The New Survival of the Fittest

One of my favorite friends/conversationalists Kirk passed the below graphic to me earlier Friday after a discussion regarding sugar soda fighting in NYC (also a great name for a Beastie Boys album (RIP)). It seems while we’ve been on the self-esteem kick of telling people big is beautiful — and it is in relation to skin-and-bones models — the country has embraced the idea by multiplying it into superhuman phrases like “Hankering For Huge”, “Human Hippos Are Happy” and “Gigantic Is Gorgeous.”

It’s not a surprise that as Americans we’re stuck between extremes: be rail thin or eat 4,000 sandwiches a year, but it’s also no surprise to any grown-up who grocery shops that it’s a lot easier to pound Root Beer while snorting lines of Pixy Stix and mowing down deep fried Twinkies like they were corn-on-the-cob (Oh, and chicken don’t have fingers) than… well… actually buying corn-on-the-con.

In a way, it’s quite like survival of the fittest (and it’s arguable that amassing ridiculous amounts of wealth is the No. 1 non-physical way to ensure your line’s evolution) via the death of the fattest. Bigger people are going to die faster and be — on the whole — much less attractive to the general population for procreative purposes. Again, I’m not talking about my beer gut, a general trend away from manual labor as a profession or someone with horrendous metabolism; I’m talking about people who think jogging is French for “the Pudding Diet.”

And then there are the financial reasons…

Looks like meat producers need less government in their lives, while vegetable/fruit farms need bigger gov't

How about a third option? Would you indulge me or write me off if I were to tell you that a contributing factor is political preference? Before you think this is a liberal smear campaign, it’s not; I think it just fits in neatly with my dangers of extremism. If you’re trained to think that every single thing supported by someone (lately, Michelle Obama) is the wrong thing, you are going to do the exact opposite and think it’s the most American thing to do (“Exercise? Next think you know I won’t be able to buy Pop Tarts). I imagine that this is why anyone would ever support the idea of partial-birth abortion (the hackneyed notion that banning it would lead to all condom-makers to be put in an electrified pen).

Consider the similarities in this rushed graphic that combines the above %-Obese map with the projected voting for 2012 (Thanks, 270towin.com) :

How about zero of the swing states being dark?

I just don’t think it’s absurd to consider that the people who went from supporting Trayvon Martin to supporting George Zimmerman as soon as their talking heads told them to would abide by fatty foods out of patriotism. Prove me wrong.

It’s another instance of extremism precluding people from moving forward.

Email; nicholas.mendola.com