I think all your points are excellent. Our entire American system is built for production and consumption and to keep the pedestrians and any other non-producers out of the way. You are right about our availability to food being limited, too, even if of our own doing. Whereas Cambodians have to put in significant effort to find and afford junk food, Americans have to put in extra effort, time, and money for healthy food. It’s opposite! SE Asians are in their predicament because of lack of money/development. We are in our predicament because we have overindulged in tastier, faster, cheaper, chemically-enhanced food alternatives; the healthy options have been marginalized. Now, we’ve boxed ourselves into being a “Fast Food Nation.” Fast food products thrive, while healthy foods sit on shelves and expire worthless.

As Americans, a land of individuality and liberty, it is difficult to face the idea that we aren’t fully responsible for our choices. You mentioned it, that the marketing is engineered to manipulate our behaviors. Compound that with the engineered food, full of additives containing zero nutritional benefit, but affecting insulin levels, tricking our bodies into feeling hungry after eating an enormous amount, and overall messing up our physiology, and you have a recipe for a national bodyweight crisis. If we were all Michael Phelps, we could get away with it, but our work and social lives are so sedentary that it’s too easy to get fat fast. Eating healthily and staying fit takes enormous willpower. I have the time and energy to exercise much more now that I’m unemployed, but I’m still susceptible to all the junk food I mentioned in the post. I’m even looking forward to breakfast at McDonald’s, getting a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, an egg mcmuffin, and an order of hotcakes. How messed up is this? I haven’t had any McDonald’s meals since very early June (though I have eaten some soft serve ice creams occasionally) and I am now craving it more and more with my impending return to the US.

Beyond just the products that are available, we have shorter and shorter lunch periods at work to boost productivity (i.e. people working more for less money to produce more goods at a lower cost) which really helps drive the fast food market. If I have a 30 minute lunch break, I’m not going to head home and have a nice meal. I’m going to dash to McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King, etc, or the vending machine. Maybe I’ll bring a sandwich, but man does that get old. Eventually you want to eat something hot. In Europe, an hour and half for lunch was not uncommon. It included real food and a glass of wine.

Then there’s the architecture. Many folks live in the burbs and we don’t build sidewalks anymore. If I go to a shopping area, I have to dart through 5 lanes of traffic to go from Books a Million to Kmart. It’s not designed for walking. Right now where I live, I need to walk 2.5 miles along a heavily trafficed road with no sidewalks to get a gallon of milk. I’m going to drive. If there was a nice walk way along the bayou, I’d probably walk, or at least bike. It just isn’t designed that way.

Mrs. Big Mac, I try to blame Mr. Big Mac for all my problems. For starters, he has negatively influenced my waistline and opinions on counter-zombie security measures. Eating lunch with him usually means buffets, which means overeating. In fact, I’ve been dreading (and looking forward to) going to an Indian lunch buffet in S’port if I make it there.