Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Eating their way into obesity to fill the boredom void

Here in North America, every time you open a newspaper there's an article about obesity. They all trumpet alarming statistics: two out of three Americans are overweight, while a staggering 25 per cent of American children are obese.

The media respond to this wave of weight with a constant chorus of "do something". Legislators and organisations respond with litanies of regulation or litigation.

None of it helps. People, especially kids, just keep getting fatter, while the one question the mainstream media never asks is why.

Recently the New York Times ran a piece entitled "What we don't know about obesity". Most striking was a quote from a leading obesity researcher who said: "When it comes to obesity, we are like deer in headlights. It's clear the environment has changed, but it's not clear exactly what aspects of the environment are responsible."

Perhaps that is exactly why obesity seems so unbeatable. The underlying reasons are just too exigent to look at directly.

Maybe it's as simple as boredom. Not the nothing-to-do-on-Sunday variety but a deep, disenfranchised sense of emptiness. A profound inability to express dissent, a cultural gagging that goes so deep most are not aware of it, except as an itch that can only be scratched by consuming.

Which is perhaps why obesity is the plague of the poor. Experts all agree that obesity is intrinsically tied to economic resources, education and income. Being poor translates into long work hours and limited access to affordable fresh food and exercise choices. But that is not the whole truth of being fat.

Because, ironically, while poverty is associated with lack, obesity is the chilling fact of abundance. Obesity is not a result of poverty; it is a result of consumerism. In a society where ability to consume is the gold standard, even a super-sized Big Mac satisfies the desire to belong, to be a participant in the prevailing culture.

The impact of such consumerism was negligible when consumption was a form of self-expression for the wealthy and the rest of the population took solace in other forms of perspicuity.

But that was back when there used to be myriad other ways to express yourself and your beliefs.

You could wear a T-shirt with a pertinent slogan. Not any more. At campuses, high schools and malls across the United States any T-shirt voicing "controversial" messages is banned.

Just a small selection: a mall in Guilderland, New York, banned T-shirts with the slogans "Peace on Earth" and "Give Peace a Chance". In West Virginia, a 15-year-old was suspended for her T-shirt which read, "When I saw the dead and dying Afghan children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America". And a Michigan high school banned a T-shirt with an image of the President framed by the words "International Terrorist". But it's OK to wear the Nike swoosh or any other corporate logo.

You used to be able to congregate with like-minded others and voice your dissent. Not any more. The 2003 Rave Act (Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act) threatens to end that.

Under the act, any business owner can be prosecuted for the drug offences of their customers. Home-owners could also end up in jail for up to 20 years if someone smokes a joint at their party or barbecue.

How about dancing those calories off? You'll soon be hard-pressed to find a venue because property owners will be too afraid to rent or lease to any group perceived as attracting drug-users.

So no dancing, no anti-war meetings in your lounge, no controversial T-shirts. How about belonging to a student activist organisation. You could risk being labelled ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), and if you're under 18, you can be shipped off to one of nearly 200 enforced juvenile rehabilitation programmes that have sprung up across America.

And the symptoms of ODD? Losing one's temper, arguing with adults, actively defying or refusing to comply with adults' requests, deliberately annoying people, being touchy or easily annoyed, and often being spiteful, vindictive, or angry.

This year's National Conference on Organised Resistance said the definition meant all those with radical and anti-authoritarian beliefs could be labelled as ODD. If you're still not convinced, remember your grandmother's tales of wartime rations, of sacrifice to support the war effort. Now, with war on every American's lips, consumption has become synonymous with patriotism.

Even music has lost its power to fill a void. American Idol, the top-rating (by a gazillion kilometres) television show this past season, was won by a guy singing Imagine. It was bad enough when John Lennon conceived it; in its present context it sounds like a rally cry for electric sheep.

In the 1982 movie Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer's replicant dangles from a rooftop and articulates what it is to see and to feel while remaining a robotic "skin job". The movie asks the question, what is it to be human?

Twenty years later, we've answered with a resounding "I consume, therefore I am". And that's the real environment that causes obesity.