A Guest Post for the Thanksgiving holiday by Senior Editor, Pamela Grundy.  Pam not only writes for Eye on Life, but also has a fabulous blog which is well worth following.

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In just a few days, Americans from sea to shining sea will gather together to ingest a starchy, fatty, 5,000-calorie meal and to give thanks for family, friends, and national plenty.

The very next day, many of these same Americans will rush to the mall at 2:00 AM and mob the doorways (no, we don’t ‘queue up’ here—that’s sooooo Euro-Socialist) in hopes of being the first human shoppers to lay hands on the cheapest small electronics of the Christmas season.  (I got it! I got it!)

Last year, the ‘Black Friday’ carnage in the U.S. got so out of hand that a WalMart greeter was actually trampled to death when he unlocked the front doors.

(WalMart was predictably unrepentant. Hey, freedom isn’t free, suckers.)

Eventually, Satan—I mean, Santa—will scuttle down America’s chimneys (or bust out America’s patio doors) and leave lots of brightly wrapped bad ties and ugly sweaters under every glistening tree, alongside a discount toaster and iPod or two.  

Another enormous meal will be consumed, often involving a roast beast of some sort and lots of sugary sugarplums. And butter. Despite what you might have heard, there’s no such thing as ‘too much butter’. This is a culinary fact.

 The week of December 26th through January 1rst, America’s citizens will once again mob America’s malls, this time to return all ugly stuff they just bought and will never use, in exchange for cash they desperately need.

So basically, between 11/27 and 12/24 we rush out buy stuff we don’t need and can’t afford to give to people who don’t want it anyway, and then, between 12/26 and January 1rst, we all take most of it right back.

Kind of like musical chairs, only with cheap crap from China.

 “Despite what you might have heard, there’s no such thing as ‘too much butter’. This is a culinary fact.”

Post Holiday Diets

Contrast this bacchanal with the post-January 2nd American landscape, when every mall in the country will be so empty you could safely run naked through them and no one would notice or mind. (Maybe the airlines could take a cue from this and just schedule all holiday travel between January 2nd and February 28th—naked.)

Also beginning January 2nd, two thirds of the women in America will go on a diet and/or join a fitness club and lose 10-25 pounds that will come right back by June—often with a few friends—just in time for bathing suit season.

At some point, a significant portion of these post-holiday dieters will decide that sugar, gluten, fat, chemical additives, refined carbohydrates, high fructose corn syrup, eggs, meat, dairy, or some other seemingly innocuous food or food additive is EVIL and responsible for every human ill known to man.

Right, that’s the problem all right. Sugar. Eggs. Refined flour.

Let me make a controversial observation: Maybe food is not the enemy.

Maybe American-style consumerism is the enemy, and Americans, unable to face this basic fact (something the rest of the world sees quite clearly), project their own considerable anxiety and guilt onto food and food-like products in a distorted attempt to maintain a lifestyle that is not only unsustainable, it’s quite mad.  

Why are we shocked (shocked I say!) that 2/3rds of the people in a nation that voluntarily refers to its citizens as ‘consumers’ are fat?

What do consumers do? They consume things! Duh!

 Fat in America

Getting fat and miserable by consuming until you fall over is now an American duty, and happily (or not), America is now perfectly structured so that its citizens can do just that, all day, all week, all year, all the time.

I’m not saying there aren’t real problems with food additives and corporate farming and so forth. Of course there are. But when I was a kid, we ate a prodigious amount of crap (Spam, mashed potatoes and gravy at every meal, creamed chipped beef, dessert every night, JELLO… need I go on?) and very few people got fat.

But when I was a kid we walked everywhere as a matter of course. We walked to the local neighborhood market and carried the groceries home, buying just what we needed for that day. We walked to school, and after school, since we didn’t have the Internet or cable, we played outdoors, which involved a LOT of running around.

If we had other shopping to do we walked to the bus stop, rode the bus to town, and walked all over the place, going from store to store on foot.

Most of the jobs people had involved some sort of activity (or at least allowed it), unlike today’s ‘cube farms’ where employees are hooked to a computer and abusively prevented from moving anything but their mouths and their fingers. Performance goals increase weekly at these places, employees are constantly on task, and rewards come most often in the form of rich food, not more money.

Today’s workplace kind of resembles the life of a factory-farmed chicken, and the results are identical and just as horrifying.

Maybe this year, when so many of us are broke anyway, we can stop beating up on ourselves and stop hating our cushy behinds and judging each other on that basis, and instead give thanks that this consumer madness seems to be reaching some kind of outer limit. Maybe if consumerism crashes, we won’t have to—at least not with crash diets and food fetishes and phobias.

Maybe in some post-consumer era we’ll all look back on all this and laugh.

I hope so. I hope that maybe, just maybe, we can go back to being people instead—the kind of people who gather around the table together and enjoy and nourish each other—just like food used to do, before food became THE ENEMY.  

In the meantime, while we wait for the second crash we all suspect is coming, our family here in Michigan is scaling way back on holiday everything. We don’t want to be consumers anymore. We’re full. We’ve decided to be human beings instead.

Would you like to join us?

Everyone—and I do mean everyone—is welcome.

We’ll be serving real butter. Lots of it.