英美报刊阅读教程中级精选本 第五版 端木义万lesson 5 Food and Obesity

Lesson5 Food and Obesity

Being fat is be coming the norm for Americans.As it will soon be come in this country, I have seen the future, and it's extra large.

By Joan Smith

A friend who happens to be both American and a superb cook-his poulet de Bresse en deuil is one of the most memorable dishes I have tasted--called me a couple of days ago,enthusing about a lecture he had just at ended.The thesis,he said,was that the human body has changed irrevocably over the last quarter of a century and that the physical environment—chairs,beds, airline seats-will gradually adapt to accommodate the new shape.It is,of course,in the US, where my friend no longer lives,that this evolutionary experiment is most advanced;for years now, millions of people have been gorging themselves on vast helpings of fast food, with the consequence that about 60 percent of the population is overweight.

According to Greg Critser, author of Fat Land：How Americans Became the Fattest People in the Word, none of this has happened by accident. Critser argues that the challenge to the US food industry in the 1970s was that the population was growing more slowly than the food supply, so people had to be persuaded to change their eating habits. Fast food, invented after the Second World War as an affordable way of getting families to eat together, became a means of selling surplus fat and sugar to the far-from-unwilling masses. This is a social revolution on a grand scale as scarcity, with which most human beings have had to struggle throughout history, has given way to an apparently permanent state of plenty.

It may also help to explain why the magician David Blaine, suspended without food in a Perspex box beside Tower Bridge,has such a grip on people's imaginations.In an astonishingly short period of time, starvation has metamorphosed from a threat to a spectacle, and families are turning out en mass eat weekends to see how his hunger strike is going. For the fifth of the British population who are obese, and unused to doing without food for more than a few hours, the notion of someone giving it up for 44 days is unthinkable, some normal-size people have turned up to mock, throwing egg, cooking food and even trying to cut off the water supply to the hung American. Perhaps this is the point, that there are so few starving Americans in the world, which makes his self-imposed ordeal appear ludicrously self-indulgent.

Yet it is possible to take Critser’s argument a stage further and suggest that millions of Americans are trapped between two industries, fast food and slimming, which enjoy a cosily symbiotic relationship. Research by a fast-food chain showed that what customers cared about was neither taster nor quality but portion size; what they have come to expect from food, and what their neighbours are beginning to want as well-obesity has increased by 158 per cent in Mexico in a decade, since fast food outlets began to replace the traditional diet-is a feeling of being stuffed to the gills. Cooking has become a spectator sport, something to watch famous people do on telly, as the populations of affluent countries rely increasingly on supermarket meals and takeaways. For many people, eating has become an addiction rather than a pleasure, and going on a diet merely replaces on morbid habit with another.

In the circumstances, it is not really surprising that people are confused and