eating bad and poverty

I went to high school in a Mississippi town. At our local theatre, the folks who sold popcorn, coke (nothing diet mind you) and candy were a black family of Mom, Dad and (presumedly) Oldest Daughter. At the time, I was worried about being 5 to 10 pounds overweight. All three of these folks had to have been 30 to 50 pounds overweight. They were obviusly working at the thretre to supplement the Dad and Mom's incomes.

I was ignorant enough to wonder how they could afford to eat enough to be so fat. I later learned that it wasn't from eatting too much, it was from eatting the wrong food!

I was laid off November 1989 and it wasn't until 1995 that my new job began paying me well enough for us to have decent food. I ate so much white rice with soy sauce and a little bit of tuna that my boss told me to eat something else. So, having gotten a bit of a pay raise (this was 1991), I started taking baked or mashed potatoes and overly cooked hamberger to work (not always but enough to be noticed). My boss gave up on tryng to get me to eat right. That was too bad...

The result of eatting what I later learned was the wrong food was:

* I gained 70 pounds,
* My blood pressure went up and I may have had a stroke (I'm being treated for hypertension)
* I became a type 2 dibetic (I'm being treated for this with metformin.)
* I eat much better and exercise now but I can't seem to lose that damned weight...

So, I have the answer to my question of why those three poor black folks were so fat. They ate what they could buy and what they bought was very bad for them!

CAVATE TIME: These folks may have been well off and may have been working at the theater simply to meet folks coming to the theater. Sounds good but isn't consistent with the culture of Southern Mississippi in the late 1960s and they never struck me as being willing to talk with the audience (mostly white folks that we were). I could be wrong but I strongly feel I'm not. Alas...

10 October 2006: Why not be candid? Whites didn't like blacks and blacks didn't like white (in general) in Mississippi in 1969...