The links no longer seem to work (five years is an internet eternity). Text that originally appeared as links appears below in blue.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/i>When presidential hopeful Barack Obama told Oregon<\/span>, \u201cWe can\u2019t\u2026eat as much as we want\u2026anymore,\u201d most rational people understood it as a consequence of energy conservation. After all, it was in the easy-to-understand context of<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t drive our<\/i> SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times,<\/i> whether we\u2019re living in a desert, or living in the tundra, and then just expect that every<\/i> other country\u2019s going to say okay, you guys just go ahead and keep on using 25% of the world\u2019s energy, even though you only account for 3% of the population.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n The Journal-Sentinel\u2019s Patrick McIlheran<\/span> saw \u201cWe can\u2019t eat as much as we want anymore\u201d and took it as a challenge.<\/p>\n In a piece for the New York Sun, the Milwaukee columnist finds a ridiculous straw man in that quote to wrestle against. He has a thing or two to he\u2019d like to say to those \u201cpeople \u2014 the kind you’d meet over the arugula bin at the food co-op in Hyde Park \u2014<\/i> [who] figure it needs to be said: It’s so embarrassing, what the Europeans must think of<\/i> our Land of the Larded. All those NASCAR yahoos are eating too much.\u201d <\/i>Some people can eat lots of food without being fat! Food shortages only happen in other countries! Restaurants have so much food that they can serve you sherbet! No liberal is going to tell Patrick McIlheran how much food he can eat. In fact, no liberal is going to stop Patrick McIlheran from eating tremendous amounts of food at an unnamed New York eatery right now<\/i>:<\/p>\n [T]he food came. And came and came, dish after dish. The lady running the place gave us sherbet, unbidden. She could barely find a place to set it. <\/i><\/p>\n Strictly speaking, it was too much food. But, I’m guessing, a veteran restaurateur could spot out-of-towners who had slumping, late-afternoon kids and figured that, on top of big portions, a little dessert would be welcome. Maybe she was cultivating repeat business. Maybe she just wanted us to think of her restaurant and her town as fondly as she did. I prefer to think the latter.<\/i><\/p>\n For that purpose, such oversized generosity was just right. That’s an old logic understandable to any reasonable person yet opaque to any calorie-rationing regulation ever written.<\/i><\/p>\n As he rightly states, some people can eat whatever they like without getting fat. And he\u2019s absolutely correct that some nice people have enough food that they will give you free sherbet with large purchases. McIlhearn\u2019s obesity plan, apparently, is for everybody to become people who can eat whatever they want without getting fat and know nice restaurant owners who give away food with large purchases. Sadly, that doesn\u2019t really address what Obama was saying. Food and energy usage are inextricably linked.<\/p>\n Fertilizer prices are tied to oil prices<\/span>; grain prices are tied to fertilizer prices; meat prices are tied to the feed prices tied to the grain prices. Crops for biofuels eat up farmland once used for food. The meat, lettuce and tomatoes in fast food hamburgers are so cheap because they are trucked from other countries.\u00a0 All that transportation takes gas – even when shipping food to nice people, or the lucky few with high metabolism.<\/p>\n Hidden in McIlhean\u2019s woeful mix-up of Obama\u2019s speech is an odd paranoia. Do arugula-types really see obesity as a redneck issue? Liberals love fat guys. There\u2019s Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy (may he soon recover) and Michael Moore and noted socialist wealth-distributor Santa Claus. McIlheran\u2019s governor here in Wisconsin continues to be a Democrat and we continue to be famously obese with our 34 types of fried cheese.<\/p>\n At the same time, a health-based battle of the bulge has been a major selling point for the Republican Party for quite a while. Eisenhower started the President\u2019s Council on Youth Fitness (now called The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports<\/span>). Mike Huckabee, who lost 110 pounds after being diagnosed with diabetes, featured losing weight in his health care plan as both a governor and a presidential candidate. Pat Robertson sells diet shakes<\/span>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s nearly impossible to imagine, as McIlheran does, that fat is a partisan debate. If anything, anti-obesity efforts would be a conservative issue. They are the trickledown economics of health care policy. Preventive measures like weight loss curb government health care spending. Should pro-lifers be correct, slimming down would chip away at the substantial increase in miscarriages caused by obesity. And the diet and exercise combo stresses that personal responsibility Republicans seem so keen on.<\/p>\n Though it\u2019s unintentionally so, all efforts to tighten the nation\u2019s collective belt are bipartisan. Obama\u2019s platform, like Huckabee\u2019s and Eisenhower\u2019s and pretty much everybody\u2019s, is to give every American the chance to save themselves should they choose to – a mix of education on healthy practices and increased access to healthy foods. Like Obama\u2019s actual speech, this is not a controversial enough premise to argue against. There is no pro-\u201cgive people diabetes even if they don\u2019t want it\u201d lobby, no anti-\u201creduce government spending through voluntary programs\u201d activists lining the streets of Washington. No one is trying to ration McIlheran\u2019s food. But someone might want to ration him some logic.<\/p>\n Maybe they could spoon feed it to him, with sherbet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The links no longer seem to work (five years is an internet eternity). Text that originally appeared as links appears below in blue. \u00a0When presidential hopeful Barack Obama told Oregon, \u201cWe can\u2019t\u2026eat as much as we want\u2026anymore,\u201d most rational people understood it as a consequence of energy conservation. After all, it was in the easy-to-understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeuchill.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}