So, I finally saw Super Size Me. Heidi and I have decided that our new diet will simply be watching 10 minutes periodically. If anything helps you fight off craving for food, this and perhaps Fast Food Nation are it.

I thought it was funny and informative without being too preachy (at least until the very end). I still think that there’s a level of personal responsibility that goes into dietary choices (the discussion with his girlfriend about being vegan touches on that in a very tangible way), but a lot of basic human greed is going into creating the obesity problems in this country.

Perhaps greed is too strong… maybe it’s just shortest-pathism. The shortest path to more profits is getting more money per purchase. Shortest path to convince consumers to part with cash it to give them more. The shortest path to getting more revenues in our schools is to raise funds directly (as opposed to raising taxes). The shortest path to do that is to partner with the food industry to allow Taco Bell and Pizza Hut to sell lunches and Coke and Pepsi to install vending machines. And so on and so on.

The school thing bugs me the most. As our own thoughts turn more and more to family and some day having kids, Heidi and I have been looking back at our own childhoods and thinking about how we ended up the (relatively) good adults that we are. During the movie we talked about what we both had for lunches. Heidi was on her school’s free lunch program and my mom made me a bagged lunch every day. Neither of us really were exposed to the Pizza Hut/Taco Bell phenomenon in schools, though my high school did get Pizza Hut my senior year or so. I also never had cash on me, except maybe a little bit for a soda if I stayed after school. My parents never really gave me an allowance and I didn’t work. So, the vending machines weren’t much temptation either.

Luckily for us, the West Hartford Public School system doesn’t seem to offer “brand” meals for lunch at the elementary level. If Heidi is still at K-O, our kids get to go there for free… let’s just say they don’t have the funding challenges that prompt schools to consider outside food vendors.

It would be an interesting little experiment to see whether there’s any correllation to the cities with the highest levels of childhood obesity and the cities that offer brand lunches (e.g. Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, etc.). Another interesting question would be to see whether there’s a correlation between those obesity levels and the districts that take federal lunch subsidies.