I was eating some unhealthy snack the other
day and while poisoning myself I recalled reading about Kraft
Foods announcing that it had seen the light and was now dedicated
to making healthier food in the future. Sugar, fat, calories—all
would be reduced, just for us poor beleaguered consumers.
Of course, the real reason Kraft and other members of Big Food
(as the newspaper called the set of corporations responsible
for making this the most calorie-rich nation in the world)
are suddenly concerned with their customers' health is that
they've read the jury verdicts and they don't want to become
the next Big Tobacco, hobbled by billion dollar judgements,
attorney's fees, and months of bad press. True, recent attempts
to sue McDonalds and other fast food chains have faltered,
but more suits are sure to be filed, if only because the lawyers
remember how long it took before the courts started ruling
in favor of their tobacco lawsuits. Also, it is time to face
the fact that in this country of rugged, freedom-loving, independent-minded,
personally responsible, choice-making individuals, we are never
at fault: every cigarette has been forced between our lips,
every Big Mac has been crammed down out gullet by powers greater
than those available to rugged, freedom-loving, independent-minded,
personally responsible, choice-making individuals. As such,
the perpetrators must be made to pay for their crimes of brainwashing
and force-feeding.
Ha ha. Actually, what amused me most about all
this was the adjective "Big." Big Oil, Big Tobacco,
Big Government, and now Big Food. (Images of colossal portions
of macaroni and cheese or monstrous fruit cocktail cups stalking
the land continue to invade my thoughts.) In this country,
we're addicted to big, from super-sized orders of fries to
gigantic SUVs, from the largest, most lethal military machine
to the world's largest cherry pie in George, Washington. Even
those things we marvel at as they get smaller (like computers
and cell phones) point to our addiction to big. What impresses
us about such "small" things is not really their
size as much as their power, how amazing it is that something
so tiny can be so . . . big.
I began wondering if our addiction
to big might ultimately thwart all the good works Big Food
will be implementing. That is, sure Americans obviously consume
more calories than we should, but can all the blame, or even
most of the blame, be laid at the feet of Big Food and their
ever-expanding serving sizes? If it's true that over 60%
of us are overweight, does that not suggest that perhaps we
like
our bodies to be as big as our Oil, and our Tobacco, and
our Government? While our country bestrides the globe like
a colossus,
have we also become enamored of living large—literally—of
transforming ourselves into individual colossi? Such thinking
seems counter-intuitive when you survey the endless array
of thin, buff models that are supposedly our ideal. The number
of liposuction procedures performed every year would also
suggest
that certain types of big must be eradicated. Diets and exercise
programs proliferate like algae in a stagnant pond. Still,
I can't help but wonder if many of us take comfort in being
big.
From a psychological standpoint, it makes a
certain amount of sense. We come into this world small and
helpless. Big people control our lives. Chafing at such powerlessness,
we want to become big, too. Is our addiction to big rooted
in some fundamental human need for security? Seems plausible.
But it's also a bit frightening. As "civilized" as
we've become, do too many of our responses to the world and
events simply recapitulate our deep longing to never be as
small as we used to be?
—Dirk Stratton |