Yeah, well — she’s dead. She died when my mom was much younger than I am today, and my mom died a while back.

Pretty much everyone else in the Western world is getting fatter, and it’s primarily because of the poor food choices that most people make. Whether it’s fast food from McDonald’s or a frozen dinner, the result is pretty much the same.

Even the higher quality frozen dinners from Whole Foods aren’t as good for you as fresh food, but they are better than most of the stuff you get just about anywhere else.

I have a general rule in life; if I see one person making a decision I disagree with, I might be comfortable criticizing that person for their actions. When I see a bunch of people making a similar set of decisions I disagree with, I start wondering if there’s a separate driver for shared group behavior. When I see entire populations doing things I disagree with, I am very certain that I’m missing whatever is driving that behavior.

Back to the subject at hand, I suspect that the answer is a mix of cost, stress, and purposeful design. Good food is expensive while the middle class is losing buying power, huge swaths of the population are over worked (stress makes you hungry), and there are massively powerful corporations purposefully attempting to make their products more addictive in order to win an arms race for massive profits.

Blaming the individuals on the receiving end is highly misplaced when it’s happening to the entire country at the minimum.