Theory of Fat #43

I'm reading an op/ed piece in by Geraldine Kempler (a local pediatrician) in The Oregonian today. She wants to worry about being eaten by sharks, but she gets distracted by toddlers drinking apple juice. She thinks it's bad for them and they shouldn't be drinking it, or at least not by gallon jug. OK, fine, she might be very well right. No skin off my nose. But then she makes this comment:

Ideally, all babies would ... have flash-pasteurized local apple cider as a treat every fall.

Apple juice is a treat? Well, I suppose in healthy, whole-food-ish [tm] way, it kind of is. I mean it's certainly sweet enough. But here is the crux of the problem: this is America, the land of plenty, we can have treats whenever we want. If we want to have treats we can have them every day.

     Every time my friend Jack goes to a carnival or fair, or anyplace really, that has a stand selling corndogs, he will buy one and eat it. Not because he necessarily wants one, or because he is hungry, but because when he was a kid a and his parents took him to the fair they would NOT buy him any corn dogs, on account of they cost money, you know. So now he has money and he can buy a corn dog anytime he likes, so he does.

     Among my many vices is Reddi Wip whipped cream, the kind that comes in the aerosol cans. When I was a kid we would sometimes get a dollop of whipped cream on dish of something or other, could have been turnips for all I cared. But the dollop was all we got, no extra, no seconds, no piling on. I think economy was the purpose here as well. But now I can afford to buy all the whipped cream I want, so I will pile it on. It doesn't help that the resident food Nazi's make a big fuss about it. I think their argument is specious. The stuff is mostly air, even a football size serving isn't going to have more than a couple calories. Yeah, a couple zillion you mean.
     So sometime in the last 50 years the price of food fell to the point that the majority of folks could eat all they want, and after a billion years of evolving on a starvation diet, by gum we're gonna eat.

Previous Theories of Fat: #42, #10, #9, #8, #7.