The Obese and Bulimic are Responsible for the Food Shortages

Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced earlier this week that our world is suffering from a food shortage. Ki-Moon, himself a perfect stranger to want with a figure that challenges the svelte Asian stereotype, announced a plan to begin searching for a committee to start thinking of a way to develop a method to find a solution to this problem. When asked about implementation, Ki-Moon responded that it is too soon to be talking about such final details. With the average cost of food soaring and some Malthusian experts predicting immense food shortages in the future, Ki-Moon is trying to bring attention to a problem that he claims will eventually rival oil price shocks and Al Sharpton in severity.

Perhaps, some experts intone, the problem is that we send too many of our food stuffs to our engines and not enough to our tummies. When oil prices started their meteoric rise a few years ago, some government leaders panicked and intervened in the market to redirect agriculture products like corn and soybeans to the world's gas tanks. Maybe now we are paying the price.

Other political watchdogs say the culprit is the weather and that harvests have declined substantially due to changes in meteorology.

Others blame George W. Bush.

Here at FCN we were dissatisfied with all of these mainstream diagnoses, so we put our crack(ed) staff to work researching the real cause of the world's food shortages. What we discovered will make you want to lose weight the natural way, even if you are 6'2" and 145 pounds.

The obese and bulimic are responsible for today's food shortages. I know, that's a lot to swallow if you've already chomped down on the pre-chewed answers the media are feeding us. If you can keep it down for a couple of minutes, maybe I can add enough spice to make this proposition palatable.

So sorry.

Without exception, fat people weigh more than skinny people. That's a position you can take to the bank and earn interest on forever. In order to maintain their immense bulk, they have to eat more of the scarce products that could prevent starvation in the third world or keep the afternoon growls away in the first world. That's right, when an obese person reaches for another donut, someone dies in a poor country and a white collar American goes without. Further, all the fat guy or girl has to show for it is another wrinkle in his or her fanny.

A good way to redistribute wasted calories and reduce the obesity problem at the same time is to steal food from the hands of fat people. If you see a big guy reaching for another donut, run in front of him and grab it first. Then find a white cardboard box, write "Africa" on the top in a black Sharpie and drop it in the mail. Your postman will either find an emaciated Kenyan to feed or scarf down the donut himself; either way, you will be helping to third world or preventing a decent human being from going postal.

A more insidious threat to global food security is found in the bulimic population. People who eat food, but don't digest it waste the caloric value of their diet entirely and so deprive billions of stable nutrition. Bulimics are especially dangerous because they are so hard to spot. A chronic binge eater may consume two to three times the amount of food an obese person will, but generally looks relatively fit. Without outward signs to warn the rest of us of a bulimic's selfishness, society has no way of knowing who is wasting food and who is using it the way the farmer intended.

If you find a bulimic, get a large white cardboard box, put the bulimic in the box and label "Africa" on the top. Your postman will deliver item to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Finally, start drinking ethanol from the pump. In many states, gasoline is 85% from corn, which is the same thing they make sugar out of. In other words, drinking gasoline is paramount to drinking corn syrup or eating donuts. Just don't smoke afterward.

That's FCN's solution to the problem. It's too bad the Secretary General didn't ask our advice before he...well, wait, he hasn't done anything yet. Mr. Ki-Moon...?