Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

I'll be damned. Poor peo­ple don't eat well, and get fat as a result? Who woulda thunk it?

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – As a portly woman plod­ded ahead of him on the side­walk, the obese mayor of America's fat­test and unhealth­i­est city explained why health is not a big local issue.

"It doesn't come up," said David Felin­ton, 5-foot-9 and 233 pounds, as he walked toward City Hall one recent morn­ing. "We've got a lot of eco­nomic chal­lenges here in Hunt­ing­ton. That's usu­ally the focus."

Huntington's econ­omy has with­ered, its poverty rate is worse than the national aver­age, and vagrants haunt a down­town river­front park. But this city's finan­cial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.

Nearly half the adults in Huntington's five-county met­ro­pol­i­tan area are obese—an astound­ing per­cent­age, far big­ger than the national aver­age in a coun­try with a well-known weight problem.

Appar­ently they have two hun­dred pizza joints in Hunt­ing­ton, WV. Not bad.

I admit to gaw­ping and slaver­ing at the McDonald's quarter-pounder per­haps more than I ought to, even after Mor­gan Spur­lock showed us all that Mickey D's food is a chemical-meat-potato-chicken neck nuku­lar dis­as­ter. Who could for­get the scene with those french fries, under a glass cover for a month or so, that didn't change shape or grow mold? And I will­ingly put that shit into my gut. If it don't decom­pose, why the hell am I swal­low­ing it? I need to answer that for myself soon, but you'll have to excuse me, my cheese­burger and fries are reheating.

Too, I have heard my friend Emily lec­ture to any­one who will lis­ten about the high fruc­tose corn syrup in sodas and many foods, expe­cially the processed foods that— you guessed it—poor peo­ple buy. I'm not poor, if I ever really was— it's debat­able— but I sure enough eat like I'm poor most days. Ease of cook­ing and speed of con­sump­tion rule the day.

This is the part where I say I hope my kids are smarter than I am.