No complaints here

How odd it is that, on a day when I'm not feeling particularly grumpy about my existence, when I have yet to see the local newspaper and have it make me angry at the waste of trees (or whatever)... in short, on a day when I feel pretty good about life in general, I replay the recording of one of this week's Tonight Show programs with Jay Leno, in which he mentions a study indicating we're the fattest country on the planet.

Funny, the study I saw indicated we were only #9 (behind 8 very small countries, though). Not that it's anything to write home about, either way. But Leno said this as if it were a bad thing.

You know what? I'm with the commenters at Dr. Helen's blog, yesterday. In fact, it sort of falls into the category of the post itself: What's right with the world? What's right is that we have conditions such that large swaths of the population of the planet are fat.

There is a surplus of food -- and yummy fattening foods, at that (we don't just have a glut of gruel -- stuff of all sorts, all flavors and colors and ethnic hues comes to our stores and tables daily). We have so much extra that tons of it go to our landfills daily, unconsumed during its long shelf life.

Work, too, for so many, is not back-breaking labor which burns away every last calorie one consumes. Along with the less physically demanding job comes the leisure time thing, where we can pay a few pence, as it were, to have somebody else entertain us, either in person at a theater/arena or remotely via idiot box/internet/cinema.

By modern Western standards I am impoverished, and, yet, I have a roof over my head, access to all manner of information and entertainment, and daily access to a nutritious diet including fresh/frozen/dried produce from all over the world, clean fresh meats and dairy products, and an extraordinarily wide variety of grains (both processed and whole), as well as a more-than-healthy share of desserts. What an amazing problem -- to be seen as poor and yet overfed!

So what if I may die younger than others, from having been too sedentary (not entirely by choice) and from enjoying the occasional funnel cake or Texas sheet cake brownie? It's better than a long, miserable, hardscrabble existence for a square of weevil-filled hardtack or a bowl of grey porridge.

At least I've been able to taste life. And, by cracky, at my table it's good!