Industrially farmed and produced food has made Americans grow fatter over the past 40 years. The same business techniques and their medically disastrous effects are now being exported around the world

When Forrest Davis left his job in 1985 to set up the Goliath Casket Company, he probably didn’t imagine his business making extra-large coffins would be so successful. The obesity rate in the US was less than 15%, and the market was faltering: at the end of the 1980s Davis’s little firm in Lynn, Indiana, was selling just one “triple-width” coffin a year. Now it sells five a month: various colours are available and the deluxe model has gilt handles and a padded lining. With more than a third of adults classed as overweight and another third as obese. the US today is one of the fattest countries on the planet.

The market has adapted. Some companies provide products and services for larger consumers: bigger seats for sports stadiums and theatres, reinforced ambulance stretchers, king-size mattresses, dating sites for larger singles. Others offer pills to make the pounds melt away, military-style “fat camps” and surgical operations costing $10,000. The fat market is worth tens of billions of dollars. Books on obesity (miraculous recipes for losing weight, analyses of the phenomenon) are so popular that The New York Times has given them their own category in its best-seller list. Yet the cause of this weight gain in the US is well known: it’s the American lifestyle of the past 30 years — eating more calories and burning fewer.

The American way of life, based on the cult of consumption and technological progress, encourages physical inactivity. Thanks to lifts, escalators, remote controls, automatic garden-watering systems, vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers and electric tin openers and carving knives Americans “are burning far fewer ‘accidental’ calories” claim Eric Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman. “Throwing your clothes in the washing machine versus washing them by hand is estimated to result in 45 calories fewer being expended”. Having been freed from chores, Americans could have taken up leisure activities that burn calories but, over the last few decades, they (...)