A list where nobody wants to be #1: The fattest state rankings. Mississippi "wins," with 32.5% of adults and 44.4% of children considered obese, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina. Colorado is the thinnest state. "I know, if you are like me, you are sick and tired of Alabama being waaayy down at the bottom of every listing of states and their accomplishments," jokes Left in Alabama. "Here's a list that ranks us near the top!" VivirLatino says we need to remember that "Beyond just the superficial 'you eat too much junk food' analysis, these statistics have everything to do with access to healthy food, education and everything that goes along with living in impoverished areas or belonging to a traditionally oppressed group." "What's wrong? The entire industrial food system based on corn and sugar and on treating animals really badly and OUR acceptance of this as being not only normal but desirable," writes Robert Paterson's Weblog.

Maybe the food system as it stands will seem less acceptable after watching the new documentary Food Inc., which "exposes, gracefully but mercilessly, the ugly, rotten heart at the center of the American food industry. A giant machine with dollar signs in its eyes, the corporate monster that tortures these pigs and workers, that fattens chickens so quickly and ruthlessly, they can't support their own weight, that keeps cows standing in piles of their own manure, manure that gets into our food supply, causing E. Coli outbreaks that take the lives of innocent children (another harrowing sequence in the movie)--this is a mighty foe, the most nefarious of villains" (via The Amateur Gourmet). Or as Variety puts it: does for the supermarket what "Jaws" did for the beach. Take Part offers a list of ways you can get off a corn-based diet, lessen your carb(on) food/footprint, support local farmers and choose humanely raised meats. "Demystification becomes a matter of stifling nausea," writes More Intelligent Life. "After our tour of the slaughterhouses of the meat industry, we are subjected to a lingering shot of a package of bacon in a supermarket. Somehow that bacon is scarier than a summer's worth of horror films."