Writing to a Question

When reading the article “XXXL: Why are we so fat?” written by Elizabeth Kolbert I found that there were many things I didn’t know about the food industry. Kolbert goes in many directions to find an answer to the reason why we are gaining weight so rapidly and this leads her to look at others research as well as look into the history of the food industry. When reading through Kolbert’s journey through this question I began to for some questions of my own. Some of these were about food itself and others were about finding ways to prevent unhealthy weight gain. 

The first place I found myself surprised was when I read a fact Elizabeth wrote. This fact was a discovery made by Eric Finklestein in which he states “For most people, an iced Coca-Cola used to be a treat reserved for special occasions. He continues his research with “Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them the number one food consumed in the American diet.” Even though I understand soda tastes good to people I still had many questions to ask. Why don’t people limit the amount of soda they drink if they know it is bad for them?” Is food just addictive as drugs are? That could be one explanation for it or it could be because of the price. Multiple times I have walked into the local convenience store and bought a bottle of water for two or three dollars and gotten a soda for half the price. This is too big of a problem for us to just sit around and let people get fat. I understand for some that they just have a slow metabolism and due to this they will struggle to lose weight regardless of what they eat, but for other we must find a new plan to get America back on the right track. Finkelstein closes his research by inserting a new argument “If it’s cheap to consume too many calories worth of ice cream or Coca-Cola, it’s even cheaper to consume fewer.” Though I agree with Finklestein’s idea I don’t think it’s all that simple. We must do more than just say don’t buy something because it is unhealthy. 

Another place in the article that was interesting to me was the history of how sizes came to foods. Kolbert introduces a man named David Wallerstein and begins to tell his story. Wallerstein was the first individual to serve different sized popcorns in a movie theater. Ray Kroc who was the owner of McDonald’s argued “if people wanted more fries, they could always order a second bag.” Wallerstein repels this argument by saying “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” There was a strategy behind Wallerstein’s moves and it was that if people were seen with two bags of popcorn or fries then other would judge them as fat. But if they were seen with just one bag that contained the number of fries two smaller bags could hold then they wouldn’t be as self-conscious. This is a good strategy but at the same time taking advantage of people. Wallerstein knew that people would order the bigger sizes and all he was worried about was increasing revenue. He didn’t care if that meant that all of America would begin to gain weight at an unhealthy amount. At the same time, I believe Wallerstein is not to blame for this. If he weren’t to come up with this concept someone else would have. Then we would be talking about that person instead of him in this article. Kolbert also investigated the experiment conducted by Wasnik. The experiment is explained as follows “Wasnik invited participants to cook dinner for themselves with ingredients he provided. One group got big boxes of pasta and big bottles of sauce, a second smaller boxes and smaller bottles.” Kolbert states that “the first group prepared twenty-three per cent more and downed it all.” This led me to ask is there a psychological theory to why people eat more when given more? Maybe this is because we eat with our eyes instead of our stomachs. 

The last thing that shocked me was reading in the article that America was no longer the “fattest” country in the world. A book titled Globesity states “Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Malta and Slovakia, the portion of overweight adults is actually higher than the U.S.” This was funny to me because foreigners always make jokes about how Americans are fat and we eat like garbage. It turns out that we are not the only ones. This got me to question if American food is really the problem. Has American Culture begun to spread all over the world? Is there a loss of traditional food in these countries as well? Maybe instead of having a Gyro stand in Greece now there are McDonalds everywhere. I also realized that this was my first-time hearing this and I wondered if the government was trying to keep it a secret. It must be because they also aren’t doing anything about it which I believe they should. They try to enforce certain fixed meals within public schools but there is only so much you can do and as it is kids don’t like the food being served in schools. Do we have any access to healthy foods? Maybe there is a few farms that could be used to make sure people are getting the right nutrition on the daily. Overall as a planet we need more individuals and programs to step up and help us tackle this issue. 

I’ve come to conclusion that McDonalds and Burger Kings will never stop serving what they do. They make so much money off it and that’s all they care about. For there to be some type of change we must act against the fast food industry and any unhealthy junk food. We can have junk food every now and then even maybe one or twice a week but as soon as we are eating it every day for every meal then a bigger problem is presented to us that must be stopped.