I was driving through a town in the county north of us, near Zephyrhills. Recently, Zephyrhills was in the news b/c of a brouhaha over renaming a st. to MLK Blvd. It's one of those kinds of places where you get off the main drag and are quickly met with homes with chicken coops in the front yard and mangy old dogs stretched out on the dusty ground shadowed by a rusted out hulk of a '78 Impala.
We were headed to a b-ball tourney. Turning down the "drive" toward the town's high school, on the right was a double-wide with a dilapidated sign made of particle board. "Bible Study group meeting 11:00," it said. I had no idea, from the sign, if the meeting was daily, Sundays, 11 am or pm. To the left was a dirt road with a sign, arrow pointing skyward, telling the driver that the Loaves and Fishes bible camp was ahead. The next home was completely fenced with chain-link, a beat up old cracker house surrounded by trees heavy with Spanish moss and a sandy, dusty yard sprinkled with children's toys. A sign out front announced that the toys were probably part of a home-based daycare business.
The school looked like something straight out of a teen movie about a Beverly Hills high school. The architectural lines indicated that it must be the product of some architectural school of thought pedaling the idea that schools ought to look like shopping malls. It was strange to see the school emerge out of the dilapidated surroundings, from potholed dirt roads to the smooth blacktop of curving tree-lined boulevards and parking nooks, just like you'd expect at a shopping mall.
After the game, we stopped at a few stores to get some groceries before the heavy thunderstorms hit. We went to three different stores. Look, chicken was on sale for 1.99 a pound at one, shrimp was buy one lb. get a lb. free at the other, and a drugstore had toilet paper on sale, 3/$1. Shoot me for trying to save a buck.
I thought of you and Carl as I noticed how many overweight people there were. People looked worn and tired, compared to shoppers where I live, a more affluent county in the Tampa bay region, one of the ten largest metropolitan areas in the country I belive. I stopped at a local chain that sells discounted "name brand" clothes. It always has racks outside featuring marked down cloths. Unlike the stores in the same chain I frequent in Tampa Bay area, this store featured a HUGE rack of medical scrubs. Must be a lot of people employed in the health care industry, I thought.
I was thinking: these people are clearly poorer, on average, than those in Tampa bay region. What is it with poverty and weight? Doug once said that people feed themselves as a way to deal with life's frustrations, which often make people depressed. I looked over at my son and remembered when we were really struggling financially, facing one health or legal crisis after another, the bills mounting. When we started to get our heads above water, I felt I could splurge a little. Having learned how to be extremely frugal, I'd never been one for fastfood or junk food, though we did pretty much live on pasta, breads, beans, and cheese. Still, it remains the case that the last time I had a hamburger or fries, it was 1992 when I bought my son a Happy Meal on a road trip. I can count the number of time we've eaten fast food meals.
Like a lot of other poor people, I ate that diet and knew nothing about the need to avoid vitamin B deficiencies associated with a diet lacking the right kinds of protein.
When the need to buy special gym shorts didn't put my stomach in knots wondering what we would have to go without to afford them, I started feeling like I could "splurge." I'd go shopping and see a display of some new chip or candy bar. For two bucks, I could buy something in a nice shiny slick package for my son. That along with something other than a generic brand shampoo or soap, would be such a cool surprise to bring home for the sonshine. I know it sounds weird, but I'd drive home on cloud nine, and put together a makeshift care package of these special treats, displaying them as if I'd brought home an extravagant gift. In the morning, he'd wake up to a basket containing buy one get one free new ranch flavored Doritos, some spiffy hair gel from the mark down bin (and I had a coupon too!), and Krispy kremes for a 1.99/dozen in the reduced price baked goods bin.
I had to so regularly deny us the kinds of things that it seems "normal" people buy without thinking that it felt like Christmas in fucking July when I could buy him a lousy bag of M&Ms, something I _never_ used to buy him. Even lousy tee-shirts. I could afford to buy the nicer kind.
I can imagine that poor people treat food the same way I did. The only thing that stopped me from letting it turn into something worse as I started making more money was a real fear of being poor again and a lifetime of frugality. You would not believe what sorts of knots I tie myself into over buying something as silly and insignificant to most folks as a shower curtain when the old one is falling aprt and duct tape doesn't work or just looks so ugly that you can't bear it any more.
Food is a relatively inexpensive way to get yourself a little thrill, something you like, something that you think tastes good, something you 'shouldn't' have but something you're going to buy anyway because every other last mother fuckin' dollar is being spent on things you have to spend it on. It's a lot cheaper to buy two bottles of Gatorade (which is sugar, water, and potassium sold at a stupidly high price) or two six packs of the newest soda for the price of one than it is to buy any other 'goody': stereo, CD, clothes.
So, maybe part of it is that. People can afford to buy food, so they buy it and sometimes it medicates their depression. The cycle repeats itself, particularly since, if it's junk food, the combination of highly refined carbs/sugar/salt can really sink someone lower on the mood scale as their body crashes after an insulin spike.
Anyway, the researcher she's interviewing is pointing out something fairly obvious to anyone who looks at the numbers carefully. The really fat are much more fat than they used to be. The few, therefore, pull up the mean by 6-10 lbs. Same thing with income. The really rich, who are few, pull up the mean (the average). Hence, we use median income as a possibly more accurate indicator of what a typical person/family/household earns. This is also affected by the aging baby boom population, as well as changing racial demographics. If you look at the numbers by region and by age, white 20-40 yr olds in the north have seen a huge gain. You see increases among 50+ year olds and in the South. The BMI, by the way, is based on white W. Europeans and this presents problems when it comes to bone density differences.
I'm not sure how the researcher's claims necessarily support propaganda. Even if he'd said the opposite, his claims would support corp. propaganda. He's saying the tendency toward obesity or leanness is shaped by genetics (duh). I suppose this helps corporations because that will mean people will just gorge themselves now instead of spending loads on diet products, exercise equipments, and gym membership. Yeah, that's contributing to the bottom line! If he'd said something like obesity is ALL about eating and exercise habits, something completely in control of the obese, then his claims would obviously be resistant to corporate propaganda, hmmmm? I think not. Obviously, if he'd said that his claims would be used to pedal low-carb --i cannot believe i saw this yesterday--flavored coffee 'creamer,' low-fat Happy Meals, exercise equipment, and gym memberships.