英美报刊阅读教程中级本第五版端木义万lesson5FoodandObesity.docxVIP

— PAGE \* Arabic 1 — 英美报刊阅读教程中级本第五版端木义万lesson5FoodandObesity Lesson5 Food and Obesity Being fat is be coming the norm for Americans.As it will soon be come in this country, I have seen the future, and its extra large.  By Joan Smith  A friend who happens to be both American and a superb cook-his poulet de Bresse en deuil is one of the most memorable dishes I have tast-e-dcalled me a couple of days ago,enthusing about a lecture he had just at ended.The thesis,he said,was that the human body has changed irrevocably over the last quarter of a century and that the physical environment —chairs,beds, airline-sweialltgsradually adapt to accommodate the new shape.It is,of course,in the US, where my friend no longer lives,that this evolutionary experiment is most advanced;for years now, millions of people have been gorging themselves on vast helpings of fast food, with the consequencethat about 60 percent of the population is overweight.  According to Greg Critser, author of Fat Land：How Americans Became the Fattest People in the Word, none of this has happened by accident. Critser argues that the challenge to the US food industry in the 1970s was that the population was growing more slowly than the food supply, so people had to be persuaded to change their eating habits. Fast food, invented after the Second World War as an affordable way of getting families to eat together, became a means of selling surplus fat and sugar to the far-from -unwilling masses. This is a social revolution on a grand scale as scarcity, with which most human beings have had to struggle throughout history, has given way to an apparently permanent state of plenty.  It may also help to explain why the magician David Blaine, suspended without food in a Perspex box beside Tower Bridge,has such a grip on peoples imaginations.In an astonishingly short period of time, starvation has metamorphosed from a threat to a spectacle, and families are turning out en mass eat weekends to see h