Most people around here aren’t fat. There are a few who are obviously obese, especially children who have become addicted to sugar and white flour convenience foods sold at the mall, but in general, Asians have escaped the frozen pizza/french fry school of eating that has fattened so many in the West. Here, people eat noodle soup for breakfast. Their idea of a big carbohydrate pig-out involves fried rice.

If you examine photographs of Americans taken before the mid 1960’s, we all looked like this, too. Look at any archival footage from the early fifties, and people are positively skinny. Men in their forties had twenty-eight inch waists. Now the average middle-aged man has a forty-two-inch waist, and he’s not someone you’d call “fat.”

Zillions of words have been written about it, and it all comes back to what we consider “food.” Much more effort is spent packaging foods than in creating good foods. Much more of our supermarket shopping dollar is spent on the colorful packaging than on the item itself. If you took everything in a typical American supermarket and distilled it to its essence, you’d end up with a pond of corn sweeteners, a pile of white flour, and few smaller piles of chemicals, and a parking lot full of colorfully printed cardboard.