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When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden | 1, 2, 3
To Die For
 IVE MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACKS, the Fox network broadcast the first installment of The Glutton Bowl. It was exactly what it sounded like: an eating contest from the world's biggest pigs. Who wants to marry a Frigidaire? And it was widely laughed off or admired because OR ELSE THEY WIN!
We just don't get it. We cannot, for the life of us, figure out why a world where half the people go to bed hungry every night would find such a thing rude -- the equivalent of standing in front of a homeless guy with a sandwich and tossing it onto a passing garbage truck, instead of leaving it for him in the dumpster.
We not only waste an extraordinary amount of food, we also play with it and prevent it from being grown. We wrestle in Jell-O while poorer nations' exotic dancers are forced to square off in mud. Our rnindset is "If you've got it, flaunt it" -- not "if you've got it, share it." And we pretend being religious makes us moral and charitable.
But the charitable don't gorge for fun while others forage for scraps. Whatever happened to "there are people starving in China"?
Hamburger ads say "If it doesn't get all over the place, it doesn't belong in your face" -- and that's a selling point. We shop with forklifts. We eat giant food off of giant plates. We have a national holiday where we stuff food into other food.
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Hamburger ads say "If it doesn't get all over the place, it doesn't belong in your face" -- and that's a selling point. We shop with forklifts. We eat giant food off of giant plates. We have a national holiday where we stuff food into other food. We demand food immediately, and in the car, so we can eat, shop, and pollute the atmosphere all at the same time. We eat on planes, trains and automobiles and everywhere in between. We even take our wife out to a nice Italian meal before shooting her in the head -- allegedly.
Even our poor people are fat.
Food is so abundant here people staple their stomach shut so they won't kill themselves from gorging on it -- and then, of course, this being America, are afforded the kind of reception normally reserved for somebody who'd been shot down behind enemy lines, for their "courage" and "discipline." Roseanne tried the procedure without success, but that's because cows have five stomachs.
By the way, whatever happened to the old-fashioned way of losing weight: liposuction and months of nonstop freebasing?
America represents less than 5% of the world's population, yet we consume 30% of its resources. We are bogarting the earth. We could feed the world with just the garnish off our plates, and yet we pay farmers not to grow crops. We actually produce more than enough grain to feed every person on earth, but the part of it we don't let rot to keep prices up we feed to our livestock so we can enjoy meaty, inefficient diets that sap our resources, deteriorate our organs and pollute more groundwater than industry.
And make no mistake, it is about the poverty. Many times I've heard the argument, "the 9/11 hijackers were not poor," and many of them weren't. But that doesn't mean poverty isn't a root cause of terrorism. Hungry people tend to follow the ideology of those willing to feed them and resent those who don't. Desperate, poor young Muslim men in many countries are sponsored by wealthy Saudi Arabia, which is guided by the fanatical Wahhabi sect, to attend madrasses, which are hotbeds of Muslim fanaticism and anti-American indoctrination. They go for the room and board, they stay for the hate.
Of course, we'll probably beat them to killing us, because that's what gluttony does to people. It kills them. There's a reason why the top-selling prescription drugs in America are all different chemical elixirs for ulcers, bloating, indigestion, high cholesterol -- because no one ever says to Americans, "Maybe you should change your diet." There's money in eating badly, and there's money in the pills that put out the fires set by eating badly.
Cardiovascular disease is our number-one killer; cancer is number two; diabetes is up 40% in the past decade, and American adults have a 61% obesity rate. Even kids here are fat little eating machines -- half of them look like Pugsly. And why not, schools teach acceptance above all: "Love Your Body Day." How about a "Delaying Gratification for Future Well-being Day"?
It is a terrible irony, not lost I'm sure on many of our most fervid haters, that we are dying of over-consumption, and they of under-consumption. As a great comedian once said, if only Mama Cass had shared her sandwich with Karen Carpenter, there'd be two more singers alive today.
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