about anarchists if they choose to not even see this as a problem: anarchists don’t give a shit, they just want to be left alone in an unchanging world of conservatism where everything is as they remember it from childhood, like every Republican I ever met. Maybe, but I’m not ready to give up on them yet. It was, after all, only one late night and early morning. Maybe there is some creativity in you guys.

I don’t want to imagine that anarchist ideas fall to pieces once I wander outside of the realm where Noam Chomsky has already tread. I’d like to think of anarchy as a living, breathing philosophy that can adapt to problems and come up with simple solutions (like the problem of English prisoners being shipped to Australia).