i was talking to my dad about this, and it seemed to blow his mind a little bit: this is the first time in history that poor people are fat.

think about it; not that long ago, if you were pale and pudgy it meant you spent all day inside eating rich foods. if you were poor, you worked hard and you were tan and muscular because you didn't have much to eat.

now, just to eat well, you have to spend a lot of money. i probably spend a quarter of my paycheck on food, and i mostly cook my own food.

If your wife lived at home, so that you didn't need either preschools or a second car, its about the same.

Obviously people knew what they were doing in the past when they kept women in their proper places.

Nocal: This is due to a few things...

1) Dollar Menu: It used to be that fattening food was 'rich' because they were expensive and consisted of cremes and whatnot, now the cheapest food has the most calories (well, unless we count Ramen...)

2a) Rich people want to eat 'organic' foods -- btw, almost all food is organic (derived from an organism -- a misnomer, but whatever) and it costs a lot more to have your corn coddled by hippies . They are rich, however and willing to pay a lot more for this hippie-coddling, and therefore the prices of healthy foods are driven up.

2b) Farm subsidies drive up the cost of produce, so even non-coddled groceries are more expensive than they would otherwise be.

3) Poor people don't have to work as hard. It used to be that rich people got fat sitting behind a desk and poor people had to do manual labor (construction, agriculture, etc.), now there are a lot more jobs for unskilled laborers that don't require much physical exertion (flipping burgers is hardly a workout) and in many cases, the welfare state pays people not to work.

That's just off the top of my head, maybe I missed something...

Fast food and mass marketing, aimed right at them.

When I visited my home town in central PA, an area that has fallen on extremely hard times, I was so amazed at the mass of most of the people there. Easily, 70% of the people were obese, and not pudgy, but Huge. Their diet of McDs, Burger King, Long Johns, pizza, and all things bad for you really took its toll. I lived in Colorado at that time, where almost everyone is fit, so the contrast was extreme.

i agree that subsidies are bullshit and i am personally infuriated by them (my personal ron paul will be the first politician to tell those lobbies to fuck themselves and will never materialize), and that service jobs have made people sedentary.

'organic' foods typically meet a certain criteria, which often includes not using human sewage as fertilizer. i think that if more food were 'organic' we'd be doing better, health wise.

just think: what is cheapest in the grocery store? the stuff around the outside (fruit and produce, meat, fish) or the stuff on the inside (bread, grains, processed cereals). the inside of the grocery store is a popular, cheap, festering shitheap

Look at the 'Necessary' expenses: 2 cars, bigger food bills, much bigger houses, bigger fuel bills and of course, twice the taxes.

And there are faults with the math when you 'adjust' the dollar values to current amounts you kind of eliminate most of the math differences.

There was a great article about the Farm Bill a while back, breaking down how it allowed (corn) farmers to produce a subsidized surplus of low-demand food which then got turned into cheap mass-produced garbage in the supermarket impulse-purchase section and firehosed into school lunches, making it not only possible for poor people and school-children to get fat off high-calorie, low-nutrient food, but actually very likely. Can't find it now, of course.

Also never discount the tendency of poor uneducated people to stay uneducated and avoid enlightenment like a cat getting a bath and thus miss out on the finer points of critical thinking, like 'what's going to happen after I eat this delicious tub of cake frosting?'

Here's the article.