Engineering a Fat Nation

What are we going to do about obesity in this country? Diabetes is skyrocketing, even amongst my young generation, heart issues related to high blood pressure and cholesterol are also rising at an alarming rate.

There's no point enumerating the problem here, we've all seen (or personally experienced) obesity everywhere in America. Apparently even in third world countries, obesity is rising. Who is to blame?

Well, unfortunately, I'd have to say that the engineers are to blame.

Since the 50's, engineers have destroyed every single piece of hard effort a person had to do. We designed lawnmowers with combustion engines strapped to them, then went one better and added a seat, so you could sit on your rapidly growing behind and drink iced tea while you mowed.
We got rid of saws and introducted "chainsaws", got rid of axes and introduced log-splitters, got rid of washbasins and introduced dishwashing machines. We got rid of clotheslines and introduced electric and gas dryers. And why sweat when you are at work, at your crummy 9-to-5? We engineers introduced central air conditioning, central heating, boilers, chillers, cooling towers, and a myriad of small, personal air conditioning systems to keep you at 70 degrees, year round. To hell with discomfort! To hell with burning calories keeping your body temperature up in winter!
We then turned on the food industry, and designed massive farm implements. A manual "picker" was quickly replaced by the 2-row, then 4-row, and now up to 12-row combine that shucks the corn, strips the kernels from the ear (or not), places them in a hopper, and shreds the corn plant to better enable mulching during the winter. Let me put it this way: beans are no longer planted they are "drilled." We invented larger and larger planters, fertilizer sprayers, bigger buildings for raising hogs and chickens, better trailers for hauling cattle to market, bigger railcars for transporting all those beeves, and designed huge assembly-line plants to trim and process that meat into the delicious, fatty foods you enjoy today.
All this engineering managed to drive the price of food down, down, DOWN to never-before-seen levels of cheapness. In a generation, the family farm was gone, replaced with corporate farms that produced millions of bushels of grains, thousands of heads of cattle and pigs, and over a million chickens a piece.
And the restaurants responded in kind: thanks to the cheap food, they could now increase portion size. They could throw huge amounts of sugar and oil into their dishes, not only because it made the food taste irresistible, but also because sugar and oil were cheaper (literally) than dirt.
But all that food meant that engineers had to design new materials for take-out boxes, new industrial washers for all those dirty plates, and new industrial ovens and fryers for all those massive portions of food!

Oh engineers have been busy making us fat!

Let's not forget, however, the cadre of engineers designing biomedical devices to prolong our sickly lives! Need a quintuple bypass? No problem! Engineers have developed arthroscopic surgery devices to minimize the incision size. They've designed better, dissolving sutures that need not be removed. They've designed new implants, with new materials and shapes, so that when your fat body destroys your knees and hips, they can just be replaced! Has all that sugar rotted your teeth? No proble, as engineers have designed new drills for root canals, and new materials to fill the holes in your teeth. New filing and glue materials so rugged, in fact, that they will still exist after your body and bones have turned to dust. To think, all that will remain of you in a thousand years will be your fillings (and a pacemaker and titanium hip and polyethylene knee).

Anyways, before we all go give fast food companies, or high-fructose corn syrup manufacturers, or restaurant portion size, or even our cultural compulsion to eat all the credit for our global obesity problem, please:

Give engineers some of the credit too.


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