Of course not. It comes from changing food policy on the national level, which (one assumes) would influence the large-scale producers. There’s a reason Coca Cola replaced sugar with HFCS back in the 80’s; it became a widely available cheaper substitute due to corn subsidies. Which in turn made coke cheaper. Which in turn inspired the big gulp and the 20oz standard serving size. Personal choices my fucking ass.

I’m not sure you’re economics are up to par. Government subsidies for HFCS made using HFCS cheaper than using sugar (although part of that has to do with tariffs). While that made soft drinks cheaper, we’re talking about a marginal difference, a tiny percentage added to an already enormous profit margin. You could, and should, change the subsidies for HFCS but that isn’t going to do a thing about the consumption of drinks that used to have HFCS because the HFCS doesn’t do much about the cost. Ever wonder why you can go to your local supermarket and find pretty much any soft drink you want for half price at least twice a month? Its because even at half price everyone is making money.

I live in Chicago and theres a very large Jewish community very close to my home. Theres also a very large Mexican immigrant community. Back in Mexico Coke is made with cane sugar, not HFCS. Apparently HFCS isn’t Kosher, either. As a result Coke makes a “kosher-for-passover” version thats sweetened with sugar instead of HFCS. All of the little Jewish and Mexican markets in the area stock it right next to the HFCS Coke. Most of them charge the same price, too.

The increase in serving sizes has had more to do with marketing the perception of value than the reduced price of creating the product.

Of course not. It comes from changing food policy on the national level, which (one assumes) would influence the large-scale producers. There’s a reason Coca Cola replaced sugar with HFCS back in the 80’s; it became a widely available cheaper substitute due to corn subsidies. Which in turn made coke cheaper. Which in turn inspired the big gulp and the 20oz standard serving size. Personal choices my fucking ass.

The minute you include people’s bodies in your criticism, you rest the responsibility on them for having a wrong body.

You cannot make a criticism that includes obesity, fat, etc. and get around that basic fact.

You CAN criticize the awful, awful food policy we have, the way we approach “green,” the way we use energy. All that stuff matters! The fact that my ass is now 44″ instead of the 37″ it was when I was severely undernourished? That does not affect global warming. Sorry.

A more insightful article would have been titled “Our current industrial food model is making people fat, is denying them nutrients, and is destroying the planet.”

Ahh, but that ultimately comes down to the same problem. Such an article begs the question “what do we do about this?” The only answer ultimately comes down to controlling the decisions of the individual, to controlling their bodies, to changing the way they think of and consume food. The only ways to pull that off are powerful centralized means of controlling food distribution or “education” which will inevitably need to engage in some variation of fat shaming. As we don’t live in a culture with a centrally controlled market, the logical conclusion of such an article would be attempts to persuade people to change their habits. Realistically that means telling people that doing things which are likely to cause them to gain weight hurts the environment.

At the end of the day this discussion will always become a fight between people who have different values. You dislike the western way of eating, I sometimes wrap pork in more pork and serve the result with couscous cooked in chicken broth and a butter based sauce.

Olympic athletes consume far more calories than the average person during the course of their training.

Its not just Olympic athletes. Maintenance for me is around 4500 calories a day with infrequent exercise. When I try to push my body fat (and thus my BMI) down that number goes up. A lot of people just don’t fit the “normal” 2000 or so calorie diet.

There is no denying, however, the high rates of obesity-related health problems in societies who subscribe to the Western diet on a large scale. It also happens to be that refining all those grains and producing 10 billion animals a year causes vast amounts of pollution and waste, not to mention the cost of shipping the final products.

It is also indeed true that the most heavily-processed food tends to be the cheapest and most accessible. And, costs aside, the culture of appreciating fresh foods and the education behind proper nutrition and food cultivation tend to be absent in poorer communities, urban ones especially. You’ll find these more in populations of privilege.

So, if one really wanted to, one could draw some correlation between industrialized societies feeding their populations industrialized “food,” that “food” making the population both fatter and less healthy overall, and then finally measuring the environmental impact of it. You could even then argue that the poor people, because the processed food is less expensive, are hurting the environment disproportionately more than the rich people.

But the fact that inexpensive, high-calorie, nutrient-devoid grain derivatives make the people fatter is purely incidental. The poor people don’t have a lot of choice; the people wealthy enough to afford the choices are intentionally misled by marketing and confused nutritionists; the government regulators are heavily lobbied by industrial agriculture groups; and so on. So unless you do some extensive research, you the individual really don’t stand a chance. But, if things were changed from the top down, everyone would be a lot better off.

A more insightful article would have been titled “Our current industrial food model is making people fat, is denying them nutrients, and is destroying the planet.”

Side note: The phrase “Vegetarians are thinner”, again, is more of a statistical observation. Vegetarians pay a lot of attention to, exercise a lot of discipline about, and make a lot of decisions about what they eat. So do bodybuilders, olympic athletes, your eccentric raw-foodist friends, and so on. Those groups too have statistically low body fat percentages. Obviously one could be vegetarian and still maintain a diet of refined sugars and hard oils — not very productive for weight loss.

Is cigarette smoke good for the planet? How about growing tobacco?

As presented, the study relies on comparing a 1970s carbon footprint to a predicted 2010 equivalent. But that’s more a comment on how our lives have changed in the intervening period than on any relationship between the girth of my hips and the impending heat death of the universe. And the really heinous assumption in this article (second, of course, to the implication that the overweight, among which I am counted, are causing the planet to DIE), is that if we return nothing but our bodies to 1970-era conditions (not the numbers of cars per family, for instance, among other things that were probably less earth-destroying 40 years ago), the everything will somehow be okay.

If we all freak out and diet ourselves back to 1970, it will not change the reasons that obesity rates and the global temperature are increasing; we’ll still be locked in a processed food economy, drive everywhere and have lousy public transportation, work desk jobs and have no leisure time. And without addressing the genuine problems in our consumption of resources, it won’t change a damn thing.

Or we could, you know, switch over to different energy sources. What’s that I hear? Oh, changing our energy use would require actual effort? Forget that–fat-shaming is waaay easier!