At least from a business perspective, the fattening of America may well have been a necessity. Food companies grow by selling us more of their products. The challenge they face is that the American population is growing much more slowly than the American food supply -- a prescription for falling rates of profit. Agribusiness now produces 3,800 calories of food a day for every American, 500 calories more than it produced 30 years ago. (And by the government's lights, at least a thousand more calories than most people need.) So what's a food company to do? The answer couldn't be simpler or more imperative: get each of us to eat more. A lot more.
Critser doesn't put it quite this way, but his subject is the nutritional contradictions of capitalism. There's only so much food one person can consume (unlike shoes or CD's), or so you would think. But Big Food has been nothing short of ingenious in devising ways to transform its overproduction into our overconsumption -- and body fat. The best parts of this book show how, in the space of two decades, Americans learned to eat, on average, an additional 200 calories a day. In the words of James O. Hill, a physiologist Critser interviewed, getting fat today is less an aberration than "a normal response to the American environment."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/books/review/12POLLANT.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=all&position=top>
This urgent need to ram commodities down the consumer's throat no matter what the peril to said consumer reminds me of Catch-22 and uber-entrepreneur Milo Minderbinder's frantic scheme to liquidate his overstock of Egyptian cotton by bringing an innovative new confection to market, chocolate-covered cotton.
Carl
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