Eating Smoke

The national rise in obesity is the consequence of not smoking. If we all still had firesticks to warm us in the evenings, we surely would have coughed all those extra calories away. Surely someone has come up with an epidemiological study comparing the rising and falling rates of lung cancer and obesity. Long dull evenings were always made tolerable by the cycle of wanting and enjoying which cigarettes provided every half hour. Whatever else was going on around you, soon you could have a cigarette. This addictive logic has not disappeared, it has merely been transferred to snacks, drinks and the internet.