New Zealanders' love affair with junk food is merely a symptom of a far deeper hunger, writes the Rev Stuart Crosson.
Over the last decade, one of the more annoying trends on free-to-air television schedules is the advent of celebrity food shows and the related Masterchef epidemic. We seem to have developed something of an obsession with food.
There was a time when our own Alison Holst was enough to show the nation how to cook properly. Today it's Gordon one day, Jamie the next, Nigella, Annabel and on it goes.
During this rise in addiction to food shows, unsurprisingly, our waistlines are also growing at an alarming rate.
Last month, Otago University released figures showing that 28% of New Zealanders were obese. If that wasn't bad enough, another 37% of us are overweight. That means that two-thirds of Kiwis have a problem with their weight.
Recently, my family and I spent two months living in Nairobi, Kenya.
Among the many stark differences between our respective countries, one that stands out is just how fat we are becoming. On the streets of Nairobi, it was a rare occurrence to observe someone who was overweight. Sadly now, in New Zealand society, the overweight person is becoming the norm, not the exception.
Prof Jim Mann, of the University of Otago, has for a long time been warning our nation of this epidemic, and advising us of the terrible cost to our nation's health that results from our fat pukus. It is costly in terms of the diseases which flow on from obesity such as diabetes and heart disease. It is costly in terms of the strain it puts on our health services. And it is costly in terms of the bigger chairs we all need.
Air travel has become just a tad crowded so the aeroplanes get bigger.
So what is going so wrong, that we just seem to be getting fatter and fatter?
It has been rightly observed that, for the first time in history, it is actually the poor who are most susceptible to obesity. Some of the problem can be traced to the rise of "junk food" that costs far less than a healthy, balanced diet.
The sugar-laden soft drinks and the fat-rich takeaways are being consumed proportionally more by the poor than by the rich. Fruit and vegetables, milk and other staples, are becoming harder to afford. But this is not the root cause of the disease.
Multi-national companies are experts at the promotion of our junk food diets that we so readily swallow, feeding our addictions to sugar and fat and salt, but they are not the problem.
The advent of the computer age, with its compelling call to our children to "come and sit your generous backside down in front of me", has diverted our young people away from the tree-climbing and ball-kicking after-school endeavours.
Mum and Dad spend more time on Facebook than on the squash court, but that is not the problem.
There is something going on which is much deeper than this.
Physically, the healthy equation is very simple: if you consume more food (energy) than you burn off by activity, your body will grow.
Controlling the intake while maintaining output will maintain the equilibrium. But getting fat is not usually a simple physical equation. If it were, that diet you have just started (again) would solve the problem.
More often than not, we get fat because of the interplay of emotional, spiritual, economic and intellectual factors that shape us and the society that we have created.
At an individual level, the connection between obesity and emotional health is pretty easy to see.
The boyfriend walks out on you and you spend your weekends at home watching DVDs and eating bucket-loads of KFC washed down with a few litres of Coke. Your wife has an affair and so you spend four nights a week at the pub eating three pies and drinking four jugs of beer.
What I am more interested in is the connection between the current epidemic of obesity (or pandemic as Prof Mann describes it) in our society, and the spiritual component in our life. We have been trying to push God out of our New Zealand society for about a generation now. We think we are so clever and grown up that we can get along just fine without him.
Trouble is, our behaviour so clearly tells us that we are hurting; hurting really badly. We are lonely and not sure what we are supposed to be doing with our lives. We long to be loved, unconditionally. We long to be known, intimately. And when the One who alone can know us and accept us just as we are isn't there, we have to fill the gap somehow. We move from the place of hurting, to a place of unrestrained consumption, to a place of self-loathing, and a vicious downward spiral sets in.
New Zealand needs to wake up and realise that our love affair with chips and fizzy is merely a symptom of a fulfil the appetite of your soul.
•Stuart Crosson is vicar at St Matthew's Anglican Church, Dunedin.
