Now weight just a minute

Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or flat-out obese, and it’s not difficult to see why. On May 5, a.k.a. Cinco de Mayo, my workplace sprung for a buffet-style Mexican feast, and everyone flocked to the break room to stock up on pork and beans and other thigh-enlarging treats. Even the skinniest wisps among them loaded their plates as though they were on the brink of a weeklong fast, strips of gooey meat swinging from the sides of their paper plates like mud-spattered turkey wattles. And who could blame them? Mexican food is delicious.

A little too delicious.

Weight-wise, that’s one of this country’s biggest problems: Everything is super-yummy. If you’re staring at a morsel of food you don’t like, there’s surely some condiment or garnish in the house, or at the nearby market, that ups the yummy factor considerably. We put yummy sauces on non-yummy foods to make them more yummy. We put peanut butter on celery because celery isn’t yummy enough on its own. I really need to stop saying the word “yummy.”

Yummy. Dangit!

This fixation on flavor obfuscates what should be a simple truth -- food is fuel. Its primary function is to provide nutrition for the body, not entertainment during “Simpsons” marathons. Yet a lot of people treat eating as though it’s a hobby, something akin to crossword puzzles or plastic canvas. Early humans, the ones who wore mammoth skins and did cave paintings, wouldn’t understand that kind of behavior, beholden as they were to the scattershot food gathering of the time. Although I’m sure a bowl of Cherry Garcia ice cream would make them converts in about half a nanosecond.

There’s a traceable chain of events going on here. Consumers like tasty food. Tasty food is mass-produced. Mass-produced food is cheap. Cheap food is unhealthy. Unhealthy food causes weight issues (and general health headaches). And the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone and so forth. That’s why even poor people struggle with weight: The only grub they can afford is crap. Forced to choose between a seven-dollar salad at Whole Foods or a 99-cent burger at Wendy’s, economics forces them to make a choice, and all too often that choice results in difficulty climbing a flight of stairs.

I don’t speak about heavy people disparagingly. I was one of them once, so I get it. When I was in grade school I lived about a five-minute walk from McDonald’s, and I took advantage of this luxury whenever I could -- much to the detriment of my chin, which went into hiding for so long people thought it had been relocated through the Witness Protection Program. There were no salads at the Golden Arches at that point, only oil-drenched fries and razor-thin slices of “meat” made mostly from grease and walrus knuckles. It’s as though a coterie of mad scientists had perfected a secret formula for unhealthy weight gain, with the populace their unwitting guinea pigs. Which incidentally are another ingredient in their burgers.

The weight piled on almost without my noticing it, and plenty of others report the same thing. The pounds just happen, until one day you look in a mirror and no longer recognize yourself. It’s not a fun feeling. And while it’s true that there is some measure of personal responsibility involved -- we do choose the foods we eat, after all -- it taxes both our wallets and our willpower to make the right choices. What sounds more appealing, a juicy Red Delicious apple or a double helping of soft-serve ice cream piled atop a generous slice of chocolate cake? Rest my case.

Crud. Now I want cake.

Michael Moss, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2010, wrote a book a while back that explains why. In “Salt Sugar Fat,” he writes that most processed foods are pumped full of -- you guessed it -- salt, sugar and/or fat. This is partly to preserve the food, but a large part of the motivation is to make the food more yum-- uh, tasty. The fact that tastier food sells better is easy to understand on an intuitive level, but there’s something more insidious going on: Those ingredients can trigger addiction in much the same fashion as dangerous drugs like heroin and cocaine. Food manufacturers essentially hook us on their products, much like those swell folks at the big tobacco companies. The only difference is that, while human beings can survive without cigarettes and grape-flavored cigars, they can’t survive without food. Our choice is between tasty food that kills us or yucky food that keeps us alive. Like in presidential elections, we’re faced with two unsavory choices.

Meanwhile, the weight piles on. And on. And on.

There’s not a lot of food in my home, and that’s by design. If there were, I’d eat it. Clementines and bran-based cereals comprise the bulk of my “snacks,” because if I were to stock up on Chips Ahoy cookies I’d get bored one night and drain an entire sleeve of them, staring vapidly at the electric clock on my stove and humming the theme song to “All in the Family.” That’s not the relationship anyone really wants to have with food. There’s only one feeling you get after an episode like that, and it’s not elation or a sense of self-worth.

A week later and somehow I still feel bloated from the Mexican food. I brought it on myself, because there’s another trap you can fall into. You can behave yourself on most days and then, reasoning that you’ve “earned” it, binge shamelessly when the opportunity presents itself. My Cinco de Mayo feast certainly qualifies, considering I downed enough burrito meat to feed a pack of ravenous wolves.

Though, in my defense, it was super yummy.