Fat and the climate

The UK has recently decreed that the fat will have to pay more tax. This may seem pretty draconian what with everyone being politically correct and weight issues being linked to a variety of factors. The law conjures up the image of a tax man coming with a weighing scale. However, such a tax could not be more opportune.

But first on a more personal note – Like the Europeans of yore I am now in an expansionist mode. As I move from ‘ship-shape’ to ‘ship shaped’, my clothes live in constant fear that they will be down graded to hand-me-downs ‘cos there is a limit to how much I can tuck in my girth.

Clothes getting ‘bangalored’ has lead to a new form of humanitarian service, while making economic sense to others. Such clothes from the US are reaching the distant shores of Africa where they are destroying local textile industries. The question is how come there are so many clothes to give away – one reason could be that that Americans are hording copious amounts of fat. So they send these non-fitting clothes down south where it becomes an aspirational commodity no not to buy them but to fit into them. The subconscious message that percolates is that the ‘south’ can become the ‘north’ when and only when they fit into XL sizes.

This leads me to link current economic growth to girth and finally to grime/guano. Well looking at things around me I see a very visible relation. Take the SUV for example – it is huge, guzzles huge amounts of fuel like a perpetually thirsty camel and belches out copious amounts of smoke. Now to clothe such a machine requires large quantities of many materials – rexene/leather for the upholstery and so on and so forth. Going further the most polluting country in the world the US of A also has one of the highest numbers of fat people. The other countries ahead of it are from the south pacific -Samoa and others - who are going to sink not because of the number of fat people on it but because the US is doing more than enough to damage the climate (which would lead to sea level rise for one) along with other wannbe’s like India and China.

Now why did the UK propose such a tax? It’s not because more cloth is required to clothe the fat, nor is it that more food has to be put on a plate, or because they occupy more space. It is because in the long run they are going to cost the community a lot in medical expenses. So now we have a situation where the government is making it clear in no-uncertain terms that the fat should become fit or pay per Kg.

This logic is also quite applicable to industries and countries. Industries and countries that generate more carbon (and therefore use more carbon producing stuff) should be asked to change their ways or start coughing up more big bucks (not the best thing to do). The US and other climate killers should get their act together because their current size and growth patterns are already costing their citizens and the world community a lot and this cost is going to increase in the coming years.

The author understands that there are a variety of causes of obesity and one major cause is lack of access to good nutrition and easy access to cheap unhealthy packaged and fast foods, dietary choices and lack of exercise. Not forgetting the right to be fat .