Stephen Downes

During a fortnight in California from which I’ve just returned, I watched Barack Obama’s televised addresses several times. Formal or informal, they are brilliant pieces of sensible communication. I’ll say something silly, probably, but predict that he will be not only the best but the most important president the USA will have.
But his biggest and most expensive job is tackling American obesity. He said it himself the other night — very tactfully, too. Broadening American health insurance will be much more costly than any other aspect of the nation’s budget, he admitted. Much more costly than operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and paying for any other security issues. But it was so important it needed to be done. And very cleverly and delicately he urged his compatriots and their employers to start to take responsibility for their overweightness and unfitness. (And the thought also overwhelmed me that, if Americans did lose weight, billions and billions of joules of energy will be lost in heat and unproductive exercise rather than making things or providing services.)
At base, of course, American obesity is the most obvious and malign effect of the lure of greed. And I don’t mean greed for food: greed for money by American food processors is the culprit. It’s hard to find processed food without sugar in the United States. The breakfast cereals are a disgrace — they are all appallingly sugary. Kids’ strollers have attachments in which to insert fast food and fast drinks, and at Universal Studios on Saturday everyone was eating crap as they staggered along. A young couple spooned up oversize versions of hundreds and thousands from the cute plastic containers in which they are sold. No one seems to drink anything but buckets of proprietary ’soda’ (as they call it), and serving sizes in general need to be reduced by at least a third. (Restaurants all serve from the same restricted list of dishes, mainly steaks and hamburgers accompanied by mountains of chips.)
Obama has his work cut out, because the greedy food manufacturers aren’t going to relent in their policy of feeding the nation saccharin crap. And isn’t it so cynical of them! Here’s a country without a discernible food culture, and the appalling food manufacturing giants have jumped into the vacuum with the sole aim of making massive profits by appealing to the most exploitable (sugar and fat receptive) parts of the palate. Bugger the dire consequences!
President Obama ought to look at taxing sugars and fats in processed foods. No one would disagree that they are dangerous — perhaps as dangerous as cancer-causing agents in tobacco, and taxing the latter has played an important role in curbing smoking. America needs to curb eating in general and eating badly in particular, and making fresh food at least as, if not more, cheap than processed rubbish has to be an important part of the offensive.