Re: disagree....

Trapper,
is this ever true to life, OMG!! you have hit the nail precisely
on the head, as usual. It's all about food! Remember, too
that all our rituals are food-based. From Thanksgiving and
Christmas dinners, to the seder in the Jewish religion (this
is my all-time fave), to weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, or just
a family get-together for no particular reason, it's all centered
around a meal. If you want to see your family, you gotta eat.
Then there are the candy-eating orgies at Easter time and Halloween.
While this is great in moderation (not orgies, but getting
together w/ the family for a meal) we as a society are immoderate,
as you are pointing out. That's why cruises are so popular:
they lay out these huge spreads for the passengers, 3 times daily,
and there's not much else to do aboard ship but eat. Also, I think
the extreme gluttony in our culture may have its basis in the
rampant frustration that people feel nowadays, from limited
employment choices and underemployment, seemingly intractable, overwhelming
problems such as global warming (particularly for our children and
theirs), problems of over-population, pollution, the degradation of the
environment, etc., which we did not have a generation
or so ago. I dunno; that is my guess. Thus eating becomes a huge outlet,
a sanctioned way of forgetting about all of problems, temporarily. It
takes real discipline to just say no and go against the tide, like you
and other dedicated CZers are doing. You need to be a bit of a maverick
in order to survive these times, into a healthy, fit and ripe older age
(I won't say "old" age cuz we're never gonna get old, LOL). Tweet