Cheap food/high calories. Healthy food is expensive. Obese we are!

A big tip of the hat to Economix for the link to the following chart:

It is simply way easier in the US to consume a whole lot of calories by spending very little money.  A McDouble for a dollar is beyond ridiculous.  It doesn't even make sense that a burger would be this inexpensive. 

More from Leonhardt:

One dollar’s worth of Coke has 447 calories, while $1 of iceberg lettuce has just 16.5. To look at it another way, you would have to spend about $5 to buy 2,000 calories at McDonald’s, $19 to buy 2,000 calories worth of canned tuna and $60 to buy 2,000 calories worth of lettuce.
These gaps have become larger over time, as this chart makes clear:

Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsChange in price of items since 1978, relative to overall inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The price of carbonated drinks, for example, has fallen 34 percent relative to all other prices.

I rarely saw obese people in Quito and its surrounding areas.  BTW, fruits there were tremendously tasty and inexpensive; I think I bought two guavas and two bananas for about 35 or  40 cents.  These were the guavas with the red pulp inside.  Aaah!  One can't get obese by eating a whole bunch of bananas, guavas, papayas, ... maybe we ought to send--at taxpayer expense--the highly obese to Quito, have them walk those ups and downs of the city, and have them subsist on nothing but local fruits, steamed corn, and locro.

Getting rid of agricultural subsidies here in the US makes sense even from a health perspective.  These subsidies are killing us. Literally sometimes.

But, of course, that is not what Congress did.  Instead, the House voted to retain farm subsidies!  As Alex Tabarrok notes, the news headline "House keeps farm subsidies, cuts food aid" makes one think it is from the Onion!