Commentary

The restaurant smelled like the Texas barbecue of my youth, so of course I was ready for a thrill. I ordered the beef brisket for $20, which is pretty expensive but these are inflationary times.

The plate came. A third of the plate was a giant pile of fried potatoes, cheap food and carbohydrates topped with salt and served with a corn-syrup liquid we call ketchup. Next to that was a giant piece of cornbread, but this is New England so of course they don’t know how to make it right. It’s more like a corn cake sweetened with corn syrup and filled with corn oil. It’s a big piece of processed corn.

Danger food.

Then there was a boil of beans. Another carb.

Finally there is the stuff, the meat itself. It was two tiny slices, each consisting of two bites each. It was covered in a sticky sauce, mostly likely sweetened by corn syrup. Add a beer on the side and you have a plate of early death, for which I paid $20 plus $9 for the beer plus a service charge plus tip. In the end, we are looking at $40 for four bites of quasi-real food.

You know the drill. The profit margins of restaurants have been seriously harmed with inflation, and so they are pushing cheap food at high prices, minimizing the expensive stuff (once called food) and loading you up on carbs. They hope you don’t notice.

This has become all the more essential in the post-pandemic period when restaurants are trying to make up for the devastation of lockdowns. Then they had to pay more in wages just to get workers. So I completely get it. At the same time, it is deeply dangerous to public health.

Most people already put on weight during lockdowns. From closed gyms and massive alcohol intake, plus the munchies born of too much weed, there is a reason they call it the “COVID 19.” So now is the time to get healthy. But real income has been declining for 20 straight months and good food is more expensive.

Already the American diet was a disaster. It’s not the “fast food” as such, but the reality that nearly all food out consists of some combination of corn, corn oil, corn syrup, and salt, with a sprinkling of actual food but that too is likely breaded with corn flour and fried in corn oil.

It’s actually not easy to find any mainstream American food that is not built from some corn product. Take a tour of your local convenience store and look at the ingredients: observe the ever-malleable presence of corn. The food you seem to be looking at is not the food you are eating.

Of course you could also do pasta, which is another carb.

Truly, eating healthy food, or what in other countries is called food, requires real acts of deliberation. Mostly you have to cook at home and shopping for the ingredients is harrowing. The grocery store used to be a delight but now the prices should infuriate you all over again at what the cabal of government, media, and tech, backed by the Fed, did to the American standard of living.

Beef, chicken, and pork have all soared in price. It used to be that eggs were the cheap way to get good protein but that’s not possible either.

Looking at the big picture, we have a pricing disaster on our hands. All good food is up 30 percent in 3 years!

Meanwhile, the American obesity problem, along with all associated health issues, is out of control. The obesity rate has more than doubled since the 1980s. It is the second leading cause of premature death. A third of Americans can be classified as obese plus one in five children. Even our pets are developing an obesity problem. Maybe they are eating what we are eating.

“Furthermore,” reports Forbes, “19 states in America have obesity rates over 35 percent, increased from 16 states just last year. A decade ago, no states had obesity rates above 35 percent! … the annual medical cost of obesity was nearly 173 billion dollars in 2019 alone,” so that is obviously going to get worse.

How many ways can government kill us? They wrecked our normal diet from several generations ago with massive subsidies for bad food and now caused an inflation that is making good food unaffordable. It’s gotten so bad that major fashion labels have started valorizing obesity, which is just about the most irresponsible advertising campaign in world history, not to mention aesthetically offensive.

Here’s a way to go about fixing this. Think about anyone you know who is healthy, fit, and well. Just take a few minutes to ask how she or he does it. I guarantee you that this person has a regime, a deliberate plan. It involves carefully eating only good and high quality food plus daily and plenty of hard exercise. They are not on a “diet.” They have learned to live healthy in every aspect of their lives every day, without exception.

If you want to foil the planners in D.C., you have to do the same, even if that means pushing away the pile of fried potatoes and corn cake masquerading as cornbread. Haven’t our rulers in D.C. done enough to ruin your life? Don’t let them get away with it anymore.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.