We are what we eat or we eat as we are?

I was brought up by parents who had been formed by austerity and rationing: my upbringing was marked by frugal attitudes towards all sorts of things including food. For me this led to an attitude towards food where not eating is something that only happens if there is no food -While I'm not obese I do carry now more weight than I would like and I suspect my doctors would like to see about 5-10 kilos less of me. I don't know how typical I am but I'm beginning to wonder how far reaction to autsterity is a factor in obesity levels. Clearly that is challenged by the USA figures where austerity isn't a factor, but I wonder. I wonder too how it all relates to greed and sin. Some obesity is not so much greed as miseducation and sheer bad manufacture. Admittedly made to pander to our tastes but these are tastes formed by the need, throughout most human history, to stockpile energy as fat when you could against the lean time that were almost inevitable. Lean times have now for westerners been banished and replaced by abundance. How far are we responsible individually for the fact that we like what we like and food producers want to sell us it?

However, the issue of obesity can maks the 'more' important issues of 'food discipleship'. We need to be asking questions about the way that our food comes to us, by what means it is grown and what web of just or unjust trade does it participate in? What contexts do we eat in and how do they sustain or nurture community or not? Indeed do our eating envionments sutain us individually? Do we taste our food or is it we simpy do while other things [like TV] go on? I rather suspect that if we strain at the camel of such questions then the gnats of diet start to fall into place more and enable us to get a better picture of where our individual greedinesses lie or don't lie.

Let's not think "diet", let's think "global food and health".
The Observer | UK News | Britons break heavyweight record