Living to Eat

This weekend, the family soaked up some sun at our neighbourhood pool. I learned a couple of things.

First, the swim lessons my kids took this summer have done them a world of good. Watching my daughter, I couldn't believe that she was the same girl who started the school holidays with a floatie. Now, she throws herself off the diving board, head between her arms and legs like a frog behind her into the deep end of the pool. She is fearless. My son, has refined his stroke and now, he looks like the picture of grace instead of looking like the picture of one who is drowning. Achieving this tiny success has been good for his soul.

The other thing that struck me at the pool was the sheer size of most of the attendees. I don't mean this as some sort of sneering, looking-down-through-the-nose kind of thing, either. I just couldn't help but notice that most everyone, from the very, very, young to the middle-aged, were well beyond plump. I think the medical term is obese.

When I see an adult in that kind of shape, I always wonder what their story is because "there but for the grace of God" thing, you know? I'm in a good place these days but only because I entered my forties, had myself a mid-life crisis, experienced a few aged related signs of decay and decided to permanently change my lifestyle. I am ALWAYS just one nasty bout of PMS away from binging myself blind. I'm not kidding. The difference now is that when I stick my face into a tub of ice cream, I don't stay there for several months. And I won't add a silo full of rum, deep fried wings and a truckload of Starburst candies to the mix, either. I've spent most of my life yo-yo dieting and I'm not one to cast stones seeing as how my little glass house is pretty fragile.

But it bothers me when I see obese children. They just don't stand a chance. Marks and Spencer recently announced that they are now offering plus size clothing for toddlers, which is shocking to me only because it was a British retailer and not Wal-Mart, who adopted this idea first. The biggest threat to the health and welfare of western nations today is not some radical foreign entity but is found right here at home at the hands of Big Processed Food. If McDonald's, Kraft and General Mills are the princes, Monsanto is the king. It all starts with the corn and soybeans, kids.

I remember back when my daughter was just a baby learning to speak. We were in the car on our way home, trying to work our way through rush hour traffic. Both kids were tired, hungry and cranky. As we neared a set of lights, the familiar golden arches appeared out the window to the right hand side of the car. Olivia went crazy, pointing, babbling and finally, breaking down in tears as we passed without stopping. I was still several years away from understanding that a Happy Meal is a nutritional nightmare but something in my daughter's frenzied reaction to those iconic arches gave me pause. She couldn't yet form complete sentences but my daughter could say "french fry" with authority. It worried me. When I was a kid, fast food was a rare treat because we couldn't afford to eat out very often. Now, it seems that there are a lot of people that can't afford to eat in. There is something horribly wrong when it costs less to feed your family garbage than to nourish them with real, live, unprocessed, food. And the scariest thing of all is that it doesn't look like anything will change in the near future.