Do you remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? I had a moment like that today, when I read yesterday's column in the NYTIMES by Mark Bittman. His message is that the giantic deficit in the US economy amounts to a rounding error, compared with the Federal Budget's share of the cost of our lifestyle diseases.
It's a surreal moment. It's like having an elephant in the room. An elephant that's grown big enough to almost choke off the world's richest economy. And what are our politicians doing? They're bringing the Federal Govenment to the brink of a shutdown in a show over how to shrink the "ronding error" without raising people's taxes.
How big is the elephant going to be next year? And why not raise the taxes? Don't most Americans have more than enough money to eat themselves to death? Isn't it in fact the very convenience of it all, the living standard that we're trying to raise, that's killing us?
As human beings, we have evolved with a very fine balance between appetite for food on the one hand, and our dislike of walking on the other. If our ancestors wanted to eat dinner, they had to hunt it or gather it, or both. Imagine having to walk five miles for your dinner. Imagine getting only a half portion, and having to walk five more miles for the other half. That's the kind of resistance that your appetite evolved to overcome.
The older you got, and the more your joints ached, the stronger your appetite had to be, in order to get you to feed yourself. In the end, you starved to death. Today, you're more likely to eat yourself to death. It's a big difference.
:-(
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