Jimmu's blog

Obesity is not a simple issue where the magic answer is more activity, like the Government would like it to be. It is a consequence of the industrialized society, of the way we have been living for the past 150 years. It is the culmination of a series of decisions, done over the years, by different parties, and by us. What we are seeing today is a long work in process. 

We have been slowly disconnecting ourselves from our food, and from nature. The Catholic religion has not been helping the matter. Putting the man has the sole creation of God and giving him the Earth as a playground, therefore only there to supply him. 

We have lost the ability to look at food in a healthy way. Still today, we examine, study food and analyze its components. We believe that food is only vitamins, calories and carbs. We have forgotten what food is suppose to be, what it is suppose to do, and what it is suppose to taste. 

We consume too much sugar, no problem, here is a chemical, unsafe for human, but sweeter with less calories. We consume too much fate, no problem here is a chemical to treat the problem. The children have cholesterol problem, no problem, let start giving them drugs. Every year, thousands of supposed new diets come out, pretending to be the silver bullet. Attempts after attempts, in hope to carry on this destructive, disconnected lifestyle. We keep trying to fix the consequences without thinking about the cause. 

We unconsciously consume everything. I remember some years ago, during a Shiatsu class, the teacher was talking about Yin and Yang within food. In Asia, one can spend his entire life studying the delicate balance of food. He said that the food itself is only a small part of process. It is the how, when and where that matters the most. You could gorge down a healthy salad, walking to your next appointment, stressed about your next project, and the nutritional value of this salad would not be better than an oily plain pizza. 

The microwave was probably one of the worst invention for the family dinner. Creating a world where food is sealed, and cooked in 5 minutes, all packed together. 

We spend more time watching television about food, then cooking it. We worry, feel guilt, stress over every ingredient, battle with a society that continuously want to stuff you like a duck.  We freak out about the treatment done to ducks to create the delicious foie gras, yet, the irony is that society is doing it us. 

The writer of the movie Wall-E said that he didn’t write it thinking about the obesity reality, it just turned out that the timing was perfect. 

Andrew Stanton: I didn’t know any of that ten years ago when I began to work on this and I’m not that psyched that some of these things became prophetic. I just went with simple logic. The thing that made me pick humans the way they were. It’s funny, I actually tried to avoid obesity. I wanted blobs, I wanted babies. Because in doing research with our, one of the consultants to NASA and his expertise was long term residency in space and the reason we don’t send a man out to Mars right now is because if we do, they’ll come back with almost no bones because disuse atrophy will kick in with very little gravity and osteoporosis will occur and you will lose a large percentage of your bones, and you’ll just be this jello blob. And, so I thought oh my gosh, that’s a perfect sort of thing dealing with people, later on in life, who have everything solved for them. We don’t have to farm anymore, we don’t have do all these things that make us get up and survive and what if technology was so advanced that all these things were solved. How to live longer, regenerative food, all that stuff, what would you do with your time? Because the theme of the movie was irrational love defeats programming. I just love the idea of a machine that basically had more of an understanding of what living was all about than everything else in the universe that was living and he was almost like the involuntary keeper of the flame of that. And what if everyone that was truly human living had forgotten all that, that they were so distracted and so programmed into their habits and their rituals, that they were filling their days but they weren’t really living. And that’s really what drove it. And the whole realization that if you were out in space for that long you would sort of have a lot of bone loss made me feel like wow, you could almost buy that people would be stuck in their beach chairs and we be almost babies. And I thought that was a great metaphor for having to grow up again and stand on your own two feet. And that’s what drove it.

Now the web is filled with headlines about Disney/Pixar Obesity propaganda. Everyone is so afraid to speak up and wake up the machine. The country is fat and sick, but quiet, otherwise the sponsors will not be happy. 

America being the poster child of the industrialized world, it is normal that the obesity problem finds its root here. The rest of the world will follow. Obesity is a result of our way of living - the way we eat, the way create, the way we sleep, the way we move, the way we think.