Chew On This: List 3

His family wanted him to have gastric bypass surgery. Sam had just turned sixteen years old—and weighed almost 300 pounds. The operation would reduce his stomach from about the size of a football to the size of a golf ball.

An additional 15 million are “morbidly obese”: they weigh about 100 pounds more than they should.

Since the early 1970s, the rate of obesity among American adults has increased by 50 percent.

One study of obese children in California found that their poor self-image and bleak view of the future was similar to that of children undergoing treatment for cancer.

The first one is a healthy aorta. It’s tan and smooth. It has a slight bounce and feels a lot like a thick rubber band. The second one looks twisted and gnarled. It’s covered in thick yellowish spots.

The second aorta was removed from a person with advanced atherosclerosis, a disease that causes blood vessels to stiffen.

As an artery gets hard, pieces of fat (called plaque) stick to it. If a big piece of plaque suddenly breaks off, it can block the flow of blood and cause a heart attack.

The other backbone is full of holes; Dr. Oz describes it as “crunchy.” It came from a person with osteoporosis, a disease that weakens bones.

Your liver is the biggest organ in your body, and one of the most important. It produces bile to help you digest fats, stores vitamins, maintains the right amount of sugar in your blood, and cleans toxins out of your blood.

The unhealthy liver has a green tinge, and it’s covered with thick yellow globs that are stiff to the touch.

In 2000 he put together a business plan for opening clinics devoted solely to weight-loss surgery. His first Weight Intervention and Surgical Healthcare (WISH) Center was in Downer’s Grove, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

He had stopped taking his vitamins, which led to kidney problems, gangrene, wounds that wouldn’t heal, and blood clots in the brain.

A generation ago American embassies and oil companies were the most likely targets of overseas demonstrations against the United States. Today fast-food restaurants have assumed that role, with McDonald’s a particular favorite.

The war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq prompted a series of new fast-food attacks.

So many fast-food restaurants have now been bombed overseas that the major chains are installing shatterproof windows, special ceiling tiles that can absorb bomb shrapnel, and large outdoor containers, made of cement and planted with flowers, to protect against car bombs.

A new disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, nicknamed “BSE” or “mad cow disease,” was literally destroying their brains.

In 2001 the company responded to American fears about mad cow disease by imposing strict rules on its beef suppliers.

The University of California at Berkeley was known for its radical thinking, for students who liked to make waves and challenge conventional wisdom.

Chez Panisse was soon considered one of the finest restaurants in the United States, and Alice Waters was hailed as one of the nation's greatest chefs.

During the same years that fast-food chains were turning restaurant kitchens into little factories and livestock into industrial commodities, Alice championed an old-fashioned view of food. It stood for a different set of American values: honesty, integrity, wholesomeness, and, most of all, community.

Esther Cook, the chef-teacher at the Edible Schoolyard, has thought up many ingenious ways to combine cooking and gardening with learning.

Teachers work with their students in the garden and the kitchen. At Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, food isn’t something you scarf down quickly and then forget about. It’s an integral part of daily life.

Alice is now supervising the creation of new gardens and new kitchens, finding new suppliers of organic food, figuring out how to prepare healthy meals for nine thousand students every day, and privately raising the money to do all of those things. It is a mammoth undertaking.

It should promote the kind of agriculture and the kind of eating habits that are sustainable.

It’s also a family-owned company, distinguished by a long-standing commitment to selling fresh, locally produced food.