Another Cream Puff, Sweetheart?

Hong Kong - photo by JoAnn Sturman

Scott Sturman

fliesinyoureyes.com

The Pima Indians of southern Arizona have the dubious distinction of being the second fattest people in the world.  They lead a slothful life, plying themselves with fast food and calorie laden fare devoid of fruits and vegetables.  By their twenties they begin losing their kidneys and eyesight to the ravages of diabetes and hypertension.  Their closest relatives are the whippet thin inhabitants of Mexico’s central mountains, who while not working in their fields, subsist on beans, corn, and an occasional rabbit.  Same genetics, different lifestyles and the product of two disparate social systems: one where those are left to their own devices and the other where the government cannot do too much to help.

She never learned to speak English, but her eleven year old son was born in America.  She sat at his bedside, while he waited for surgery to have his gallbladder removed.  A day before a stone was removed from his common bile duct, but his eyes were still yellow from too much bilirubin in his blood.  He had a little boy’s face mounted on a 200 pound body packed into a five foot frame.  “I like hamburgers,” he told me.

Was his mother oblivious, ambivalent, or just took pride in the fact that she was raising a big boy?  One point was certain: her son’s stature was nourished by food stamps and unlimited access to unhealthy food that at the age of eleven has already destroyed his gallbladder and is slowly coating every artery in his body with atherosclerosis.  The boy is young, hungry, and helpless to resist a never ending supply of free food which is killing him.  It is only a matter of time unit the taxpayer foots the bill for a lifetime of medications and surgery needed to treat the complications of obesity.  Food stamps buy potato chips, soda, and chocolate chip cookies just as readily as yogurt and celery. 

Rather than strictly limit the variety of foods which can be purchased by food stamps, welfare recipients are free to roam the aisles of the local supermarket and load their shopping carts to the brim with fare guaranteed to make their children one of the 40% who are obese.  It would not be politically correct to deny a person on public assistance the same opportunity to over indulge and develop an ample torso as their self paying counterparts.

Four states, California, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan, currently allow certain food stamp recipients to use benefits in fast food restaurants.  In California in order to avoid the stigmata of the term “food stamps”, the program has been renamed CalFresh.  It’s the same type of bureaucratic gobbledegook where a janitor transforms to a sanitational engineer, a prostitute to a lady of the night, and a violent temper becomes an anger management problem.

Say it again, Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet!”  Now national fast food franchises are lobbying to extend the program throughout the United States, purportedly to combat hunger among the poor, elderly, and disabled.  Such altruism!  When it comes to making the fat fatter, government welfare agencies, politicians, and the private sector are quite willing to make Pima Indians out of the poor.