An overweight argument

I actually agree with the substance of today's Wente. Obesity is rising because people are eating more and exercising less than they once did, and parents give their children too much junk food. Poor people are indeed more likely to be overweight than the well-off.

But as usual, Wente can't resist making her trademark digs - "Latte Land", and imaginary forces of political correctness that are supposedly covering up the problem. In fact, Wente herself has done her share on this score.

She once approvingly cited a book called The Obesity Myth and grumbled about the proselytizers and the demonizers, the moralizers and the food prudes who warned about the dangers of obesity, and whose ranks she now appears to have joined. In a later column, Wente again denied the presence of an obesity epidemic, and wrote public campaigns nagging fat people to slim down are useless. If that were true, why bother with today's column nagging parents?

You can't help but see the pattern - when Wente believed that obesity mostly afflicted rich people, she churned out columns denying or minimizing it, and told food-naggers to buzz off. Now that she sees it as a poor people's problem, moral hectoring is back in vogue.