Someone Get Me a Fatburger

William Saletan, in Slate, takes on the anti-fat police.

The one thing you're not allowed to do in a culture war is win it, so we searched the mortality data for the next big menace [after tobacco, RvB]. The answer was as plain as the other chin on your face. Obesity, federal officials told us, would soon surpass tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death. They compared it to the Black Death and the Asian tsunami. They sent a team of "disease detectives" to West Virginia to investigate an obesity outbreak. Last month, the surgeon general called obesity "the terror within" and said it would "dwarf 9-11." [...]

To lower junk food to the level of cigarettes, its opponents must persuade you that it isn't really food. They're certainly trying. Soda isn't sustenance, they argue; it's "liquid candy." Crackers aren't baked; they're "engineered," like illegal drugs, to addict people. Last year, New York City's health commissioner asked restaurants to stop using trans fats, which he likened to asbestos.

If you think such arguments are over the top, you haven't read the recent op-ed in the Washington Post by a cardiologist, John Sotos, who posits, apparently seriously, that

"Food calories are so pervasively and inexpensively available in our environment that they should be regarded as a pollutant. Just as an asthmatic can’t help but inhale pollutants in the air all around him, we Americans cannot help but ingest the calories present in the environment all around us."

Over at consumerist.com, where "Shoppers bite back," they're not taking such foolishness without a heavy dose of sarcasm:

Yes, it certainly is narrow and self-serving to believe in the freedom to do something as simple as eat the food you want to eat without some busybody, hunched over with his entire forearm up his rectum, comparing you to an industrial spill and siccing the Hazmat team on you.

Touché.

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