The other day I read an article on yet another restriction on food by the city council in Baldwin Park, California. They decided to ban any new drive-ins that they call “drive-throughs,” saying that these type fast food joints and liquor stores outnumber sit-down restaurants and grocery stores six to one. One wonders if the new regulation was the result of pressure from the owners of restaurants and grocery stores. This new ordinance goes in effect in the town that claims to have had the first drive-in called In-N-Out back in 1948.

All of this has been inspired by the attempt to prevent or end what’s called childhood obesity.”  The food police nation-wide exist for the purpose of sticking its nose into everyone’s personal affairs. Just a couple of months ago, a group sued McDonalds attempting to stop the company from putting toys into their “Happy Meals.”  About three times a week, Jay Leno uses what has become one of his running jokes that describe something that people eat. The punch line is “How fat are we getting?” 

This afternoon, I was at Wal-Mart in Sherman. My wife wanted to “get a few things.” Since I knew I’d have at least two hours to wait, I decided to conduct an unofficial survey. Sitting by the front door, I took note of everyone that entered and exited the store, assigning each person a category. The categories were skinny kids, normal kids and fat kids. For older people, it was a bit more complicated. There were three categories of teens—skinny, normal and fat. For people between twenty and fifty, there were skinny, skinny with a beer belly, normal, pudgy, fat and really obese. Grandparent age folks were similarly classified. While I was at it, I included women with visible tattoos. That has nothing to do with blubber, but it was just something of interest. I don’t particularly like tattoos on men and definitely don’t like them on ladies.

Once I started looking at everyone, I didn’t see as many fatties as I expected. It may be that we pay more attention to huge people because they take up more real estate and are hard to ignore. Or it may have been skinny day at Wal-Mart.

The results were significant though nothing a statistician would accept. I didn’t write anything down. I just mumbled the category to myself as they passed by—“skinny, skinny, regular, skinny, old and fat—oh, that’s a mirror.” The one thing that stood out was the lack of obese children. They were, for the most part, skinny. I saw a few that I would call regular and a couple of fat kids, but most of them looked like my grandkids—skinny. I wonder if all these obese kids we hear so much about on TV live in huge cities. Although Sherman seems like a big town compared to Whitesboro or Lindsay, cosmopolites from places like Dallas or Chicago would classify Sherman as a small town. Maybe kids around here get more exercise, or perhaps the parents of all the obese kids shop at more expensive stores than Wal-Mart. Of course it’s possible that childhood obesity has been over-hyped by those that want to change the way we eat to the way they eat. There seems to be no shortage of activists that exist for the sole reason of making others obey them. This may be just another example of self-appointed nannies who demand that everyone eat celery and yogurt whether we like it or not.