Fatty Fatty Fat Fat

Recently I was leafing through some old photos* from my high school days.  Aside from laughing at the girls’ hairstyles and wondering how I escaped without earning the nickname ‘pizza face’ I noticed something.  The fat kid in our class.  No names, and it wasn’t me, but I recall the fat kid being… well… fat.  Like roly-poly fat, Tweedle-Dum or Tweedle-Dee fat.  Wheezing fat, couldn’t finish a mile run in less than twelve minutes fat.  Thigh-chafing fat.  He was a big kid, is what I’m saying.
   But now, as I scan the black-and-whites from the lunch room, he doesn’t look all that fat.
   Especially not compared to some of the Shamus I see waddling around today, plodding heart attacks just waiting to happen.  Somehow, some way, the fat kid from my high school days has become svelte.  He’s not, even in hindsight, anywhere close to lean, but it’s just that in comparison to kids nowadays he’s a veritable model of health.  The kid who couldn’t beat up the smallest girl in my class now could rule the playground like a pudgy Genghis Khan.  I read online that nowadays about 25% of American kids can expect to become diabetic before they’re 30, mostly because they’re morbidly obese.  Before they hit puberty.  Insane.  In-fucking- sane.
   Where did it all go wrong?  How did the secret shame of ‘husky’ Toughskins become the new normal?
   I had a friend back when I lived in Pasadena, an older guy, well past retirement age, who was one of those white-haired, cranky, don’t-give-a-crap old codgers I hope to become one day.  He was a retired dentist, an old-school guy who wore the uniform sterotype - the short-sleeved white coat, the silver mirror on his head, the whole kit, he showed me a picture.  He’d seen the rise in hygiene and dental care from his early days, and then seen an increase in cavities towards the end of his career, especially in young kids, where he’d never seen so many dental problems before.  I asked him why he thought that happened.

   “It’s because we let them fuck with the food.”

   Well said, and I think he’s right.  The 'them' he's talking about are Big Food, the increasingly- small number of companies responsible for providing us stuff to jab down our gullets.  In the name of profit and growing shareholder value these companies are feeding us poison.  Literally.  And we're just rolling over and letting them do it.
   Americans buy food that’s not food.  The grocery stores are full of it.  Bread that doesn’t go stale, 'shelf-stable' meals that stink of chemicals, food that’s more preservative than nutrition, American food companies sell us garbage that you wouldn’t use to poison vermin because it’s cruel to kill even pests that way.  High fructose corn syrup, aspartame, chemicals ‘to ensure freshness’ that are also the main ingredient in fertilizers and fireworks.**  It’s gross, and it’s supremely unhealthy, and it's what's going to make the generation of kids right now the first in American history to have shorter lifespans than their parents.  Some of them may not even outlive their parents.
   There’s a lot of social movement on holding Wall Street and banks to account for their bad behavior.  I don’t want to be an apologist for Goldman Sachs, but all they’re doing is stealing, usually from other thieves who've stolen from us.  They’re not murdering our children with toxic chemicals disguised as food.  There are people and web sites and blogs devoted to calling out American food manufacturers about their poison, but there’s been no grass-roots swell, not like there was with the Occupy movement.  This is a huge, huge problem, one that places profits above the health of our nation.
   We need to start fighting to stay alive.


*  kids, you used to have to take real film to a developer and have your pictures printed on actual paper, which gave you something to touch and handle, instead of click through on your phone
** seriously, sodium nitrate, look it up