Krispy Kreme nation

Krispy Kreme nation

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Originally published 10 October 2004

I’ve recent­ly returned from the heart­land, and I have one thing to report. Mid­dle Amer­i­cans are fat. Huge­ly, jeans-bust­ing­ly, roly-poly fat. The Bible Belt has bust­ed its buckle.

The mid­dle of the coun­try is so over­weight that rivers that used to flow into the Atlantic and Pacif­ic now drain into the Mississippi.

Ok, I’m being face­tious. But it’s true that my home­ward flight out of Chat­tanooga was­n’t allowed to take off because the plane was over­weight. And it was­n’t the baggage.

I’m not talk­ing about peo­ple who are heavy because of genes or metab­o­lism. Every pop­u­la­tion has a nat­ur­al dis­tri­b­u­tion of body types from super­sized to twig­gy. But out there in mid-Amer­i­ca the bell-shaped curve slumps alarm­ing­ly towards the port side of portly.

I’m talk­ing about folks who would­n’t say no to a triple cheese­burg­er if their life depend­ed on it.

Which it prob­a­bly does.

Accord­ing to the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, obe­si­ty has become a chron­ic, life-threat­en­ing epi­dem­ic. More than a quar­ter of adult Amer­i­cans are obese. Not just over­weight, but dan­ger­ous­ly fat. We are becom­ing a nation of couch pota­toes more amply uphol­stered than our couches.

Except for a few Pacif­ic island nations, Amer­i­cans are now the fat­test peo­ple in the world.

And here’s the irony. Take a look at the mag­a­zine sec­tion in any news­stand or book­store, sure­ly a reli­able indi­ca­tor of Amer­i­can taste. Not an over­weight body in sight.

Rather, what one sees spread across the shelves are trim, per­fect­ly mus­cled bod­ies. Flat abs. Impec­ca­ble pecs. A Mr.-and-Ms.-America parade of taut skin.

What we are and what we aspire to be have gone wild­ly out of sync.

We are becom­ing alien­at­ed from our bod­ies as they were shaped by mil­lions of years of nat­ur­al selec­tion. The sleek phys­i­cal frames that suit­ed us per­fect­ly for life as hunter-gath­er­ers on the savan­nas of East Africa have become redundant.

Few of us make our liv­ing any­more by brawn. The super­mar­ket has replaced the hunt, dig­ging for roots, search­ing for berries. No one runs to escape a prey­ing beast. Hand-to-hand com­bat for food or mates is a thing of the past.

Fat is rife because mus­cles don’t matter.

But our genes still whis­per the old Dar­win­ian mes­sage: It’s good to be trim, agile and fleet. Dur­ing the long course of human evo­lu­tion, a “babe” was the like­li­est to bear a healthy child and a “hunk” was like­li­est to be the best provider. Only no one called them babes and hunks then. They were sim­ply the survivors.

Babes and hunks came lat­er, when cul­ture made phys­i­cal fit­ness less nec­es­sary for sur­vival. A firm, mus­cu­lar body is now a sta­tus sym­bol, what cul­tur­al crit­ic Rebec­ca Sol­nit calls “an aes­thet­ic of the obsolete.”

So we snap up news­stand copies of Mus­cle and Fit­ness and Nat­ur­al Health even as we wolf down our buck­et of chick­en with an extra side of fries.

Mean­while, I’m sit­ting in the air­plane on the tar­mac, sur­round­ed by seri­ous­ly over­weight Amer­i­cans, wait­ing for the ground crew to fig­ure out whom to eject. Will air­lines have to widen the aisles and broad­en the seats of their planes? Will the price of our tick­ets go up if planes car­ry few­er passengers?

Nowhere is obe­si­ty more out of con­trol than in the beer­bel­ly of Amer­i­ca, the Bible-thump­ing, gun-tot­ing south and cen­ter. In fact, there is a strik­ing coin­ci­dence between the inci­dence of obe­si­ty and a map of the so-called red states/blue states. Texas, it turns out, is one of the fat­test states in the union, and Mass­a­chu­setts is among the thinnest.

You tell me what it means, but if votes were weight­ed by the weight of the vot­er, George W. Bush would win by a land­slide. It’s appro­pri­ate that the sym­bols of the two par­ties are a cor­pu­lent ele­phant and a scrawny donkey.

So praise the Lord and pass the Krispy Kremes. The fig­ures for obe­si­ty of our chil­dren are even more dis­turb­ing than those for adults. What this bodes for our nation’s long term phys­i­cal and men­tal health is any­body’s guess.

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