Fat people and education

In the middle of an informal gathering, I joined a conversation about the concept of fat tax, junk food tax, or whatever.  The current food demon is sugar, and this particular conversation was about a proposed sugar tax in New Zealand. Still, wherever you are, you have had something similar in the distant past.

The conversation centered on how taxing any particular food is government over-intervention. They all agreed the effort was another way to get people to eat "healthier." Most felt an aura of moral obligation; it was a well-meaning conversation about improving people's general eating habits. We all agreed that foods have varying levels of usefulness, nutrition, and substance for every person. Food has absolutely no moral value. It is not good or bad; it is just food.

A repeated suggestion was to "educate" people about food and its origins. Poor people, in particular, need this education.  That is crap. Wealthy investors want to continue to use any means to increase the profits of the genetic foods they produce.  That includes slave labor and abuse.

All people already understand food.  Let me give you an example.

As I drive each morning to go to work, I pass a Domino's pizza franchise.  The other day, I noticed a poster for a meat-lovers pizza in their window. The calorie count was in a font twice the size of the price of the actual pizza. A third of the page was taken up with the calorie count.  It is deemed more important to tell people how many calories are in a pizza than the price of that pizza.  Who actually thinks that anyone likely to buy a meat-lover pizza is either ignorant or cares about the calorie count?  Either you're buying it because it's dirt-cheap and will fill the bellies of a hungry family, or you just want a greasy pizza and care about calories. You could put the calories in a big scary font with flames coming out of it saying that you'll go to hell for eating it, and people would still buy it because they want it or because they have no other option that suits their needs.

I really do have a problem with the concept of educating people about food. Particularly when it's aimed at poor people, who are statistically the biggest consumers of fast/processed food.  This is because fast/processed food is CHEAP.   The attitude that poor people need to be educated about food is classism.  It almost always comes from the wealthy.

A poor person knows about food and its value better than any affluent person. As someone who has lived through poverty, I can tell you we know EVERY single thing about the food we are spending the tiny bit of money we have to fill our stomachs. I would spend so much time looking at a price, not nutritional.  I wanted the most filling, calorie-loaded food that would last the longest for the least amount of money possible.  Poor people aren't ignorant. They're poor. They're not choosing fast food because they don't know any better; they're; they're it because it's cheap, easy, filling, and available.

One person said fat people are ignorant about food; do they know which foods are "good" and which are "bad."  I am ."fat man.  I can tell you the approximate calorie count of pretty much any food.  I can probably tell you how many Weight Watchers points it is, whether or not it is allowed on the Atkins diet, what crabs are in it, how many grams of fat, and in most cases, what the key ingredients are.  I have been forcefully "educated" about food since I was young and am now 52.  I have spent decades calculating every little fact about food because I have spent decades dieting and with disordered eating habits.   I bet I am not in the minority of fat people who have been forcefully "educated" about food their whole lives, too.  Fat people are the least ignorant people about the nutritional information of food.  Poor people are the least ignorant people about the nutritional information about food. 

We must make it cheap to help people eat more nutritious, fresh food. First, people need a living wage.  If we pay the fast food restaurant worker a living wage, the price may equal that of healthy food.  Imagine if you've worked a 16-hour d16-hour to cover your rent and bills, you need more time to shop for prepatovegetables. You have kids you have hardly seen, who are hungry, and very little money to feed them; you need something quick, hot, and filling available now.  That is the highly processed and inexpensive food where they just worked 16 hours daily.

Enough ranting.  Seriously, it is time for me to be more concerned about being a fat man. My biggest issue is the addictive chemical; the low-cost food is designed to keep me coming back for more.  Withdrawal symptoms, here we come!

Carry on…