“Big is Back!”? This emblazoned above an enormous image of, you guessed it a hamb…excuse me…sirloin burger. Now a third of a pound, no less. But I look around and I still see obesity in America everywhere I go. It walks around in all ages. And now “big is back”?
Is this a new trend? I’m noticing that the usual suspects contributing to obesity and poor health have crept back to center stage as you walk through the door of your local grocery store, convenience store, ‘superstore’. All those packages and cans full of sugar, salt, high fructose corn syrup, food coloring and a multitude of ingredients you can’t pronounce in bright shiny non-recyclable packaging. These often conveniently located adjacent to the shopping carts and baskets. You have to circumnavigate these promontories to get to produce, dairy, fish…
No longer can healthy shopping be simplified for people by the old rule of “shop the perimeter”. Some of the worst culprits have infiltrated the perimeter and are now stocked at pride of place, front and center.
It isn’t always the what, sometimes it is the quantity. Too much even of a good thing is, well, too much. I refer to an online ad I saw recently advertising “healthy snacks”. Some of the examples were not too terrible themselves, but the images were gross in their quantity: piled high and practically overflowing a dinner plate. To my mind this is not a snack, this is overindulgence. These “snacks” were shown in quantities that are more than I could ever eat in one meal.
And then, there were the plastic ‘jars’ of cheese puffs I just saw conveniently placed right at the checkout aisle. A single container was the same height as from the floor to my knee (I’m 5’7″ and my legs are not stubby either) and the girth well it seemed almost as big around as the old traditional water cooler. Not only that, the cheese puffs inside were oversized giants almost an inch in diameter.
I’m not sure who comes up with the packaging, marketing, advertising but I’m pretty sure they’d all earn a seat on Douglas Adams’s “Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B”.
For those of you who may have forgotten (or may never have had the treat of reading or watching The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), Golgafrincham was a planet, once home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The Poets made up terrifying stories of impending doom that drove their leaders to develop a plan for the evacuation of the planet. The plan was that they would build three “Ark” ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B ship would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitizers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Lou and I frequently point out people who “belong on the spaceship”…