Like many of my fellow Americans, I’ve struggled to contain a waistline that has expanded over the years. I led a mostly sedentary life until I was in my forties. At that point, I realized that I needed to do something to counteract years of desk work. I also needed to counteract the slow creep of weight gain. I took up tennis and changed my diet. I dropped 45 pounds. Then a career change and frequent travel undermined my efforts at lifestyle change. The weight came back.
This January marks a year of mostly-healthy habits that I adopted at age 67. I’m pleased to see that I’m making progress. I’d still like to lose another 20 pounds, and hopefully that will happen this year, but I won’t lie. It isn’t easy. I’m lifting weights and logging steps, but it’s hard to outrun a cheeseburger. And I’ve got plenty of company. There just aren’t many thin people left anymore.
According to the most recent statistics from the CDC, 73.6% of Americans are overweight. Among them, 40% are obese. This level of fattiness is strongly linked to serious outcomes including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke, cancer, and shortened life expectancy.
These days, there is a lot of discussion about this “obesity epidemic.” It affects not just the United States, but also other countries. These countries have become more affluent and have adopted Western-style diets. It’s a real and growing problem (pun intended). However, it should be understood in the context of the historic progress that has been made in global food production.
For most of human history, people didn’t worry about eating too much. They worried about not eating at all. Scarcity was the organizing principle of life. Hunger, disease, and violence shaped our institutions, our moral codes, even our gods. Civilization was a desperate effort to hold back the chaos that came when crops failed or raiders struck.
The modern world has changed that bargain. In the space of a few centuries we have tamed scarcity to a degree that would have seemed miraculous to our ancestors. The industrial, agricultural, and technological revolutions combined to push back the shadows of famine, pestilence, and ignorance. Global food production per person has more than doubled since 1960. Famine, once the grim punctuation mark of every generation, now occurs mainly as a result of war or political collapse.
Historian Francis J. Gavin has examined some of the paradoxical consequences of this transformation in his essay, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty. The same innovations that banished hunger, disease, and misery have created climate instability, ecological strain, migration crises, and global public-health challenges. The institutions and mindsets that thrived under scarcity—competition, accumulation, expansion—are poorly suited to a world of abundance. Humanity solved the problem of not having enough by learning how to produce more than we can wisely consume.
The Fat of the Land
The obesity epidemic is one of the more literal examples of this paradox. It’s the story of a species that mastered food production so completely that its old survival instincts now work against it. Our evolutionary wiring once helped our ancestors endure famine. They craved sugar, fat, and salt to survive. Now, this wiring has become maladaptive in an environment where those nutrients are cheap and omnipresent.
Critics often blame the food industry for this, and not without reason. Food companies have engineered their products to be energy-dense, long-lasting, and irresistibly palatable, exploiting the pleasure centers of the brain. But to be fair, the industry has also given humanity what it once prayed for. It has provided abundant, affordable, tasty food that rarely spoils. Our ancestors would have thought this was paradise. It seems a tad ungrateful to put Lucky Charms and other foods on trial for being “magically delicious.”
In conquering hunger, we overcorrected. The result is not famine but metabolic overload. In that sense, obesity is not just a public-health issue. It is a mirror of modern civilization. The same forces that overfeed our bodies also overheat our planet and overwhelm our attention spans. The body’s struggle to regulate appetite is a microcosm of humanity’s struggle to regulate consumption.
Overshooting the Target
Gavin’s insight about the taming of scarcity applies to many of the modern dilemmas caused by prosperity. The institutions and mindsets we used to solve scarcity are ill-suited to managing abundance. Economic systems are built on perpetual growth. Political systems are designed to allocate scarce resources through competition. The logic of growth and accumulation that once delivered progress now threatens to destabilize the planet itself.
The “problems of plenty” extend far beyond people getting fat. The information revolution, for example, liberated knowledge but also unleashed torrents of misinformation, distraction, and outrage. The energy revolution powered prosperity but destabilized the climate. Medical advances extended lifespans but created chronic disease burdens and challenges caring for the elderly. Material abundance raises living standards but generates waste, pollution, and alienation.
Each success story contains a warning: abundance can corrode the systems it depends on. Our economic and political institutions were designed to divide scarce resources, not to manage surplus. We know how to compete, but not how to share; how to grow, but not how to stop growing.
The Need for a New Ethic
Gavin’s argument—that the old tools of conquest and accumulation no longer fit our era—invites a deeper question: what replaces them? If scarcity made us clever, perhaps abundance must make us wise. The future may depend less on invention than on restraint, less on production than on proportion.
We need, in short, a new ethic of limits. We do not require austerity for its own sake. We must recognize that the survival instincts of an age of hunger—our drive to consume, expand, and dominate—now threaten the civilization they created.
At the individual level, this might mean learning to eat less, scroll less, buy less, and listen more. At the collective level, it might mean rethinking progress itself. Success should be measured not by how much we can extract. Instead, it should be measured by how much we can sustain.
The Wisdom of Enough
Humanity’s story is, in some ways, a cosmic joke. After millennia of struggling to escape nature’s limits, we now find that survival requires learning to live within them. We have conquered scarcity only to discover that abundance is the harder master.
Perhaps the final stage of civilization—the one that determines whether all this progress endures—will be the taming of plenty. That will require something rarer than intelligence or ingenuity. At the personal level, I still need to figure out how to outrun that cheeseburger. At the level of society, we all need wisdom: the ability to say that we have enough.
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