Ahh, it's nice to see predestination breaking out into the open.

I have more sympathy for Mrs. McArdle's arguments. Two points:

1) She is not arguing that the poor are morally inferior; she is arguing that their actions should be judged, just as those of the rich are, rather than ascribed to external factors. A world in which the poor are judged and found to be inferior is still preferable to one where they are dismissed as overgrown children.

2) Both you and Mrs. McArdle leave open, but do not explicitly state, the possibility that the poor are fat not by causation (in either direction), but by joint correlation with a common underlying cause. When an observer selects a set of poor people for study, he is selecting for some set of emotional characteristics in the process. This makes it impossible to tell whether whatever effects he may observe are caused by poverty, or by some deeper cause.

1) If Person A lives out in the country to get to the nearest dentist and Person B has to walk across the street, are they both equally culpable for the result when the requirements were completely different? If Person A gets an hour lunch or can have his lunch made for him, are his actions therefore morally/ethically equivalent to someone whose apartment doesn't have a kitchen or who has roughly 15 minutes a day they aren't working, riding the bus, or taking care of the kids? I don't support the view that the poor are victims, necessary, but I do acknowledge that they have hurdles that I have never had to jump.

2) I think that there are a multitide of reasons, some circumstantial (it's more convenient for the wealthy to eat healthy than the poor), some judgmental (eating right/wrong), and some by other factors (such as ambition and education). But I don't think it is, as Jane suggests, as simple as the poor being on equal footing with the rich and just having poorer judgment.

Did you really get the impression she thinks "the non-poor are morally superior by birth" from that paragraph? I think it's more insulting to treat the fat-and-poor as stupid & doomed than to acknowledge that even the poor are capable of putting healthy food on the table for cheap.

The problem is that it's hard (for ANYONE) to spend more time (and possibly money) cooking healthy food when fast food is so available, cheap, and pleasurable (possibly even addictive to some extent). The non-poor are more able to eat at restaurants with "real food", but cooking at home is cooking at home, and can be done for pennies if some time is devoted to it.

Linus,
It's possible that I am indeed being unfair to Jane, but she dismisses every possible reason that the poor are more obese, which is why I threw predeterminism in there. If you're reading me as saying that "they're doomed" then you're entirely misreading me. I am acknowledging that it is more difficult for the poor, but nowhere did I say it was impossible (the only place I used the word "doomed" was in reference to what Jane was saying). I take her argument that the rich are rich and the poor are poor and the rich are going to do better than the poor because... well, they are who they are cause it's not about having more money. I'm saying that not having as much disposable income has quite a bit to do with it. To suggest that it's just as easy for the rich and the poor to eat and behave right, but the poor are doing worse, and that they're equally morally/ethically culpable, than there is some sort of moral argument at work here about the rich and the poor that is quite unfavorable to the poor. I don't claim to know the solution, but I'm not quite as quick to dismiss it as "the poor just happen to make bad decisions more than the above-poor and it has nothing to do with education, capitalism, or our society." I find it interesting that you seem to take issue with the first somewhat anti-capitalist post I've had in a while.

I find it interesting too... :-)

BTW, I don't want to seem like I'm only here to disagree with you. It's the fact that we have similar goals, individually and for society, that makes it interesting for me to read about different approaches to reaching those goals.

But back to this topic...I thought Galt's focus was refuting the quote from the original NY Times article, and didn't feel the need for an alternate explanation. If I were to offer one myself, it would be a combination of things: lack of health education, additional cost of healthy restaurant foods or organic/specialty foods, and your lack-of-motivation-to-live-long point.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't think any individual in this country can blame anyone but themselves (or God) for being overweight, BUT it may be a little more difficult for the poor and I would support educational efforts directed specifically towards them. I would LOVE to see particularly unhealthy foods be taxed to pay for such programs, but how to implement such a tax is problematic. Even though fast food companies may not do anything illegal, I think they've had a profoundly negative effect on the health of Americans and wish they would transition to healthier, less-addictive foods.

I haven't really disagreed with anything that you've said thus far. Or Sammler, really. And I agreed with Galt on the whole, but not on the notion that everything can be reduced to "choice." Society makes some choices a lot easier than others. Those with less money have less insulation from these effects. While I don't agree with the NYT writer, I very much think that Jane glossed over any explanation that there might be a reason for the obesity disparity between rich and poor unrelated to the latter making poor choices for no other reason than cause they feel like it.

Like I said in my response to Sammler, I think there are a number of factors at play here. A lot of it has to do with poor judgment on the part of the poor (but I think it's worthwhile to point out why this lack of judgment exists: productive values of self-worth and ambition are not instilled into them... the "third cause" that Sammler eludes to), but some of it *is* environmental (society promotes and provides some of the wrong things most conveniently and the poor are less insulated from these come-ons).

So what to do about it? It's a good question. I think education is vital (part of the reason I took issue with Galt was that she seemed to me to be suggesting that the education was pointless cause they already know and besides are gonna eat bad anyway). And the older I get the more I think we have got to clean up school cafeterias and get rid of the vending machines (I never thought I'd say that...). Make eating unhealthy a little less convenient from the onset. Ideologically, I don't have a problem with a sin tax on bad foods, though I think it would be logistically very difficult to actually implement the same way we have sin taxes against alcohol and cigarettes.

But mostly, in my mind, it comes down to the values that we're neglecting to instill in our children. The "third cause," and to relieve Americans in general of the idea that "I can't do anything about it" (whatever 'it' is), which despite the blame-society impression I seem to be giving, I'm not a fan of at all.

But even if it all starts with the individual and the choices they make, I don't believe it entirely ends there. The libertarian in me believes that the government shouldn't have the power to act on behalf of our health (and the un-libertarian in me doesn't entirely disagree), but when we invite the government to pay for our healthcare, we give it a vested interest in our health and the power to do something about it. You cannot have one without the other.

Cultural! Cultural! What my mother had to deal with when she was a Houston public school teacher, and what's still a problem in many Mexican immigrant communities in Houston (and, likely, elsewhere, and in non-immigrant communities, etc.): the cultural idea that being grotesquely obese is desirable because it shows that you're well-off (i.e., you have money to be able to not starve). These dirt-poor families would send their kids to school with bags of pork rinds etc., sometimes instructing them to eat that instead of the free lunch program (when there was one), with the expressed goal of fattening them up.

No taxation is going to help if fatness is the goal, rather than just a side-effect, of eating habits.

Adrianne,
If specific cultural things like that can account for the gap, then I'll retract the entire post. I have my doubts as to whether that accounts for the total difference. Specific cultural factors like that should not be entirely overlooked, particularly in the area of nutrician education. Of course, the point at which they have the autonomy to set their own diet and whatnot is also the point at which the public education system is done with them!

No, it certainly won't account for the entire difference. Probably not even a majority of it. But it still shouldn't be overlooked.

Nor, for that matter, can one ignore the backlash to any attempts to teach people that their cultural ideals are unwise. See also: all those posters on college campuses by the anti-eating-disorder groups extolling african cultures where "fat is beautiful"!