Texas: Through thick and thin
Hey, Houston! Not only are we better than you, we're thinner, too.
By Patrick Beach
American-Statesman Staff
Thursday, January 10, 2002
We Austinites are a famously quarrelsome bunch, but when circumstances dictate -- as they surely do now -- we are well capable of putting aside our differences and standing united.
So stand, turn to face the rest of the state, the part of Texas that only wishes it could be as cool as us, and repeat after me:
Fatty, fatty, bo batty . . . you're fat and we're not.
Men's Fitness magazine has pronounced Houston the fattest city in the land -- for the second consecutive year, no less. What's more, Dallas tips the scales at No. 5, San Antonio is feeling a little bloated and gassy at No. 7, and Fort Worth -- well known for its fondness for cow -- fleshes out the list of fat Texas towns at No. 8.
It's hardly news that the state that invented chicken-fried bacon and the 4-pound, eat-it-in-an-hour-and-it's-free "steak" (elsewhere known as "family-sized pot roast") would be busting out the seat of its Wranglers. But little old us? Why, Austin is the16th-fittest -- that's fittest, not fattest -- city in the nation, according to the mag's rankings. Congrats. Go have yourself a tofu notdog and a carrot juice smoothie.
This news couldn't have come at a better time for Austin, which -- with its glacial traffic, denuded dot-conomy and chewable air -- was just beginning to have second doubts about its longstanding superiority complex. But now Men's Fitness, bless their ripped pecs, has bestowed us with a measure of validation. We are cooler than everybody else. It says so right there.
The magazine looked at the 50 largest cities in America and considered air and water quality, obesity rates, availability and quality of parks and recreational spaces, climate, TV viewing patterns and (we're sure) overall irrational smugness of inhabitants to come up with its rankings. One presumes the survey did not factor in the proprietor and regulars of Ray's Steak House. (The Ray's on Guadalupe even has a fat phone suffix: 0000.)
Austin is also well-known for Threadgill's, and Threadgill's is well-known for its chicken-fried steak. But, owner Eddie Wilson said, he's also helped start a fair number of gyms around town, and the five-vegetable plate at Threadgill's is available in 276,432 possible combinations. The fattening of Houston and the rest of the country, Wilson believes, is the fault of chain fast-food joints.
"I've been giving people good nutritional food and places to work out," Wilson said. Yeah. Yeah.
To get the skinny on who puts the "ton" in "Houston," we engaged in the journalistic activity known as Making a Phone Call. To The Cheesecake Factory we dialed. To general manager Tony Montero we spoke. To him we asked, "Do you see a lot of fat people there?"
"Uh, that would be a question you'd have to ask our corporate relations office," Montero said.
And that office is located in -- danger, extreme irony ahead -- svelte, self-satisfied California.
We then engaged in the journalistic activity known as Not Bothering to Call California to Find Out if People in Houston are Fat.
Now, some nonfit non-Austinites will surely see this and cry that the fat are once again being discriminated against, that fattism is the sole remaining societally accepted prejudice, it's a metabolism thing, blah, blah, blah. Oh please. Yes, I'm talkin' to you with the doughnut. You eat too much, and too much of it is junk. You will one day soon require angioplasty and defibrillation and we as a society will bear the cost.
We Austinites may be "between jobs" just now. We may have just broken a tooth trying to inhale the ozone-y air. We may be stuck in traffic until the sun burns out. But we're also thinner than you.
So Fat Texas, look at what you're eating right now and let us ask you one question:
You gonna finish that? Because we're getting kind of hungry. |
