The Lipo-Pod

What Phil Gram said last week about us becoming a nation of whiners was cruel and unfair, but partially true. It is utterly insensitive to dismiss someone who has just lost their job and is about to lose their house as a “whiner”. Yet the whining about skyrocketing food and energy costs has reached a crescendo recently, even as we continue to consume vastly more than we need and to disdain any sort of conservation or abstinence.

This sort of whining invokes the image of someone obese standing at the buffet in a Vegas hotel, his plate piled high with meat and potatoes and complaining because “they” just ran out of the lobster Newberg. We Americans have been spoiled. A fleeting glance at history will prove that we have been spared much of the misery visited upon less fortunate regions of the world in the last century.

Indeed we have long taken it for granted that we have a God-given right to guns, gargantuan fuel sucking, hydro-carbon emitting vehicles, cheap food and gas, the right to vote and many other luxuries and privileges that most people in the world could either not comprehend or could only dream about. Many Americans seem to resent the fact that lesser developed countries are growing rich and now boast of a burgeoning middle class.

In years past the protocol was to arrive on Ellis Island, change your name, take the pledge of allegiance, then move into a ghetto on the lower east side of Manhattan and hope that your grandchildren might ultimately crawl their way up into the middle class. With their economies booming, in large part because of our insatiable appetite for their exports, people in India and China want a better life. These people now expect their turn at the buffet.

The process of buying a new car in China these days is an almost sacred ritual; one that confirms or validates upward social mobility. We Americans look on and begrudge these people their success. Pradeep Mehta, the secretary general of an independent research institute based in New Delhi observed back in May that if Americans all went on a diet and attained the same weight as middle class Indians the massive amount of food saved would feed many starving people in Africa.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/business/worldbusiness/14food.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Americans%20and%20liposuction&st=cse&oref=slogin)

He further observed that the amount of money Americans spend every year on liposuction would be enough to provide food to starving people around the world. He is probably right. Of course one of the main reasons commodity prices have increased as much as they have in the last year or 2 is precisely because of the emerging middle class in countries such as India and China.

There is no crime or greed in this; it is an ineluctable trend. And if the pace of change and development endures, then I am sure there will be billions of Rupees and Renminbi spent on liposuction in the years ahead. We are all human, after all. In the meantime we Americans will just have to suffer the slings and arrows from a world that does not pity our current economic plight.

I would add to Pradeep Mehta’s comments that if the average American adult male weighed 185 lbs. and the average adult female weighed 130 lbs. the airlines would save billions of dollars a year in jet fuel. In his blog, Infectious Greed (dated July 14), Paul Kedrosky revealed an illuminating set of statistics and estimates from an ATA document that would support this hypothesis:

§ One airline saved over 17 gallons/year per pound of weight per airplane after shedding in-flight phones, ovens, excess potable water, and some galley equipment on an older fleet

§ In removing seat back phones from its MD-80s and B737-400s, another airline shed 200 pounds per airplane, translating into 3,400+ gallons saved annually

§ Alaska Airlines indicated in March 2004 that removing just five magazines per aircraft could save $10,000 per year in fuel; also, the airline has reduced the weight of catering supplies

§ Air Canada considered stripping primer and paint from its 767s to save 360 lbs. per plane

§ JetBlue and US Airways and others have moved toward a paperless cockpit

§ By removing six seats, JetBlue reduced A320 weight by approximately 904 pounds

§ Airlines have been able to remove ovens, trash compactors, or even entire galleys, due to the elimination of hot meals on selected flights; others are using lighter seats; they have also removed magazine racks and replaced hard cabin dividers with curtains

§ AirTran ordered carbon fiber Recaro seats for its 737-700s to shave 19.4 pounds per row, resulting in estimated fuel savings of $2,000 per year per aircraft

§ Alaska’s new beverage cart, at 20 lbs. lighter, could save $500,000 in annual fuel costs

§ Some airlines flush lavatories during extended ground delays to minimize takeoff weight

(http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/07/14/the_slimfast_di.html)

So if the airlines could save billions of dollars in jet fuel by resorting to these measures, just imagine how much could be saved if America shed a few million lbs. of fat. CNBC revealed today that 25% of Americans are obese; not fat or just overweight, but excessively fat. That means some 75 million Americans are obese. Of the remaining 225 million let’s assume that a further 25% are fat and need to knock off about 20 lbs; undoubtedly a conservative assumption.

That‘s 56 million Americans; now assume that in this combined mass of 131 million Americans each needed to lose 35 lbs. (another conservative estimate). This would mean a staggering figure of 4.5 billion lbs. of fat, or nearly 2.3 million tons. The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 747-400ER is 910,000 lbs, or 455 tons; just to put this into perspective. The other night a friend of mine and I were at a late night “happy hour” at Ruth’s Chris here in Seattle.

Seated next to us were 5 of the largest women I had seen in years; and I am being kind in describing them as "large". They must have averaged 240 lbs a piece, with one or two weighing in at nearly 300 lbs. And as you might imagine, they were slurping Cosmopolitans and gorging themselves on steak sandwiches, crab cakes and all manner of high fat foods. It was enough to make me lose my appetite. Imagine being seated next to one of these ladies- or Heaven forbid! In between two of them on a flight.

We have all seen those small metal racks at the airport designed to check that your “carry-on” luggage is within the acceptable metrics. So why not have an economy class seat placed right in front of the check-in counter to insure passengers do not take up more than their fair share of space? If a passenger flying coach is too fat to fit into the seat so as not to invade the space of the passengers sitting beside him, he is given 3 options: 1) pay for 2 seats 2) pay for an upgrade or 3) go home and go on a diet. How about this for a solution?

If we are unable to trim down to size of the average, middle class Indian man or woman someone should devise a way to take all that excess fat from liposuction and burn it as fuel. It is revolting to contemplate, but then again we use manure to fertilize our pastures; why not burn body fat to power our vehicles? I have even come up with a name for this kind of eco-car: the Lipo-pod! Or perhaps the i-Cannot-Believe-I-Used-To-Weigh-That-Much.

Today, the Yankee ethos of modesty and taking only what you need survives only in small pockets here in the USA. Get over it America. We have had our turn at the buffet. We need to go on a diet. And perhaps the tough economic times that almost certainly lie ahead will provide us with an opportunity.