Autumn is not a good time to lose weight in Western Canada.
Thanksgiving, with its traditional feast, is followed within weeks by a round of fall or fowl suppers. That’s where anyone with a taste for home cooking, delivered in the company of almost an entire community, can eat a fine repast.
I never see a poster for a fowl supper without thinking about Lloyd Harden of Vauxhall, Alta., who rented a vacant office in his machine repair shop to the editor of the local newspaper.
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“Are you going to the supper, Barb?” he would ask when the season rolled around. Such things can generate news in a small town, and Harden knew it. In fact, he knew most of the things that went on around town well before the newspaper reported it.
“What supper would that be, Lloyd?”
“Well, some years it’s a fowl supper and some years it’s a foul supper,” he would drawl. “I guess you’ll just have to find out.”
Then he’d turn back to his latest repair project, cackling with glee over a serendipitous opportunity to jibe an editor about the importance of spelling. As I recall, the supper was always fowl and fair, and often excellent, but Harden had longer history with the town so maybe he knew about some foulness in its past.
But I digress. Getting back to the original weighty point, there have been many stories in recent months about the increasing size of the North American populace. This is attributed to more frequent visits to fast food outlets, larger portions and less active lifestyles.
That’s all part of it, says Michael Pollen, a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
In the Oct. 12 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Pollen says that “when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat.” The source of all food and calories, he says, is the farm. A generation of U.S. farm policy that promotes the overproduction of corn has led Americans to gain excess weight, he contends.
“Absurdly, while one hand of the federal government is campaigning against the epidemic of obesity, the other hand is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check for every bushel of corn they can grow.”
Pollen elaborates on the history that led to current U.S. agricultural policy in his thought-provoking essay and this brief mention does not do justice to his work.
If accepting his premise, however, it suggests that based on comparative levels of farm subsidization, Canadians certainly shouldn’t have weight problems.
