A book title I can believe in

“The World is Fat: the fads, trends, policies, and products that are fattening the human race”

I like the play on Friedman. I think I like anything that makes fun of Friedman actually.

Barry Popkin is the author.

He is the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition at University of North Carolina. That’s a long and pretty crazy title. “Professor of Global Nutrition”. I dig.

I picked up his book at NPR. From the back of the book:

Popkin argues that widespread obesity is less an effect of poor individual dietary choices than the consequences of a high-tech, interconnected world in which governments and multinational corporations have extraordinary power to shape our everyday lives.

In a cultural matrix where Kellogg spent 32.8 million dollars in one year marketing Cheez-its, you gotta wonder.

WTF:

32.8 million is more than the budget of a lot of Hollywood films:

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls – 30 mil
Million Dollar Baby – 30 mil
Dodgeball – 30 mil
Mumford – 28.7 mil
Zoolander – 28 mil

…just to name a few.

Think of the amazing movie Kellogg could have produced!?

And Cheez-Its are nasty.

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Anyways, I’m gonna read Popkin’s book and post about it so stay tuned.

(BTW, “Hot, Fat, and Crowded” would be an awesome book title too.)

In case you were wondering…

I know I was.

Here is Thomas Friedman’s daily routine (via dailyroutines.typepad.com):

“Honestly, I still can’t wait to get my pants on in the morning,” Friedman said. He wakes early, then exercises on a stationary bike, and if he has a column in the paper that day he’ll read it through online two or three times, asking himself, “Did I get it right?” On weekdays, he’ll head into D.C. for a seven-thirty breakfast meeting, which is sometimes followed by an eight-thirty breakfast meeting. The Times has a floor and a half of a building a few blocks north of the White House, and three of the four Op-Ed columnists who are based in Washington–Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd, whom Friedman calls his closest friend on the paper–have offices at one end of an open-plan news floor. “I see him every few weeks or months, passing through on his way to Fez,” Dowd recently said. Friedman’s large corner office has windows that are oddly small and high, leaving wide areas of wall space. He has hung a poster of a three-masted sailing ship tipping off the edge of a flat world, which he bought long before he wrote “The World Is Flat”–attracted, in part, by the title, which is “I Told You So.”

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“Honestly, I still can’t wait to get my pants on in the morning”

Why is this quote so amusing?

Maybe cause it invites wondering about what would really need to happen for Friedman to put on his pants lethargically, with a hint of melancholy. Or better yet, not put his pants on at all.

Maybe this would do it…