Half Ton Shock

Wow. I’m somewhat speechless, mostly appalled, and definitely disgusted with what I’ve just seen (with a little compassion mixed in there, too, for good measure–I try, I try). I don’t own a TV in my apartment in San Francisco, but when I’m vacationing with my family, we tend to settle down in front of whatever we find on cable every now and again. Tonight was one of those nights.
Though we had intended to get down to a game of Wise and Otherwise (which I would have loved), we first ended up watching a two-hour History Channel special on Ancient Astronauts (which is slightly less kooky than you would imagine), and then another program on TLC called “Half Ton Teen”. And the title was very literal: this nineteen year-old kid weighed over 800 pounds. Even though I initially protested and begged my brother to change the channel because it was difficult to look at this person’s image on the screen, we all got sucked into watching the whole program. Where to begin? It’s a sad sad story of a boy that perhaps could have found his way in the world, but instead ate himself into such an unhealthy state that he required the ‘care’ and assistance of his mother full-time. I put care in quotes for a reason: his mother enabled and facilitated his astonishing weight gain through her behavior: she fed him whatever he wanted, and supported him as he moved toward an every more sedentary lifestyle until he could hardly walk more than a few feet without assistance.
Strangely enough, there is little to no information about the “Half Ton Teen” on the TLC website, so here’s a link to the mahalo site. Following Half Ton Teen, there was a similar show called “Half Ton Mom”, and then after that a show called “Half Ton Dad”. It turns out the Half Ton Mom was the first to be on national television and inspired a rash (there’s a better word, I’m sure) of morbidly obese people to come out of the closet (or, more literally, to be broken out of their bedrooms), to seek gastric bypass surgery and the possibility of a more ‘normal’ life.
A few brief comments:
One: I do feel really sorry for these people and their families. I know they didn’t get into these situations on purpose, and didn’t see any way out of their situation once it got to a certain point (they all claim to have tried dieting, and believe they don’t eat more than they need to). It’s a larger cultural issue, too, and the media and our fast-food agribusiness culture definitely plays a role in all this.
Two: The man, woman, and child profiled here are essentially a metaphor not only for the sickness of our food culture and the failure of our communities to take care of its members, but also a more literal metaphor for what this country is doing with regards to the planet’s resources. If the entire planet consumed as much energy and goods as the USA does, we’d need five earths. Similarly, these individuals weigh about as much as five healthy-sized individuals (they range from 800-1000 pounds). So we are seeing what happens when an organism internalizes its consumption instead of externalizing it–which is what all of our businesses do with regards to the environmental cost of our consumption. When we look at a human being that has grown so far beyond their capacity to support basic function, our instinct is one of revulsion, pity, and astonishment that such a thing is possible. But we are looking at the dark side of this culture. We find it so appalling that someone could eat as much as two week’s worth of food in a single day, but is what our consumer culture is doing really so different? It is simply much easier to ignore and we can more easily numb ourselves to its effects.
Three: How can it be that so many people in the country can be so ignorant of basic nutrition? These people are not illiterate — clearly many of them have computers and access to the internet. Could they have found that switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet might have allowed them to lose the weight they needed to lose without gastric bypass surgery?
Four: There are 15 million morbidly obese people in America today. Let that sink in for a moment. Fifteen million. It’s hard to imagine the suffering and pain that such an epidemic entails on a social level, let alone the cost to society in both dollars spent and resources needed. These individuals required teams of firepeople, EMTs and doctors to evacuate and take care of them.
Five: The extremes are not to be ignored — they are to be studied as places where we can learn the most about human potential, whether that is potential to be creative, harmful, or morbidly obese or anorexic. These people have their own story, but they also tell us something about ourselves, our culture, and our own capacities. We ignore them at our own peril.

That said, I’m not recommending you watch these shows, even should you find yourself on vacation with your family. I’m worried about the dreams I’ll have tonight.

A final fact: Americans spent 110 billion dollars on convenience (read: fast) food in 1999 — more than we spent on higher education, computers, or cars. Crazy. Just so no, people. And say yes to some kale and pumpkin seeds.