Let them eat chips
In proper First Lady fashion, Michelle Obama has taken on a health crusade on behalf of our nation’s children. She has sequestered $10 billion in pin money to help them slim down. And just in time, say the nation’s scientists with their clipboards and their white coats. We face a health crisis of historic proportions. Our kids are just too damn fat. They’re flaccid and prone to diabetes. Youth orchestras face a glut of tuba players. Schoolyard bullies no longer know whom to taunt with cries of ‘fatty boob-a-latty,’ being beset with a hippo herd of tubby schoolmates. Or they themselves are too torpid to chase down their prey. Perhaps worst of all, our youth can’t fit in Humvees, excepting them from noble but mortal nation-building excursions.
I say, let them eat chips. All of human evolution, from the hide scraper to genetically engineered soybeans, has been driving against one singular problem: having enough to eat. Frequent famines kept the human population within an order of magnitude for millenia. It was only through the wonders of industrial agriculture and international trade that we were finally able to fill our bellies and fill the earth with humans.
Now we finally have enough. Enough to fatten our children to levels that would please even the most solicitous grandmother. No more does she cry, “I guess you don’t like my rolls any more, you only ate twelve.” Yes, our children are chunky. They’re out of shape. They wheeze going up the stairs (if they even know what stairs are). But in most cases, they will live long enough to reproduce, which from nature’s point of view is really the point of it all. We finally have enough–and all we can do is complain.
Besides, if Michelle Obama wants to change our children’s lives, she’ll have to go further than distributing certificates praising them for the number of chin-ups they can do. Our children live in cities. They can’t go outside–too dangerous. They are chauffeured to every destination. They sit in school from infancy to adulthood learning how to pass tests–so they can spend their lives sitting in offices. Recess, PE, and summer vacation are all on the wane. You’re not going to get rid of television, video games, smartphones, junk food, cities, cars, or cheap corn unless you take a great leap backward (which might actually work; I don’t think child obesity was much of a problem in Stalin’s Russia).
Instead of using obesity as yet another reason to ramp up an expensive government program–in other words, to spend some more money on ourselves–we should see it as a sign of that hoary old sin, gluttony. The extra calories our kids consume could go a long way toward fattening up the less fortunate. It would be a reversal of the old “children are starving in Africa” routine–instead of getting children to pick up the fork, we would be teaching them to put it down. Maybe if our civilization learned to take a little less, we wouldn’t be so eager to let our young people be dismembered for the sake of control over sugar plantations, banana farms, and oil fields. In the meantime, be proud of your fat children. Bear them joyfully into public with a smile on your face, knowing that you are one successful organism.
