Gluttony

I don’t know about you, but every year, I spend the entire month of December eating. By January, as a result, I am generally contemplating Gluttony, a sin that is actually one of the Seven Deadlies, as opposed to all the sins I have invented for journalistic purposes.

When I wake up each January with a holiday-food hangover, I reproach myself for my gourmandish excesses, as well as for whatever other Deadlies I have committed (Sloth being my personal favorite, especially in winter). But this year, it has begun to occur to me that as far as Gluttony goes, I am guilty, but with an explanation: if I were living in a culture that bombarded people with images of flowers, I would probably be a horticulturalist; if America constantly plied me with concerti, I would be a violinist; if cats were advertised on TV as often as foods, I would have shared my home with a hundred felines in the past decade instead of merely five or six.

In other words, if I eat constantly throughout the winter months, pausing briefly at the break of the New Year to chide myself for my insatiable need for chocolate, then digging my spoon back into a second helping of Rocky Road, it is not my fault.

Unlike me, my dog Henry is relatively abstemious. When served a meal, he sniffs it with suspicion and then eats grudgingly. Often, he does a strange thing: he leaves his bowl without finishing what’s in it.

It can be argued that this lack of enthusiasm is because his appallingly healthy meals contain a holistic green powder made from, among other ingredients, coconut, cranberries, and rosemary. But it seems far more likely that for some weird evolutionary reason, he stops eating when he’s had enough.

When I, on the other hand, begin to feel full during a holiday meal, this does not even slow me down, nor will it prevent me from stuffing down desserts, after-dinner mints, postprandial cheeses, and whatever anyone’s got going.

Years ago, I slightly knew a guy named Philip who liked to talk about the upcoming food shortages. Philip was a fellow of mournful countenance, and it didn’t surprise me at all to learn that he worked part-time as a clown. When he talked about these shortages, he had a fervent tone, as if he were looking forward to them. I took Philip’s sad-clown message to heart, and since then, I have regarded eating as a temporary condition.

And this makes me hungry.

Recently, it occurred to me that this approach to food is probably a form of eating disorder, and that it is not just me but our entire country that suffers from it. We live to eat, stuffing ourselves with enormous portions of deep-fried empty calories while perpetually trying to lose weight, and as a result, we are BIG people, in huge vehicles that belch our disgusting vapors into the air. When things get truly out of hand, we have our stomachs stapled shut and start all over again.

It appears that the current rash of American obesity (a “modern day epidemic”1) can be traced to the popularity of dieting. According to The Washington Post (“Chewing the Fat: Morsels from Dieting History,”2) American dieting began in 1864 with the publication of casket-maker William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence.

Concerns about weight ramped up in the early 1900s with a rash of such popular weight-loss measures as calorie counting, sweat packs, rainwater douches, and the ever-popular excessive-mastication.

In the 1960s, which began with the founding of Overeaters Anonymous, diets proliferated, from the sensible Weight Watchers to the desperately-glamorous Stillman, Atkins, Scarsdale, Pritikin, Cambridge, and Beverly Hills diets. In 1999, the Atkins diet, which had fallen from favor, re-emerged and spawned a host of imitators. (Note: According to www.snopes.com, Dr. Atkins did not, as is commonly supposed, die of a heart attack induced by his diet, but from head injuries sustained in a fall.3)

Sure, my reasoning here may be a classic case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc4 fallacy, but look at the evidence: one minute America becomes obsessed with dieting and then the next minute, the entire country is in an advanced state of bloat.

At around the same time dieting became popular and Philip the Clown started talking about food shortages, it was widely rumored that the world was soon going to run out of fossil fuels. The energy crises of the 1970s caused Americans to panic, which created a demand for smaller cars; we went on an energy diet, cutting way back on those oil calories. When the crisis blew over, though certainly not because of any sudden increase in our resources (unless an intelligently-designing God had decided to install some additional fossils in the earth), we started gorging ourselves on larger vehicles again. Like our bodies, our cars expanded until they would no longer fit into the parking spaces at our endless chain of malls.

Our Gluttony is the primary reason we beat up Iraq: to try to take their oil—thereby causing the very oil shortage that the war was ostensibly supposed to prevent. (I’d suspect that this shortage was a deliberate strategy to facilitate record profits for the oil companies, but the Bush administration doesn’t seem to have given the war that degree of forethought.)

In other words, whenever Americans fear that there might be a shortage of something—gas, oil, or hot apple pie—we develop an uncontrollable craving for it, then yoyo between dieting and consuming it in vast quantities. The condition of self-denial and the sense of deprivation it brings about, the scarcity-model of human existence, provokes Gluttony, the very thing it is designed to prevent. And that leads to obesity—and to tragic, unwinnable, unsustainable, and unconscionable war.

But if the purpose of the war was to sustain our connection to Iraq’s oil supply, it isn’t going well. According to Professor Juan Cole, we can neither successfully withdraw our troops from Iraq nor leave them there.5 George W. Bush has screwed things up for us pretty good, and we’ll all be in for some serious stomach-stapling when the war bankrupts us, Iraq kicks us out and takes back its oil, and no one else in the world is speaking to us. And when the real fuel shortage gets going post-Peak Oil, we’ll be walking to work from those distant suburbs, which will certainly burn off the unwanted pounds.

Pass the Rocky Road.

(Footnotes)
1 USA Today
www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-03-24-childrens-health_x.htm
2 The Washington Post (October 12, 1999).
3 For a discussion of Atkins’ death certificate, see www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/atkinsmed1.html.
4 “If, then therefore, because.” Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
5 On The Al Franken Show, Air America (Progressive Talk 1260), December 8, 2005.

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