Thursday, July 19, 2007

A Failure Pile in a Sadness Bowl: The Death Business of Food

Hilarious comedian Patton Oswalt (from The King of Queens) does a funny standup routine in which he discusses one of the more ridiculous items for sale on the KFC menu.

According to the "nutrition calculator" on KFC's site, their Chicken & Biscuit Bowl has 870 calories, 44 grams of fat and (what ought to be a record-setting) 2420 milligrams of sodium.

If you travel outside of the United States a lot, don't despair. You can get your pile of failure in its sadness bowl in 24 other countries, even France! Who says the French are food snobs? Who says only Americans have terrible eating habits? Thanks to the corporations that own KFC, Taco Bell and their ilk, fast food menus are inspiring over-indulgent, gluttonous eating habits around the world.

Where do you draw the line between being responsible for what you eat and being inundated by bad choices? It's easy enough to say "well, don't eat it if you don't like it", but let's be real. These companies exacerbate a problem of rampant obesity in the USA and everywhere they exist. If you've ever tried to lose weight or diet, you know what effect these omniscient bad choices have on our food intake. It's not right.

Big business is there to make sure that we have all the choices we need to be unhealthy and susceptible to more diseases. And then, they step in to reap the rewards of a sick population. Who can say that we live in a civilized society? If the byproducts of capitalism contributed to a healthy, happy society, then maybe we could. But the reality is that capitalism has turned into a parasite that feeds off of us until there's nothing left. It sounds extreme, and yet it's happening to us everyday. Our great, modern, civilized society is a pile of failure in a bowl of sadness.

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