Big Man On Campus: Week 3 – Weapons of Mass Delicious November 2, 2009

Oh, what a First World problem we have, ladies and gentlemen! A billion people starving to death and this guy goes on and on about ingesting too many calories. Maybe if this rotund bastard ate half as many avocado rolls and gave the money he saved to some African dictator to fritter away on alligator skin AK-47 holsters and Ricin, the world would be a better place.

See what I did there? I trivialized the problems of an entire continent in a single sentence. It wasn’t even that hard to do. What is hard is to keep the static down long enough to fix problems instead of pointing fingers.

That’s what we’re here to do, like a hilariously paunchy Mohandas Ghandi. Keep that in mind, fat-challenged folk. We don’t bother you about your elbows being sharp like knives, step off our many chins.

That said: fat people, your fatness is only mostly your fault! It’s also sort of your food’s fault!

See what I did there? I made you think I was being contentious and then stuffed an accusatory finger into the face of Ronald McDonald. But it’s true, the food around us is by-andlarge pretty terrible. If I had a nickel for everything I eat in a day that could contribute to my contracting cancer, or a dime for every unsustainable foodstuff I buy, I could pay for gastric bypass surgery and stop writing this column. But sadly, carcinogens ain’t currency.

We live in a culture of bad eating. This is not to say what we’re eating isn’t awesome; I defy a vegetarian to prove to me that a spinach and pine nut vinaigrette salad is more delicious than a rack of fall-offthe- bone pork ribs in a honey garlic sauce so thick you could use it to, well, eat ribs with. But nobody in their right mind would think that the gratuitous consumption of meat, sugar, and salt is good for you. Prophet Atkins tried that and died of cardiac arrest. That’s not a joke, it’s just funny. The secret is that hardly anyone thinks meat and candy translate into ripe old age. Our options are just a little limited.

High fructose corn syrup, processed sugars, trans-fat, MSG, Little Ceaser’s Hot-and- Readys, salt-water taffy in all the colours of the rainbow, Pez. . . . The things that are worst for us are available, cheap, and delicious. Bad food is pushed onto us from the powers that be, coating us in a film of manufactured suck we just cannot ignore, like a culinary Miley Cyrus. Our food supply has been designed for efficiency and in so doing we feed poisons the things that feed us. My body is under assault and the chemicals in these foods still have not given me sweet claws that I may bolster with adamantium.

Organic is a sham. You pay through the nose and have to choose which couple billion or so more people on Earth you dislike most and want to starve (you better watch out, Switzerland). My pathetic undergrad bank balance can’t suffer the hit of market fresh produce and cruelty-free meats. My hair will likely fall out on it’s own and I could care less to speed that process up by not eating anything with a heartbeat. Things taste best if they at one time had a nickname and friends to mourn their passing.

You’re surrounded, brothers of the blubber. Your food supply has gotten so far outside your control that you can’t help but do harm no matter what you do. Whether to yourself or others, eating is now an act of cruelty. It’s a tough choice between Jimmy Dean’s Sausage Wrapped Chocolate Sausage Rounds and tofu, and likely will be until cannibalism becomes socially acceptable.

Holy shit. Cannibalism! I just solved all our problems!