Tom’s Big Picture

My wife this week made the best pecan pie I’ve ever had.  How?  By using cane sugar syrup (it’s hard to find here, Lyle’s brand is imported from the UK) instead of nasty Karo corn syrup.

It reminded me an article I read earlier this week on the distortion in the economy created by massive corn subsidies.  Click here to read it.

One has to wonder if corn farmers and their lobby are responsible for American obesity.  We already know corn syrup in drinks and such does not produce the same “full” satiated feeling as cane sugar*.

It pains me greatly to see my fellow Americans, especially Southerners, be so obese.  This is one area where we can learn a lot from Europe.  And I’ve rarely heard any preacher talk about it.  In many Baptist churches, it’s as if one beer makes you a drunk (slippery slope logic) while no amount of food makes one a glutton.  And since obese parents tend to raise obese kids, it’s just as abusive as a drunk in its own way.

This is something I’ve struggled with, always being ten to twenty pounds overweight for most of my life.  One breakthrough for me has been to accept that it’s healthy to be hungry, hunger being a normal part of human experience until the miracles of modern agriculture.  Mortifying the flesh, literally.  And a desire to see my kids be different than me, to think more of a banana than a Little Debbie cake for a snack.

*You can blame the sugar cane farmers as well, who have a tariff protecting them.  It’s completely unnatural and inefficient to get sugar from corn, but that’s what you get when the government subsidizes corn and protects sugar.