The Food Chain

A couple of days ago the local morning LA news reported that in a few years time it is predicted that  42% of American adults will be obese.  I’m not surprised. 

The next item on the “news” was a feature on the introduction of three new flavours of Girl Scout cookies – double whipped peanut butter, extra creamy coconut and mega chocco-chocolate. Must nip out and stock up on those straight away.  

Subliminal messaging or in your face advertising? Either way it was hardly going to encourage the viewer to lose a bit of weight – not with all those tasty new flavours to try. 

America is a breeding a nation of people programmed to believe they need a constant supply of cheap, sugary, fast food.  Everywhere I go, at the mall, in the supermarket, on the street, I see kids with their hands on auto pilot dipping into a bucket of popcorn or a packet of chips.  Parents seem to have this fear that their kids will faint on the spot if they don’t top-up their calorie intake on a continuous loop.  Strollers these days have special food trays – if my kids ever wanted to eat whilst they were out in their pram they had to wait until we went home and had a meal. These days it’s food on the go.  As nobody ever walks anywhere over here these toddlers will only be strapped into their stroller for a maximum of about 15 minutes – surely they can last that long without food?

I regularly drive past the local In and Out Burger when it opens at ten in the morning and there’s a line of cars eagerly waiting outside.  What meal of the day is that? It’s not even elevenses and anyway, elevenses back home used to be a cup of tea and hob nob biscuit. Here it’s a double whammy bacon cheeseburger. 

I don’t think you have to have a degree in food nutrition to work out this is a recipe for a serious health problem.

But surely not in California you might think, all that fresh air, kids outdoors playing sport. Yes moms take their kids in their car to Little League Baseball every Saturday morning and then reward them with a KFC on the way home. And don’t forget your average frappe-latte or whatever from Starbucks contains about 4000 calories – they’ll  have had one of those before they even start.

People drive to the gym, park their car as close to the entrance as they can and run five miles on a treadmill.  It doesn’t appear to occur to them that if they ran to the gym and back they wouldn’t even need to go in. But of course modern American cities aren’t designed for pedestrians – running or walking anywhere is a major no-no and not just because of the hazards of traffic, there's all the other nasties out there lurking  on the street - germs, Al Qaeda and alien abductors to name but three. It’s a lot safer just to stay in your car.

Yes you can go to Santa Monica and Venice Beach and see all those muscular fit young men swinging on the monkey bars and the blonde and the beautiful jogging along the beach.  But if you can afford to live in Santa Monica you can also afford to go to Wholefoods and stock up on your alfalfa beans.  For the rest of us – when it’s for 99c for a hot dog and an apple costs $1.50, as they say over here, do the Math.