…this scientist just could have taken the easy route and asked Mari, who is both lacking in funds and overweight. Mari simply can’t believe it took scientists this long. Are you all so rich that you don’t bother to think about what the rest of us go through?

Here are some of Mari’s favorite quotes from this “groundbreaking” article.

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Stop right there. Mari has the answer. Fruits and vegetables have been really expensive all of Mari’s life. Mari has lived on milk, bread, and meat if it’s cheap that week. Mari still has to beg and plead and use her own money (what little to none that she has) for fresh fruit and veggies to be in the house.

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

Mari is no stranger to this. All Mari’s life there’s always been tons of candy and pop and ice cream and junk food in the house. But very rarely is there anything low-fat or remotely healthy to eat in Mari’s house. Or even constituting a non-junk-food meal.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

Welcome to Mari’s world. Healthy food is expensive, so Mari rarely gets to eat it when it’s been a while since Mari’s mother has gotten a paycheck. Mari’s family eats fatty meats and breads made into some sort of food with usually doubly-fattening things like mayonnaise, cream of chicken/mushroom soups, and milk/cheese. (Examples are ground meat in cream of mushroom soup on bleached white rice, hamburgers, chicken salad, casseroles, stews.)

Another interesting tidbit that only proves this “less money= more fat” theory is not from Mari’s own experience, but her brother’s. Mari’s brother got thrown in jail for a month or so sometime in 2006 for not paying fines on a DUI. In that time, Mari’s brother got fat (He had been of average weight before). Why? The food they fed him in jail, the economized, super-cheap food, made him fat. He was on work release, so he was still burning the same amount of calories at work each day, but the food was so bad for him that it turned into a pouch of fat on his stomach. He still hasn’t lost it all.

So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year

It’s nice to know the reason Mari and essentially everyone she knows is fat. Thanks, jerkwad politicians. If you got close enough to Mari, she’d kick you in the butt. Hard. With a real big boot.

For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

It’s gone up THAT much? Mari can’t believe that fruits and veggies used to be cheap.

The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

Another part of the farm bill Mari has experience with. Mari had to pack a lunch for years to avoid getting super-fat. As a child Mari knew that school food was bad for you. As soon as Mari had to start eating school lunches (it got too expensive to pack lunch for a while), Mari gained an immense amount of weight (especially for a child). Between age 9 and 12 Mari turned into a fat chick, helped along quite a bit by having to eat school lunches.

More on the actual farm bill:

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the nation’s political passions every five years, but that hasn’t been the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the “farm bill debate” holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention. Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren’t paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes. The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average citizen. It’s doubtful this is an accident.

But don’t give up hope yet. The article details the groups and people and the differences they intend to make. Mari really hopes something gets done because she’s sick of eating processed crap.