It isn’t difficult to understand the obesity problem in America when you consider our penchant for fine dining at Truck Stop and Chinese and Golden Corral Buffets. I am as guilty as the next epicurean. So, if you feel picked on, or fat-shamed, remember I’m including myself in this observation. You’re not alone. A big part of the American Dream rest in not only having an unlimited supply of things, but unlimited choices as well.
The problem with these two concepts is that being weak of flesh—and you don’t have to be a Christian to be weak of flesh—we tend to over-indulge not only how much we eat, but how many different things we eat when a lot of when food is in front of us. For example, at the Golden Corral breakfast buffet this morning, I ate eggs, hash browns, grits, gravy, biscuits, sausage, ham, bacon, mushrooms, cheese, green peppers, and a bowl of fruit because the fruit was healthy. I somehow believed the honey dew melon and grapes would somehow cancel my hedonistic gluttony. On the way to the car my overarching thought was, “I’m ridiculous.” But the woman at the table next to me inside made me seem like an amateur. I counted seven trips to the bar and a heaping plate on each return.
Of course, that was in a southern state, one of those that rank close to the bottom in every health, wealth, education, and happiness category available for analysis. No wonder this state helped elect a moron in 2016 to the presidency considering the kind of logic demonstrated here at the cornucopia of calories.
I’m sure there are food troughs available all across the United States, and although some of them might have been closed for the Covid plague, I can only speak to what I see south of Atlanta on I-75. This is where I find America, those rotting pear-shaped people with their sunken chests and flesh flowing like a feral river over the shores of wide belts, each one with so many chins the weight of them drags the thin-lipped mouth open in perpetuity, I see them everywhere, at truck stops, rest areas as they walk tiny poodles with spiked collars, in flea markets full of Civil War-flagged peanut brittle. They offer me no apology for their misshapen shirts and I offer none for my unkind and unfair thoughts, or the foul mood of my own self-awareness, their appearance puts me in now that I’ve stopped at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
It isn’t that I have no pity for the gluttony I see as the crowd of two-footed cattle rustle around a mountain of fried chicken and a sea of gravy, or fear, as I instinctively pat my own sagging belly. This tragedy of corpulence isn’t personal. Well, maybe a little personal since we all appear related. Mostly, it’s metaphorical and that’s where my anger ruminates, at the point where something is what it is not and something is not what it is. This crowd of fat cousins has become my country, a swarm of pasty people blanched even more by the prospect of losing their place at the dining trough. Pushed aside by the largest and their horrible hunger, those left behind scratch to keep crumbs away from bus boys.
Jim McGarrah, Author 