I'm finally reading "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book in which she and her family eat for a year only with local sources, save for one personal exception each. As I've done with other books, I thought I'd blog along.

No cashier held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of the genuine conpiracy in this historical sceme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways simlar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime. [Page 15]

Almost anything I could say in response would be redundant, so mostly, I just wanted to share that someone else, someone famous, is saying it, too.

But I do have a gentle rejoinder to the victimhood implied in "The perfect crime." I do think that what food technologists, marketers, and their minions do is uncool in the extreme. They are part of the problem. But if forces are out to get us, we have the responsibility to fight back, and we have been unconscionably slow to do so. For better than 40 years, we purchase what they sell, while we let them purchase our political system. We have responsibility, too.