The stock market crash of 1929 occurred much for the same reason as our most recent stock market crash, in 2009. Opportunistic banks speculated way beyond their ability to pay, should their investors have come calling, asking for their money back. It was giddy times, the gay twenties, when speakeasies were running full blast, and there were parties everywhere. Our country had won in a major war, and the future looked bright. Then one bank got caught running way short, and the rest followed, collapsing like a house of cards. The great depression followed, hitting us all like a ton of bricks. Back then, we did not have a government that immediately came to the rescue, like the United States government of 2009. It had to wait for the New Deal policies of the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to dig ourselves out of poverty. Certainly, those efforts came far too late to divert poverty from our family. We were poor. My father was a new Methodist minister, who first had a charge in Warrensburg, Missouri, and was then assigned to a small church in Shawnee, Kansas. Shawnee was at that time a country church, although that whole area has since been swallowed by the ballooning expansion of the greater Kansas City area. The collection plate usually consisted of quarters and fifty cent pieces. The total collection for most Sundays was about 8 dollars. Weddings or funerals became special occasions. Only on those times would our family get a little extra money to buy a shirt, pants or shoes for one of the kids – and each of them got handed down from child to child. For each of us, as that item reached us, it was a new and precious item.
We had almost no money to buy food. We had to survive off the land. My earliest memories are of sitting in the chicken yard, in diapers, playing with the chickens, which I found fascinating. We got the chickens so we could get some protein from the eggs. There was no meat to be had anywhere. We then got a goat, hoping to use it to get some milk for the table. We built a shed for the goat for winter, which was just a lean-to, with a thatched straw roof. I fell through it several times, playing on the roof with my brother, and would walk back to the house, trailing straw behind me. Unfortunately, the goat got spooked one night, and wound its chain around the stake to which it was attached, strangulating itself. That caused great grief in our family. Not only did we grieve the loss of life, but our source of milk and possibly meat was gone from the table. We had to build a cistern in order to have a water supply. I remember being so fascinated by watching the workers (neighbors and church volunteers) digging away in the bottom of the cistern, that I fell in. I do not remember the fall, but do remember passing out, and then being hauled to the surface by concerned men, and cautioned to stay away.
The only way we survived was by maintaining a large garden. Springtime was spent in hoeing, seed planting and raking. We spent a lot of time plant tending during the summer. Fall was spent in picking. We would then sit around the kitchen table, shelling peas, snapping beans, peeling potatoes, stemming tomatoes. Then the entire kitchen would become a wild place full of boxes, jars, lids, boiling steaming kettles on the stove, my mother working frantically to get the boiling contents of those pots into steam sterilized jars, then cap them, let them cool, retighten the lids, and in the final stage, label them all as to contents and year, before we would carry them all to the basement, to be stored in rows on shelves for the winter. They all got used during the winter according to age. We knew not to use any jar that had a bulging lid, and all jars had to pass the smell test before that food was reheated and placed on the table. We lived on eggs, beans, potatoes, peas, corn and tomatoes for years. We never had any meat. Our only special treat was, on occasion, a ripe watermelon from the garden, only in the fall. And boy, did we dive into those watermelon slices once they were cut.
We never had any candy. We were lucky to find someone else had left some morsel on their plate, for some inexplicable reason, and if so, whichever one of us found it would promptly swoop it up, directly into the mouth. Somehow, those extra morsels always tasted the best. There was little time spent eating a meal at leisure. We dove in, and in minutes, it was all gone. We would suddenly come up from our plates, looking around to see if there was anything else left, anywhere. Christmas, was truly, figuratively and literally, a hard candy Christmas. One Christmas, I got a toy tool box, and thought I had gotten the most precious gift in the world. One time, I went to visit with my uncle Ernest, who was out in the field working on tomato plants. He had a bar of brown stuff he took of bite of every now and then. I knew he had a bar of chocolate, and wanted some of it desperately. I asked him three times to give me a bite of his chocolate bar, and each time he would simply smile at me and say, “You don’t want any of this.” I finally ran back to the house crying. I told my dad, who was sitting in the kitchen talking to my mom, with some visitor, that Uncle Ernest was mean, and would not give me a bite of his chocolate bar. My dad almost fell out of his chair, laughing. My mom doubled over in laughter, choking and gasping for breath. Our visitor was guffawing. It appears that what uncle Ernest was biting on was chewing tobacco. It was my first really good lesson that everything is not what it appears to be, and realization that hunger drives you to do some irrational things.
Our first big meal, when we came out of poverty, was in 1937. My mother fixed a big pan of baked pork chops, and a big pot of macaroni and cheese. We all ate big plates of that food, then went back for seconds. Although completely stuffed at that point, I went back for thirds. Then we all collapsed in torpor. I could not eat macaroni and cheese for over a year afterwards. It took a long time, however, to take any meal for granted. We were soon saving our grease for the war effort. We took some kind of white greasy stuff, mixed it with coloring, and called it butter. The refrigerator was stuffed with little containers full of various small leftovers from previous meals. None of it was wasted. We would first have a second meal of multiple leftovers, then a third meal, and then have a meal of stew or soup, which consisted of whatever leftovers were available, once all of the room in the refrigerator had been taken. I never complained about any of those meals, nor did any of my siblings. We were always grateful for whatever food we got. We thought we had reached heaven, a few years later, when we could walk down to the corner gas station and buy a can of grape pop for 5 cents.
It isn’t that way anymore. I now live in a town which has a north/south road called Maple Avenue, which runs parallel to the river heading south. It got its name from the fact that in the beginning of our city, that street was lined with maple trees, and very picturesque from those trees. There aren’t any maple trees any more. The street is lined with restaurants and fast food chains from about two miles south of downtown, to three miles north of town. They are all advertising tempting immediate meals full of fat and salt, to be followed by sugary treats of all kinds. Our citizenry is obviously unable to resist that temptation. Our grocery stores are no less tempting. There are delicatessens at the entry of the stores, filled with tantalizing prepared recipes. There is a bakery in each store, showing all kinds of fat breads or pastries covered with icings, cakes galore, pies and cookies. Then there are rows upon rows of delicious prepared meals in big pans or in individual servings, snacks galore, in Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Thai, name your cuisine. There is such a great variety of inviting food, that just going down every aisle of the store is an exercise for the day, in and of itself. We find this or that appealing, and when we are done, have a big grocery cart filled with more food than we ever had in our refrigerator. And all of it is loaded with fat, salt and sugar. The result of all that plethora of tempting food is not pretty.
We now have 30 percent of our population which is obese, and are heading for 40 percent. All of those who carry that obesity pay a very dear price. I spend my day seeing patients who are morbidly obese, stuffed into wide wheelchairs, because they are unable to take more than a few steps, because of their obesity. You would think that those poorest in our society would be the thinnest, but that is not the case. These are people who are fighting uncontrolled hypertension, uncontrolled diabetes, early heart disease, early strokes, uncontrolled hyperlipidemia, failing fatty livers, uncontrolled leg swelling and leg ulcers, decubitus ulcers, and early death. When I tell them that the main problem is their weight, that they should go hungry and eat less, they all look at me with blank stares on their faces. I have on several occasions had to go out to the ambulance to see 500 plus pounders, who will not fit in our doorways, to get into our clinic. When I tell their significant other, who is always hovering close by, that they are now the problem, because it is obvious this massively obese organism cannot get food for him or herself, they all look at me with blank stares, as if to say “I am not going to deprive the one I love from that one thing that gives them pleasure in their life.” Nothing ever happens with these obese people. Almost all the time, the next time they come back, they weigh more. None of them is ever willing to go hungry, although that is what I did during my childhood, and have had to do later in my life, to regain my health. Occasionally, we are gratified to find a patient who has listened and understood. That is, for the most part, a rare occasion. The vast majority of the population is unwilling to go hungry, if there is tempting food available, and they are all paying a very dear price.
It is obvious that the human population is, for the great majority, unable to control its impulses sufficiently, to deny itself access to those foods we craved in primitive times. We all want, as part of our primitive past, to store enough reserves to tide ourselves through those times when there is famine. That impulse no longer works. It is, in fact, killing us off. It is obvious that, unless we develop stringent governmental control over advertising, (against the dogma of capitalism), or there is once again, for various ideological or natural causes, unavailability of food, there will continue to be an epidemic of obesity. Those of us who have easy access to multiple appealing foods, and as a result are fat, will kill ourselves off in misery at any early age, while those other members of our human population at other sites in the world, who do not have access to food, will die at an early age from deprivation. Those of us who have more than we need should be denying ourselves that engorgement, so that we can provide for those humans who do not have food. That is not happening in our world today.
The current state of increasing obesity, and increasing starvation, in larger and larger segments of the human population, is not a pretty picture.