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A dishonest columnist is a useless one, so I'd better be frank and admit that I sometimes do things I'm ashamed of. I make bad decisions. I have regrets. This is a confession: Last Tuesday I went to get a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast. But that isn't what this column is about.
I ordered it on the app. McDonald's informed me I could get a second McMuffin, free. I thought, "Wonderful. That's my breakfast and lunch sorted, plus lunch is on the house." I took my little sandwiches home. One of them I carefully placed in a sealed plastic container for later. I opened the door to my refrigerator and placed it on the second shelf. The other one I ate with robust appreciation for the salty meat and the perfectly cooked egg. It was so good that, immediately after finishing it, I went to the refrigerator, reached down to the second shelf, took out the plastic container, and removed the second McMuffin, which I ate with great pleasure plus a bit of guilt, since I had now consumed nearly 50% of my allotted 2,000 calories for the day, and it wasn't even 10 a.m. yet.
What this column is about is: Everyone is trying to make me fat.
Like many an under-exercised middle-aged dude, I'm not exactly fat, but I'm what you might call fattish, or fat-adjacent, or chub-curious. My pants are tight. My shirts are tight. My socks and eyeglasses still fit. But fatness is calling me like Ronald McSiren. I could start eating better, but I probably won't, because there's so much food out there, and a lot of it is not only cheap but actually free.
I would have been happy to pay McDonald's $4.69 (I live in Manhattan; stuff costs more here) for a single McMuffin, yet the corporation gave me a second one for nothing. And why? McDonald's loses money on the second one. Why would a company want to lose money on customers? Answer: Ronald McD may look like a clown, but he is playing the long game. McDonald's wants me to have a big, Grimace-sized belly because it'll take more McDonald's purchases to fill it.
I realize this makes me sound like a bit of a conspiracist-wackadoodle-RFK Jr. acolyte. But think of how many giant corporations benefit from my expanding waistline. Levi Strauss & Co (I need new jeans); Hanes (I need new T-shirts). Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Health. The more problems I bring to my doctor, the more medicines he prescribes and the more fancy tests he orders, in each case resulting in a series of mystery bills (the procedure was covered, but not the radiologist or the anesthesiologist, did we not mention that?) that ultimately benefit the New York-Presbyterian Hospital system (annual revenue: approaching $12 billion). The only losers are the federal government, which doesn't really care -- it yawns as it adds another trillion to the national debt -- and me.
The comic Louis C.K. delivered one of the best observational bits this century with his "Of course! But maybe" routine (on his 2013 special "Oh My God") that captured the internal mental agony of modern man, who tries to be caring, wise and enlightened but keeps finding his darkest suspicions confirmed.
Of course! Mr. Kennedy Jr. is a crank, a weirdo, a jerk and a buffoon who admitted to having a worm in his head and is an actual scourge of public health when he tries to steer people away from life-saving vaccines.
But maybe . . . he's kind of . . . right? Sometimes?
RFK Jr. hates ultraprocessed foods. Are they making us fat and giving us diseases such as diabetes and hypertension? A lot of studies are saying yes. A Journal piece published last week noted, "People who eat around nine servings a day of ultraprocessed foods like chips and doughnuts have about a 67% higher risk of heart attacks, strokes and dying from heart disease."
Yikes. Maybe we should, at the very least, stop paying for people's junk food. Yet we do this in the name of "helping farmers" (meaning gigantic agribusinesses with sophisticated lobbying operations) and "fighting hunger" (America's poor are among the fattest people on the planet).
We are subsidizing unhealthy eating up the Ho Ho and out the Yoo-hoo. There's a sick triangle of do-gooder groups, junk food titans (PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company, etc.) and soft-hearted voters who want to "aid the underprivileged" by easing their path toward Type 2 diabetes. Isn't it insane that the federal government pays for indigent people's Cokes, then pays for the inevitable associated medical costs down the line? Same with candy and potato chips. What kind of policy is this? Are we running this country for Big Frito? A 2020 survey found that more than a quarter of low-income children are now obese. For adults that figure was 44%.
Federal spending on food for the poor barely existed as of the presidency of Mr. Kennedy's uncle John; but the federal cost of SNAP benefits (often called food stamps) has skyrocketed from $63 billion in 2019 to $145 billion last year. Nearly a quarter of those dollars go to junk food. That's more than $30 billion that the feds are spending on food people should be avoiding. Thanks to Mr. Kennedy's urgings, 22 states have placed restrictions on purchasing junk food with SNAP.
The new policies won't stop me from overeating at McDonald's. But when it comes to trimming the American waistline, they're a start.
Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.