With gluttony no longer a sin, ‘bigger everything’ is now the norm

WHEN a bunch of seriously fat Americans announced that they were suing McDonald’s for seducing them into scoffing down hamburgers and French fries in excessive tonnage, I don’t know about you, but my reaction was impatience: Get over it, lads.

Like the Golden Arches reached into your home and said: "C'mere and let me fill you full of grease and salt and sugar." This has to be the ultimate in self-ascribed victimhood. Bit like the gang member in West Side Story who sings "I'm depraved on accounta I'm deprived." These obese folk were saying their fatness wasn't because they ate the pies, but because someone MADE them eat the pies.

Marginalised overweight people don't, unaided, get into litigation against global corporations, so clever lawyers had to be behind it. If lawsuits were beginning to be successful against tobacco companies for hooking their customers on a killer product, logically, the next target had to be peddlers of burgers and fries.

Let no man put a stop to the march of victimhood. If the wind was in the right direction and the jury gullible enough, why, someone might even make money by suing TV companies for turning potential athletes and geniuses into couch potatoes. (No, I hear you say. That would never happen. Could never happen. Sorry: it did happen. This last week, a man in the USA sued cable TV providers for turning his wife into a fat slob.)

Now, as a card-carrying anti-Establishmenter, I wouldn't be greatly grieved if someone managed to prove that the colonel with the pointy beard on the top of the Kentucky Fried Chicken (recently re-named KFC to avoid having to use the 'fry' word) outlets had misled them into thinking bucket-fulls of deep-fried fowl with chips were better nutrition than a chicken salad. But common sense would tell you that nobody could indoctrinate a generation of eaters into gluttony.

Except common sense, in this instance, would be severely wrong.

Gluttony used to be a bad thing. It was one of the seven deadly sins, back when sins got graded so you could conveniently bundle together your most grim offerings in confession and maybe get a discount on the penance.

Now, not only is gluttony not a sin, it's not even a concept. (Seems to me the only mortal sins at present are child molestation and membership of the Christian Bothers. They're the real mortlars, these days.) Gluttony and sloth are no more than embarrassing remnants of that old Biblical reference syndrome our parents used to exemplify. Well, come on, how often, recently, have you heard anybody mention either? The very word "glutton" has an antique patina to it, like antimacassar. (Go ask your great grandmother.) It's just not functional or applicable any more.

Just as the fax machine did away with the telex, the fast food industry did away with the concept of gluttony. Starting with a man named David Wallerstein. Back in the '60s, Wallerstein ran a cinema chain, where the profits came from the sales of high-margin snacks like popcorn and soft drinks. Seeking to sell more of these snacks, he offered cinema-goers buy-one-get-one-half price deals, which worked, but only up to a point.

The point was the point of shame. Shame about being seen as a glutton. Carrying two containers of popcorn into the auditorium made customers feel they looked like pigs. On the other hand, if he provided a bigger size popcorn bucket at the 'special deal' price, he could de-pig the issue: customers would be sensibly paying just a little more to get a lot more popcorn. Gluttony? Where was the gluttony?

The same guy, when he moved over to head up McDonald's, applied the same principle: don't force customers to embarrass themselves by buying two containers of French fries. Help them overcome that gluttony thing. Provide regular and large size containers. That way they don't have to carry two and thereby brand themselves as gorgers.

McDonald's wasn't alone in the assault on gluttony. Other fast food outlets copped on that particularly in the wake of the '80s recession millions of hard-pressed lower-income customers wanted a bigger food bang for their buck. By bundling together high margin items like fries (now in jumbo or super-size containers) and coke along with burgers at a discounted price, the chains could train those customers into loyalty. Loyalty as defined by eating a minimum of 20 fast food meals a month. "Value meals" was what the bundled offerings were called. Never mind the gluttony, feel the profit-margin.

FROM the customers' point of view, it was a great deal. George Orwell, commenting in the first half of the last century about do-gooding attempts to feed the poor better quality diets than they were eating, noted sadly that when you're hard-pressed, harassed and poor, you want tasty,food, not nutritionally-correct food. And, my goodness, is fast food tasty!

By the '90s, in America, family meals meant meals awash in grease, salt and sugar, eaten in the bright primary-coloured surroundings of a McDonalds, a Wendy's, a Taco Bell or a Pizza Hut. The connection with gluttony was kaput. The skills of home cooking were on the decline. And except in the affluent, educated classes nutritional awareness was at an all-time low, as demonstrated by one group providing nutrition education to teenagers in American schools.

This group laid out some familiar snack foods and small weighing scales, asking the young participants to measure out what they considered a 'serving'. The kids had already spent time discussing the amount of protein, carbohydrate, calories and other nutrients per serving as defined on the package label of the snack foods. Except, when they measured out what they considered a serving, it was always AT LEAST THREE TIMES the size of the official serving. So teenagers who believed they were eating 300 calories-worth of puffy cheese snack were in fact eating 900 calories-worth.

By 1999, according to Greg Critser, the man who has documented how Americans became the fattest people in the world, "Kids had come to see bigger everything bigger sodas, bigger snacks, bigger candy, and even bigger doughnuts as the norm; there was no such thing as a fixed, immutable size for anything, because anything could be made a lot bigger for just a tad more."

Research proved such a change wasn't hard to achieve. One study showed that children up to age three, offered 50% more than they were used to eating on a slightly larger plate, simply ate what they were used to eating and left the rest. But five year olds, offered 50% more, ate it. The larger size could become the norm that early and a child's sense of the boundaries around food could be that easily distorted.

Add in the fact that more than four out of ten ads on Saturday morning "kids cartoons" TV were for fast food, and one begins to see that occasional well-meaning references to the food pyramid hadn't a chance against such focused indoctrination.

The 'victims' of the fast food industry may not win their case. But their action might help us face up to a key factor in the fat sedentary lifestyle that is crippling and killing us.