28 September 2011
The fat of the land
It was Las Vegas, 2008. I'd come to town to play a little poker and experience for the first time the great, technicoloured, intoxicating metaphor for Every that Is Wrong With America.
Of course, Vegas does have its upside: that great American exuberance and abandon, the entrepreneurialism, the democracy of the dollar bill. But it doubles down on the bad: the decadence, the greed, the shattered illusions of prosperity, the depression of the problem gamblers, the empty-eyed waitresses with their puffed-up plastic chests, the pimps in the street hustling passers-by; a great, plasteel monument to greed, brought to you by greed, rising like a mirage out of the dead sands of the desert.
One of the most memorable, yet unfortunately most banal things I recall about that trip was the size of so many of the people I met there; the indigenous obesity of the Las Vegas denizens. I mean they were huge.
Every time I sat down at a poker table it felt like I'd walked into a casting call for The Biggest Loser. If I were to invest in a company that is sure to buck the trends of the declining share-market in the States, it'd be those companies that manufacture electric scooters specifically for the morbidly obese.
I was astounded at how many relatively young men (hard to tell for sure, but anywhere between their late 20s to late 40s) required mechanical assistance to move, for no other medical reasons than an apparent addiction to all-you-can-eat-buffets.
Here's how bad it is these days in the States: in 1991, no state in the US had an obesity rate of more than 20 per cent; today, there is no state in the US with an obesity rate less than 20 per cent. Las Vegas, Nevada, believe it or not, is slightly less than the national average, coming in at around 25 per cent (note we are talking about obesity here, not just being overweight). Nation-wide, about 33 per cent of Americans are obese. That is a ticking time bomb of type-2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and cholesterol waiting to explode the shoddy remnants of the American health system.
But it is easy to bag America. Credit where it is due, when they decide to do something, they don't hold back. What's not so easy is admitting to all the same flaws in ourselves as Australians.
I knew that however stunned I was at the level of obesity in the States, it was something that was sure to be coming, both as a metaphor and an actuality, to Australia. After all, everything else in our cultural and political life seems to take about two to five years to imitate the American way. Whether it is the cane-toad like spread of US reality TV colonising our airwaves; or the tea-party-like politics (protests descending on the capital led by right-wing media personalities) poisoning the public debate; or just our desire to botox and fake tan ourselves into Warne-like hideousness; or spend every weekend in the ‘mall' learning new ways to consume. But let's just talk about food, to take but one example.
In Australia and just about every other country in the world the proportion of overweight and obese people increases year-on-year. Sixty-seven per cent of Aussies are overweight as are 74 per cent of Americans. The one ray of light in this is that the New Zealanders have managed to trump us with 68 per cent – it's good to hear the fat hobbits across the Tasman Sea can beat us in something other than Rugby, but still, we're all getting too large.
Not only are we eating more meat, our food portions generally are expanding in size. In the US 20 years ago, the average cheeseburger had 330 calories, now the average is 590; the average portion of spaghetti contained 500 calories, now it comes in at 1020; and a can of fizzy drink had an average of 82 calories, now it has ballooned out to 250. Now, none of us were starving 20 years ago, but a hell of a lot of us weighed a lot less. Added to this we are chucking food out at a rate never before seen – in Australia we throw away 5.2 billion dollars worth of food each year, including 1.1 billion of fresh fruit and vegetables. That's around 600 dollars per household. There are charities popping up around Australia now whose sole purpose is to take the food we want to throw away and give it to hungry families.
So we're getting fatter and fatter, eating more and more, and to top it all off we are throwing tonnes of it away. Six hundred dollars worth per household thrown into landfill - think about that. You know what is going to cost that much? The carbon tax. Actually, it'll cost a bit less – around 500 per household. And that is putting aside the Treasury estimates that show nearly 70 per cent of Australians will be fully compensated. Think about the uproar over the price on carbon, the indignant protests, the ‘people's revolt'. And yet we throw more than that in the garbage each year. Where is the outrage about this waste? Well, obviously concern about this waste is never going to be particularly loud. Showing a modicum of caution about our health and the food we buy involves a level of personal responsibility, and if there's something we've copied from our American cousins, it is an inability to accept personal responsibility for our choices.
Let me put a particularly offensive f-word out there: frugality. It's a dirty word these days, isn't it? One would almost have to be embarrassed to be frugal, right? But somewhere, somehow, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – you know, like the 60s – frugality was a virtue. It was in the bible and stuff – you know, the meek will inherit the earth, it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, all that palaver. Grandparents who lived through the Great Depression thought living within one's means showed a certain strength of character, a moral rectitude even. But more than this, frugality was in the Australian character. We were bronzed and lean, down-to-earth and egalitarian. Waste and conspicuous excess wasn't in our cultural DNA.
But now it is terribly unfashionable to be frugal. It's almost embarrassing to be meek. These days, the biggest church in Australia – Hillsong - preaches the good in accumulating wealth (the head of which – Brian Houston, famously wrote a book called You Need More Money: discovering God's amazing financial plan for your life (maybe the church can spend all that extra money genetically engineering tiny, tiny camels able to fit through needle eyes)) and the grandparents of today (the Babyboomers) sell their million-dollar properties and proudly tell A Current Affair they're going to spend the lot – on themselves! (Cue laughing retirees in front of a campervan, cut to smiling reporter, that ‘aw shucks – ain't greed just grand' look on her face). Well, there's nothing meek about Hillsong and nothing frugal about $5 billion worth of rotting food.
So we're not bronzed and lean anymore, what we are is fat and getting fatter. We're five years away from a burgeoning motorised scooter industry and from being a hideous spectacle for thin French tourists or agog visitors from Japan. Our consumption habits are distinctly American. But wouldn't it be good if we could adopt some different American traits – the ability to innovate, to adapt, and to transform in the face of new historical circumstances.
Every day we are confronted with the fact that the earth's resources are not limitless and that greed is no longer good. That's the new world we need to adapt to.
Tim Napper is an international aid worker and occasional poker player.
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