SLSL "Lardass"-related

[pynchonoid]

Thanks, Dave, for the heads-up re those books.  This
reminded me of Lardass Levine in "The Small Rain" 



http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/books/review/12POLLANT.html

The New York Times
January 12, 2003

FAT LAND
How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World.
By Greg Critser.
232 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $24. 

'Fat Land': Supersizing America
By MICHAEL POLLAN

"Add another to the string of superlatives wreathing
the world's greatest power: Americans are now the
fattest people on earth. (Actually a handful of South
Sea Islanders still outweigh us, but we're gaining.)
Six out of every 10 of us -- and fully a quarter of
our children -- are now overweight. Just since 1970
the proportion of American children who are overweight
has doubled, a rate of increase that suggests the
fattening of America has a specific history as well as
a biology. ''Fat Land,'' a skinny book about this big
subject, is the journalist Greg Critser's highly
readable attempt to reconstruct that history. 

At least from a business perspective, the fattening of
America may well have been a necessity. Food companies
grow by selling us more of their products. The
challenge they face is that the American population is
growing much more slowly than the American food supply
-- a prescription for falling rates of profit.
Agribusiness now produces 3,800 calories of food a day
for every American, 500 calories more than it produced
30 years ago. (And by the government's lights, at
least a thousand more calories than most people need.)
So what's a food company to do? The answer couldn't be
simpler or more imperative: get each of us to eat
more. A lot more. [...] "


-Doug




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