Sarabonde
New Orleans regularly takes the honors for being first or second in obesity in the nation. You are more likely to see the profoundly obese-one hundred pounds or more-in New Orleans than perhaps anywhere else in America. Paul Prudhomme, the famous chef who popularized Cajun food, is so obese he has to be moved about in a wheel chair. And not for nothing is the infamous suburban version of the French Quarter, located in Metairie, called "Fat City." The Friday before Mardi Gras is called "Fat Friday," and Mardi Gras itself is known as "Fat Tuesday."
One of my relatives, who recently had a heart attack, weighed about a hundred pounds more than what he should have. In a session designed to educate the family about good eating habits so that we could help our relative as he recovered, the nurse (not a native), said to us, in a disgusted voice she did not try to disguise, "This has happened because of what you people [meaning New Orleanians] eat. Do you have any idea how much cholesterol is in crawfish? Or shrimp? " she queried. We had to admit we didn't.
A study done in 1997 by the Coalition for Excess Weight Risk Education concluded that New Orleans was the fattest major city in America, with thirty-eight percent of the population weighing in as obese. The study found that cities like New Orleans, with high unemployment rates, low per capita income, a high number of food stores per capita, large numbers of black residents and, interestingly enough, high annual precipitation rates had the highest rates of obesity. I'm not sure how much our rainfall rate actually contributes to our rate of food consumption, but I do know that food, and a lot of it, is a vital element of the culture here. And we're not talking health food either: fried catfish, boudin sausage, roast beef po-boys slathered with mayonnaise, mufuletas, seafood gumbo, filé gumbo, jambalaya, fried oysters, baked oysters, oysters Bienville, oysters Rockefeller, oyster spaghetti, oyster soup, stuffed mirlitons, redfish courtbouillon, red beans and rice with ham hocks and Italian sausage, boiled crawfish, fried crawfish, stuffed crawfish, sautéed crawfish, crawfish pasta, crawfish étoufée, fried shrimp, boiled shrimp, sautéed shrimp, grilled shrimp, shrimp Creole, boiled crabs, crab salad, crab dip, fried soft shell crabs, sautéed soft shell crabs, trout amandine, bananas Foster, and sweet, sweet iced tea. We eat the fat in crabs, we eat the fat in crawfish, and we like our meat heavily marbled with fat- people expand out of their clothes, rounder and fuller than any human should be, until any discernable skeletal structure disappears. Where is flesh and where is bone? Where is water and where is land?
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