I agree with Food Network talker Alton Brown, who tells Ana Marie Cox in the Sunday New York Times:

“I do think that most of us need to actually take responsibility for what we’re putting in our mouths. Obesity is not a disease.” And: "The second that our society starts thinking that shoveling Big Macs into our face is a disease then we’re done, we’re done as a culture.”

So it turns out that when I wrote yesterday about the Jane Brody squib in the Times yesterday, referred there by my friend Ron-the-voracious-reader, I had actually been referred slightly elsewhere, to the mainbar of what Brody wrote. She was reporting the release of a series of reports in the British medical periodical The Lancet that address the growing obesity epidemic.

The NYT looks at vegetable-eating habits in America, and the trends are not good.

Quoting a study by market researchers the NPD Group, it said that "the number of dinners prepared at home that included a salad was 17 percent; in 1994, it was 22 percent. At restaurants, salads ordered as a main course at either lunch or dinner dropped by half since 1989, to a mere 5 percent."

I misunderstood when I heard about this story, or the person telling me about it did. It speaks of a diet, and of course that usually means a temporary change in food regimen, but in this case, the reference to diet is about clothing.

The way it was explained to me, people who'd lost weight had chosen to stick with six garments only until their weight had stabilized, so that they didn't end up with a range of sizes for the long run.

I see now that this makes no sense, but what it recalled for me were the days when I was dropping from 365 to about 200, where I remain today 20 years later. Except for a couple of size 64 sweatpants that I bought (slightly oversized for what I needed) — while I was in rehab, I got rid of every stitch I owned, and eventually disposed of everything I'd bought to replace it on the way down, because that stuff no longer fit, either.

What I'd really rather say is, "John Tierney, bonehead," or worse. But I'm going to control myself. Tierney is a New York Times columnist, which is an enviable perch, but Tierney wastes the advantage by relying on old-paradigm thinking. What prompts this criticism is his column "10 things to scratch from your worry list," in which he provides fodder for all those fogies, like himself, who think all this climate talk is a bunch of hooey.

Scientist James Hansen has been raised almost to sainthood for his early sounding of the climate-change alarm and for his adamance since. He testified before Congress Monday on the 20-year anniversary of his global climate change testimony, saying roughly what he has been saying all along.