At the beginning of WWII in Britain, when thousands of men were called out of the Depression and into the War, it was in the Armed Forces that many had their first regular meals for months or even years. I can remember how gaunt and scraggy so many of the men were in my town. They seemed to be either unemployed or working themselves to death for starvation wages. And that included my father who had a double apprenticeship and was a master craftsman.
When these men were given tasks to perform in the Armed Forces it became clear that the country had a big problem. The teams that loaded the anti aircraft guns had to handle twenty pound shells for prolonged periods. The underfed working class, who were among those destined to die on the field of battle, quite often couldn’t do it until they had been some weeks into eating regularly.
Rifle drills with the Lee Enfield .303 were not possible for many of the new recruits. The rifles were too heavy for their muscles, weakened by lack of food and the stress of unemployment. The German troops were all strapping, strong men often in the six foot range for height. They had not been starved by their country.
People lining up at the soup kitchens were almost universally thin with the bones of their faces showing. The fit, strong and healthy people were the rich people. You can look at the Depression photos in this country and at the Oklahoma people. They look the same; depressed, miserable, skinny and hopeless.
How things have changed! I live in America now and in my ethnically diverse neighborhood of a suburb of Chicago I see the people with sheaves of food stamps in the local supermarkets. They are the new poor, thanks again to conniving politicians and bankers. But they aren’t thin!
Some of them are enormous and move more from side to side when they walk than they do forwards. Their gigantic thighs rub together and their huge bellies and breasts make you wonder at the strength of the spine that can support that elephantine bulk. The poor of today are often obscenely and grossly overweight. The poor of yesterday were skeletal.
What has happened? Tourists from Europe are more surprised at the size of the people they see here than at the size of the buildings or things they are supposed to be noticing.
Remember how in Fiddler on the Roof, when Tevya sang his “If I were a rich man” song, he made a point that his wife would have a ‘proper double chin.’ Being fat or even just plump was a sign of health and prosperity.
Throughout history, being fat wasn’t an option for most of the population. They worked from sun up to sun down just to keep going. There weren’t many fat hunters in the hunting cultures and few fat peasants among those with a duty to give a percentage of their harvest to their lord and master. Most people were very active and often had less food than they needed. Working class people were predominantly thin or slim.
Today, the opposite is true. Numerous unnecessary studies show that low-income children and adults are much more likely to be overweight than the affluent. The pretty graphs show what everyone with half an eye already knows, as income goes down, obesity increases.
On the face of it this is a paradox. The less money you have to spend on food the more likely you are to be overweight. For many centuries the reverse has been true. What’s the new item in the mix?
The well fed, well educated researchers in their heated and air conditioned offices and laboratories have not had any trouble coming up with possible reasons. Like Monday morning quarterbacks they have endless theories, usually derogatory to what they consider a lower class of people.
There’s the G.W. Bush theory that his professor and peers were astonished to hear when he said it at college. “Those people are poor because they are lazy.” This nonsense was properly addressed by a waitress friend of mine who said, “I’m poor. I work three jobs. Lazy I’m not.” A few of her other words are omitted to save the censor the trouble.
Others consider that the poor just could be too busy working to prepare real food for the family, or too lazy to do it. Others who admit that maybe poor people might be working harder than the affluent suggest that after working two or three jobs the poor might be too tired to exercise and get rid of the fat.
Suburban researchers comment that maybe poor people can’t afford to join the health and exercise clubs that have mushroomed all over the suburbs, and maybe they don’t have time or energy to shop at farmer’s markets, which also depend on the season and the local weather.
Then there’s the ignorance associated with the poor. Maybe they don’t realize that food in the Twinkies category is not really nourishing. They don’t eat healthy meals and don’t get healthy results.
Only one researcher that I know of had the sense to get off his butt and go shopping to find out why poor people are obese. Professor Drewnowski, an obesity researcher, took money to grocery stores. His aim was to buy as many calories per dollar as he could.
He found that what he spent to buy well over 1000 calories of cookies or potato chips would only buy about 250 calories of carrots. Nearly 900 calories in soda drinks was the dollar equivalent of less than 200 calories of orange juice.
A poor person is looking for the MOST food for their dollar, not necessarily for the BEST food. And here and now the mostest for the cheapest is junk food or stuff from fast food restaurants.
But now you have to wonder, and I didn’t for quite a while, how can those industrially created foods, with all the different processes involved, sometimes with dozens of ingredients, and the huge costs of manufacturing, advertising and marketing them, how can those foods cost less than real foods produced by Nature, using only earth, water, seeds and sunlight?
Michael Pollan in a NYT article gave me the Aha! on this matter, and I kicked myself for not having seen something so obvious. My health research trail has always been on the basis of ‘Follow the money,’ and here I hadn’t done it.
He pointed out that a package of Twinkies is the result of a very high tech and complicated industrial procedure involving 39 different ingredients, many of which had to be manufactured to start with. Add that cost to the elaborate packaging and the advertising budget. How is it possible for such an industrial product to cost less than a bunch of carrots? And to my delight he answered the question himself.
"The Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat - three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year."
The reason the poor people are obese is because the unhealthiest, most fattening, and some of the most allergen producing foods are the cheapest. A poor person is not likely to choose a single vegetable when he can get a cheeseburger, a Coke and French fries for the same price.
So now let’s follow the money trail. The food policy of the government is fueled and controlled by the money of agri-business. We all know now that those with the most money have the most friends in Congress and the Senate and therefore have control of the laws to be passed and the markets.
The money of agri-business lobbyists has enabled them to finance laws that use YOUR tax money to subsidize the oil, sugar and grains they use as raw materials. When their basic ingredients have an artificially low price the food manufacturers can, and do, make out like the bandits they are. The result is that the garbage food they produce, though needing more expensive technology, labor and marketing than real food, actually costs a lot less than real food. And economic necessity causes the poorer people to buy their products.
For example: in the fifteen years between 1985 and 2000, the prices of fruits and vegetables increased by an average of 40% when adjusted for inflation. In the same time period the real price of soft drinks FELL by almost 25%.
So what do our brilliant politicians do about what is obviously a public health crisis? As usual their solutions are based on ignorance of the facts or avoidance of the facts because of corruption. For example, some well fed politicians with free health care are calling for the imposition of taxes on fat people. In many states the well fed politicians have already imposed taxes on soft drinks and junk food. And the ripples are spreading to the federal level, where the ignorance is really astonishing, and the multimillionaires talk hypocritically about the poor.
For example again…It’s clear that the financial chicanery of the banks and various corporations has seen many of the middle class dropping into poverty, because of foreclosures and unemployment. Between 2000 and 2008 there were five million people added to the poverty roll and that is not counting what has happened in the last two years.
Right now there are about 6 million Americans whose only source of income is food stamps. They are unemployed and without income, and liable to obesity, because of the folly and corruption of the politicians and the chicanery of the financiers.
So how do some well fed politicians view this prospect? Let’s look at a Congressman. John Linder is the Republican member from Georgia. He is very angry that the cost of the food stamps program will be around 60 billion this year. Here is what he said to a NYT reporter,
“This is craziness. We’re at risk of creating an entire class, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”
So, what experience does this idiot having of being ‘comfortable’ living off the government? He has been living off the government for 18 years, drawing about $174,000 a year in pay, subsidized health care, a very fat and safe pension and all the perks of being wooed by lobbyists with money to burn.
But maybe this brilliant member of the party who drove the middle class into poverty has a solution. Yes indeed he has a solution. "You don't improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes."
Well, he and the Washington crowd did that throughout the previous decade. They slashed all kinds of taxes on corporations and the very rich. Since Linder, like many other critics of the poor is a multimillionaire maybe he is just parroting the plan that worked so well for him. But the people he is denigrating were put where they are now by people like him, and their income is less today in real dollars than it was in 1999.
One more little thing before I stop to go have a post article shower. This is the country experiencing what the surgeon general has called ‘an epidemic of obesity.’ Yet in this country middle class tax payers are subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup.
The politicians are simultaneously lowering the cost of foods that are driving up the cost of health care while having a totally partisan quarrel about how we can pay for that ever increasing cost of that health care, that they get for free. I have to submit that this, like much else going on in this country, is insanity.
Only if you belong to the 'club' are you protected from the results of this insanity. Maybe it’s time to start our own club. Obviously the sane step of ending food subsidies and giving the money saved to the 70% of farmers who get no subsidies isn’t going to happen. All the money goes to the club members while the public watches Fox News. People who know the history of Rome as it became decadent have a good idea of what will inevitably happen next.
But some things are being taken care of while what could possibly benefit middle class America is being sabotaged. The bailed-out American International Group Inc. that most people know as AIG said Tuesday Feb 2nd 2010 it had begun paying about $100 million in early bonuses to employees of the Connecticut-based division that nearly bankrupted what was once the world's largest insurance company.
We are all supposed to cheer because they are only getting $100 million instead of the $120 million they suggested earlier. It was that division that sold the risky insurance on mortgage-backed securities and other investments that put the company on the brink of collapse in September 2008.
And the government, which is being criticized by a multimillionaire for spending money on food stamps (and therefore obesity) to the people affected by the financial chicanery of the company, gave the company over $180 billion of your tax money to save what the AIG called an economic disaster. Maybe we should have let it happen.
The people who manufacture hospital beds are well aware of the situation and of course are profiting by it. Beds that used to be made to stand a weight of 500 pounds are now being made to withstand a body weighing up to 1000 pounds. And some of the beds now have special built in crane mechanisms so that the nurses and emergency folks can transfer the blimps from the reinforced gurney to the bed. Another increase in health care costs. The EMT’s have stretchers that can deal with the new poundage. Maybe they should get chiropractor contracts too.
When Congressmen are on Social Security, like us, have a definite limit to their years on the job, as we do, pay for their own health care, as we have to, and leave office without a pension as so many of their constituents have had to do, maybe, just maybe, things may change. I’m taking pranayama yoga lessons to be able to hold my breath for a long, long time.
