“The evolution ray that made me super-intelligent turned me into a freak!” she sobs, clutching her unsightly Edisonian incandescent of a head.
There’s good news and bad news, Lois. As any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with “The Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen,” they’d have been up there with Nos-tradamus. “Our culture’s sedentary character—our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action—seems closely correlated to our changing physical shape,” wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. “We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 percent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.”29 We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production.
Dependistan is an unhealthy land. In America, obesity starts earlier and earlier: it’s doubled since 1980.30 According to some surveys, a third of all children over two are obese.31 Libertarians instinctively recoil from a nanny state that presumes to lecture you on eating your vegetables, and red-state conservatives have a natural cultural antipathy to effete, emaciated coastal metrosexuals nibbling their organic endives—and that was before Michelle Obama decided to make an anti-obesity crusade the centerpiece of her time as First Lady. They’re not wrong to be suspicious. Almost all public health behavioral campaigns end up as either bullying or brain-dead or both: half a century ago, nobody thought smokers would wind up huddled on the sidewalk outside windswept office buildings. Few foresaw that high-school “zero tolerance” policies for drugs would lead to students being punished for having Aspirin in their lockers. In 2008, a bill in the British House of Commons attempted to ban Tony the Tiger, longtime pitchman for Frosties, from children’s TV because of his malign influence on young persons.32
Why not just ban Frosties? Or permit it by prescription only? Or make kids stand outside on the sidewalk to eat it? Already, San Francisco’s city council has voted against life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals by attempting to criminalize fast-food menu items that offer free children’s toys.33 It’s not far-fetched to imagine government attempting to alter the contents of our stomachs: in fact, they already do. The Public Health Agency of Canada requires that white flour, enriched pasta, and cornmeal be augmented by folic acid to help women lessen the risk of neural-tube defects in their babies.34 It’s also not far-fetched to predict the usual unforeseen consequences: a Norwegian study published in
Our “changing physical shape” (in Ferguson’s words) seems an almost literal rebuke to the notion of republican self-government. Never mind the constitution, where are
What might restore the unprecedented size of contemporary Americans to something closer to mid-twentieth-century Americans? The family meal, with mom, dad, and the kids all ’round the kitchen table, like
None of these things is going to happen. So instead we’re left with Mrs. Obama as Marie Antoinette for an age of PC Bourbons: “Don’t let them eat cake.” What will that do? Push the percentage of obese kids up to 60 percent?
Seventy? Senator Richard Lugar, one of the GOP’s Emirs of Incumbistan, demands more “federal child nutrition programs.”36 But the National School Lunch Act (whose very name nineteenth-century Americans would have regarded as a darkly satirical fancy from dystopian science fiction) dates back to 1946. The bigging up of American schoolchildren happened on Washington’s watch. Yet we’ll fight the “war on obesity” as we fight the “war on poverty”—with more dependency and more government programs. While we’re “fighting” all these phony wars, it’s not even clear we could fight the old-fashioned kind anymore: according to the U.S. Army’s analysis of national data, 27 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 are too overweight for military service.37 Even running for our lives is beyond many of us.
