S P I N E L E S S  B O O K S

From the Editors’ Skulls

The Editor's Skull.

Dinner is ready, and will remain ready for four years.

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

"Always Fresh."

*

Skullclutter

About Spineless Books

Spinelessness.