We had a bit of excitement over at "Fat Boy Thin Man" central today. Jennifer Larue Huget, "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy" column at the Washington Post, with whom I've spoken a couple of times, posted a query in The Check-up, a feature on the paper's website asking, "Is food addiction real?"

The Oxford scholar Christopher Fairburn would have to be considered one of the world's foremost authorities on eating disorders. His bio includes:  twice a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences; a governor of the Wellcome Trust, the largest international biomedical research foundation; recipient of the 2002 Outstanding Researcher Award by the Academy for Eating Disorders.

Do I have hope? Yes, I have hope because, as Michael Pollan wrote in "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," what it means to say that something is “unsustainable” is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply.

The speaker is Joan Dye Gussow, "the mother of the sustainable food movement," as ID'd by writer Paula Crossfield, setting up her interview on Grist (and, previously, on  Civil Eats).

Jean Fain, 55, of Concord, Mass., is a longtime friend and colleague, though it is coincidental that we both ended up professionally concerned and active in the fight against obesity. When we met, we were working at the Boston Globe.

Though I beat her to the presses by a month or two, Jean is a whirlwind of activity. In addition to her book “The Self-Compassion Diet, A Step-by-Step Program to Lose Weight with Loving-Kindness,” Jean is a psychotherapist in private practice and a teaching associate at the Cambridge (Mass.) Health Alliance.

I recently asked her to engage in an interview form I enjoy, in which the questions, and answers, are 10 words or less. Please note: it’s not a strict rule, and I’ve done some editing as well.

The most current report by the World Health Organization estimates that in 2005:
* 400 million people in the world were obese,
* About 1.6 billion people 15 or older were overweight.
* At least 20 million kids under 5 were overweight.
WHO estimates that by 2015...
* About 2.3 billion people will be overweight.
* About 700 million will obese.
And, the planet groans.

From a recent Marion Nestle post: 

It is not an accident that five dollars at McDonald’s will buy you five hamburgers or only one salad. It is not an accident that the indexed price of fruits and vegetables has increased by 40% since the early 1980s, whereas the indexed price of sodas has decreased by 30%. Right now, agricultural policies support our present industrialized food system and strongly discourage innovation and consumption of relatively unprocessed foods.

For 3BL Media, the corporate social responsibility site, I wrote a column on the practice of some to frame the obesity problem solely as an issue of personal responsibility, without recognizing the responsibility of others. 

Dov Hirsch's interview with me on his show, "Crop To Cuisine," ran a week ago, but I'm only getting around to posting it today. In fact, I just listened to it myself and am very pleeased with their handling of my comments; I'm eager for you to hear it.

The interview commences about 8:30 into the show.

I started writing "Fat Boy Thin Man" more than six years ago, and though the timing was mine, not measured to the zeitgeist, even then I thought that it was coming at a good juncture in history. 

I was right then, but boy, the pace is picking up. "Mike and Molly," the sitcom in which the main characters meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, could hardly be a more mainstream example.

Another excerpt of findings by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, from its recent f.a.c.t.s. report on kids and eating.