The Mark of the Obese

Timothy Birdnow

Here is an excellent essay by Daniel Greenfield. Greenfield argues our liberal friends and China are making America fat.

I chewed on the edges of this with an article from several years ago. But Greenfield does a much more thorough job in my humble opinion.

From the article:

Did soda ads somehow become more compelling? Had burger joints figured out a new brainwashing technique? Coca-Cola was invented in 1886. McDonald’s was established in 1940. The golden age of junk food came and went during the Cold War. Every single food trend since then has been toward less fattening and allegedly healthier foods. The same era in which obesity rates leaped saw an unprecedented explosion in everything from soy to health food supermarkets. Food is not the issue.

Or rather food is a symptom of the real issue.

These numbers also show that the attempts to medicalize racism by tying it to obesity rates are wrong. White male obesity rates are actually higher than the rates among black men. What phenomenon that transformed society between 2000 and 2017 could possibly account for such an outcome?

The internet.

He's right, although obesity had been rising before that. But don't stop him now; he's on a roll:

That wasn’t inevitable. It’s the outcome of the economic vision of the anti-obesity campaigners.

The same Bloomberg who obsessively campaigns against obesity, also obsessively campaigns to eliminate physically active jobs and replace them with sedentary desk jobs. That’s the default Democrat position. Last year, Biden showed up in New Hampshire and urged coal miners to learn how to code.

Agreed. And there's more:

The Democrat vision for the nation’s society and economy has been to replace manual jobs with desk jobs after spending four to six years in college. Meanwhile manufacturing jobs were being exported to China. A generation of that has created unemployment, failed cities, urban riots, professional radicals, a meth epidemic, falling marriage rates, and, among many other ills, rising obesity rates.

Running our entire society through the internet hasn’t solved these problems: it worsened them.

Throwing money at nanny state programs telling people to eat more spinach or taxing their soda won’t change that. The only group where those programs have shown any results is among children. That’s because they’re children. Treating children like children works. The nanny state doesn’t work on adults.

The political elites have reinvented America as a society that works for people like themselves.

Urban and suburban lefty college graduates with six figure salaries are building a zero-sum country that only works on their terms. That’s why their proposed solution to obesity is to convince everyone else to adopt their lifestyle of organic foods and biking to work. But their lifestyle is rooted in their culture, their living spaces, and their wealth. It’s not a solution: it is in some ways the problem.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness," are the words that not only capture the privileged world of the elites of The Great Gatsby, but of our own elites who have smashed up America.

Their prescription for the country’s obesity rates echo Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal quote, "Let them eat cake.” The fictionalized queen did not understand that there wasn’t cake because there wasn’t food. The Bloombergian proposals vacillate between a similar misunderstanding about the way the people who aren’t them actually live and punitive proposals to punish them for the way that they do live.

The economy, indeed, as many lefty elites insist, doesn’t work for all us, not because of income inequality, but lifestyle inequality. Political elites are making life unworkable for people who don’t think like them, don’t live like them, and don’t want to. And those elites, like Tom and Daisy, are utterly blind to the consequences of smashing up a society and replacing it with one modeled on their lifestyles.

I would argue it is worse, that the real intelligentsia want to break America so as to open the road for a world order governed by an international government and with socialism as the economic organizing principle. As a result they want us fat and stupid.

It should be pointed out that almost all food now is prepacked, processed, and full of sugar and salt and fat. That didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen by accident. The FDA and other such agencies saw to it, by preventing things like "raw milk" or other lightly or unprocessed foods from being allowed on the market. Was it done consciously? Maybe, maybe not. But the end result is food had to be processed and shipped long distances. Now we get a lot of food from China and other places. Our food is full of bad stuff, and that at best is because the people making it don't care about the health or welfare of the American People. At best.

And don't forget the FDA "food pyramid" which changed the way American ate, making grain and carbohydrates more important and thus leading to obesity. If the Atkins diet teaches us anything it is that meat eating keeps you thin. We are, after all, descended from meat eaters. Grain is a johnny-come-lately.

But as I theorized in my article from 2007Where's the Beef the Left wants everyone eating grain because it takes four pounds of grain to make one pound of beef, and that's unfair to starving Chinese. So the decided everyone will eat grain. And they have systematically replaced the American diet with grain and sugar and salt. There is a price to be paid for that.

At any rate, Greenfield continues:

Since the 90s, the progressive plan envisioned eliminating manufacturing, and shoving the entire country into two tiers of desk jobs. Those in the higher tiers might have the leisure time and quality of life to exercise and bike. But, just as often, order take-out and play video games for entertainment.

Those in the lower tiers will sit at their desks and worry about the future until their job is outsourced.

Obesity is the least of the problems that this stunning vision of how the world ought to work caused. Marriage rates are plummeting as the two-parent family is becoming extinct. So is any sense of purpose, meaning, and optimism about the future. Like obesity, the decline of marriage is a symptom.

A healthy society isn’t just defined by waistlines, but by its capacity for personal fulfillment.

Amen. What the Left seeks to do is steal America's dreams. We were once a great nation precisely because we dreamed big, planned big, and did big things. We were restless, pushing on in all directions, building, creating, molding. They don't want us to be superlative; they want us another nation in a pleasant but meaningless existence. They want us to be consumers and worker drones, but not to think and plan and do. That is reserved for them alone.

But when you take away a sense of purpose you leave a husk with no seed. That is what is happening in America.

It's also why we are seeing no reproduction in America, except among the immigrants primarily. No purpose means no kids and vice versa.

We no longer have a reason for America. And as a result we no longer have a reason for our lives. Despair is a killer, which I suspect is part of the plan; these people are also malthusians and hope the population drops and especially the white population. Well, white males are the only demographic with a declining life expectancy, and that is because of excessive alcohol and drug use as well as overeating. Overeating stems from a sense of hopelessness.

All this fits in with the elites plans for this country.

And of course people who are obese and sick aren't going to offer much resistance to them when they make their move.

At any rate, read the whole essay by Greenfiel; it's brilliant!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:52 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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