Last time I wrote, I decried the stain of Big Food’s insistence that “personal responsibility” should be the only standard of conduct, when it works its ass off to ensure it won’t be held responsible for its actions. It’s scum-suckingly low.

But here’s another part of its duplicity:

They.

Don’t.

Mean.

It.

It is the only logical conclusion.

The Salt, NPR's food blog, carried the news today that McDonald's will beging posting calorie counts of its products, which is definitely news. This is what happens when groups like Corporate Accountability International organize the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who care about nutrition to apply enough pressure that even the most prominent corporations choose to change.

I’ve visited this area of thought before, but it bears frequent discussion: Corporate — and corporate shill — calls for “personal responsibility” are nothing less than gross insults against reasonable people.

if a school district wasn’t using crossing guards and parents learned this, how long would it be before the outcry made sure that crossing guards were on duty?

If noxious chemicals were being left out in the chemistry labs and parents found out, how long would it be before safeguards and monitoring was in place? Would the teacher(s) responsible even keep their jobs?

And yet, when schools serve children meals after meals of crap — pizza, fries every day, ketchup as a vegetable, whatever — the knee-jerk is to blame the schools.

You may have noticed — and more likely not — I placed an addendum in my recent post about having gained weight, to identify the amount in question as about five pounds. Could even be 10 — I haven’t weighed myself with any regularity for years. What I know is that my clothing still fits, but a paunch that had left has now returned.

I'm now a "health hero," at least in the lingo of the blog at Re-Body Weight Loss Nutrition. Next up: The Nobel, for sure.

Regardless, I'm pleased how the interview went, and with the presentation they made, and so I link to it.

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that I have added professional speaking to my quiver of strategies to carry the messages I wove into "Fat Boy Thin Man." In addition to the little notice I added in the upper left of this page, I've also established a space at fatboythinman.com to extol my ever-so-considerable virtues (please note my wink in that reference).

An Ottawa joint puts out an ad with a photo of its burger and the line, "Help us fight anorexia."

"Wow," I think, "what tone-deafness. They're making light of disease to make a buck! Who does that?"

Especially on the level of individuals, perhaps the biggest stumbling block to food addiction’s acceptance as a legitimate problem with specific remedies is that most folks don’t want to think they’re that bad off.

”Sure, I’ve developed a bit of a paunch, maybe, but I just have to be a bit more careful. But an addict? No way.” Certainly that sentiment is true for many people, but in a nation where two out of every three adults are overweight or obese, it may not be true for as many people who would say it.

Very rarely have I turned over this space to another writer, and this is the first time I've done it for someone I don't know. The following came to essentially via a "cold call," and I'm still not sure if publishing is the right choice — the circumstances raise my radar about potential misuse of this space by means of some scam I haven't caught onto yet. But, I haven't caught onto anything, and though I don't feel passionately about the content, it does belong at least in the neighborhood and doesn't flout the blog's principles, as far as I can tell.