Boulder, Colorado has decided to eliminate “unhealthy” food from all its civic vending machines, substituting “healthy” snacks. The rise in obesity has never been associated with stopping smoking and with the onslaught of food fad experts and health exhorters. Granted, the ubiquity of cheap, delicious, and plentiful food has given us all the opportunity for big weight gains, but ask obese people and they will all give you a 526 page history of diets and dire prognostications of horrible ends. Nutritionists and food nannies have helped us divorce appetite from eating, so that we become obsessed with what we eat, not whether or not we are hungry, and we forget about being hungry and only concentrate on the urges of the forbidden. Think Prohibition. We are obsessed with food. Maybe that’s not as overwhelming as our older obsession with sex, but it’s here: the Food Pyramid, the Food Circle. Stop eating sugar, fat, bad fat, salt, red meat, white meat. Don’t remember that starvation makes people crazed. The new devil is the sugar donut.
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