Fatty
On the subject of overeating and large portions, James Joyner writes (via Andrew’s guest blogger Patrick Appel):
…[O]ne of the things that has long occurred to me about restaurant dining is that, because every customer must be served the same portion size (within allowances for human error) they’re naturally going to provide huge amounts of food. If you serve a 275 pound man an amount of food that would be appropriate for a 125 pound woman, he’s going to still be hungry at the end of his meal and therefore a dissatisfied customer. Because the marginal cost of additional food (especially pasta, potatoes, and the like) is negligible, it’s just good business to pile it on. Naturally, everyone else will be given too much to eat and all but the most disciplined will overeat.
It might be “natural,” but it’s still stupid. I myself weigh roughly 250 pounds, and if I go to a restaurant and am very, very hungry, I’ve been known to order and eat two meals; they arrive at the same time and I shovel them both in at the same time, usually in under 10 minutes.
At higher class restaurants, the servings are smaller, but because they usually have more courses (appetizer, salad, meal, dessert), which are spaced out over the course of over an hour, I find that I’m just as satisfied having eaten less, of higher quality food.
Big chain restaurants can argue that they’re just offering what Americans want, but that’s a cop-out. Drug dealers are only meeting a demand as well. I’m not saying we need to enact legislation to limit how much food chefs can put on a plate, and I’m certainly not saying “if it weren’t for McDonald’s I’d be totally skinny,” but big chain restaurants who focus on stuffing food into their patrons need to stop dodging their share of the blame for the obesity epidemic.
My preference – and this goes for restaurants and grocery stores – is to enact legislation that makes healthy food cheaper than unhealthy food. Much like a cigarette tax has probably done more to curb smoking than the surgeon general’s warning, make organic orange juice cheaper than Sunny D. Make pork rinds more expensive than pomegranates.
One can still choose to be fat, but he/she will have to pay for it. As it stands today I have to pay for it through rising health care costs (and by looking at his/her fat ass). This is the same theory that has caused people to stop buying Hummers, which is a very good thing.
This is an idea I’ve heard before, and it’s growing on me. One of the minor problems with it is that it can be very difficult to control; I’ve heard recommendations that we start taxing soda. Well, that sounds great, but I only drink diet soda. It has zero calories and contributes nothing to my personal chubbiness other than a little bit of sodium. Do we tax it the same as regular soda? And what about basic staples like flour? Flour is a pretty high-calorie substance, which can be used to make delicious-but-fattening cakes, or it can be used to make delicious wheat bread that’s pretty good for you.
Do we just tax things by calculating a “calories per unit mass” value?