One nation, overfed

We Americans -- many of us anyway -- are pigs. We pile far more on our plates and stuff far more into our mouths at any given meal than do most folks anywhere else in the world. That’s why so many Americans are so fat.

The last time I checked, 65% of Americans were either overweight or obese, including more than 25% of Americans younger than 19, a figure that has doubled in the last 30 years. Last week, for the first time since the federal government began periodically issuing dietary guidelines in 1980, the guidelines pointed out the importance of weight loss, as well as healthy eating and cardiovascular health.

No wonder.

We super-size everything here, especially those things that are already fattening in normal-sized portions. As I watched the various college football bowl games and NFL playoff games in recent weeks, I was repeatedly appalled by commercials for Taco Bell that were built around people bragging about feeling “full” after eating the new Taco Bell specials.

I’ve always thought that feeling full is uncomfortable. I like leaving the dinner table feeling satisfied, happy, not hungry -- but not full, not gut-wrenching, belt-bursting full.

These Taco Bell testimonials were always followed by a listing -- and disgusting photos -- of some of the wonderful offerings that made people feel full, among them a half-pound burrito. Who needs a half-pound burrito?

Then, last week, on the front page of The Times, I read about “the hottest new hamburger at Hardee’s” -- a “Monster Thickburger” that contains “two 1/3 -pound beef patties, four strips of bacon and three slices of cheese, slathered with a generous glob of mayonnaise and encased in a buttered bun.”

I hate to quote the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a well-known hotbed of food fascism, but they’re only overstating things slightly when they call this 1,420-calorie, 107 grams-of-fat-burger the “fast-food equivalent of a snuff film.” As The Times story pointed out, an average 165-pound person would have to walk briskly for more than three hours -- or run for almost two hours -- to work off those 1,420 calories.

I’m not one of those folks who orders a chef’s salad (shudder) and iced tea (surely you jest) for lunch. No one who has eaten with me would ever mistake me for an abstemious diner. I have a good appetite and a sweet tooth, and I often eat more than I should. That’s why I’m a few pounds overweight myself.

When I have a hamburger, I want a nice, thick hamburger, not some skinny White Castle patty that looks like a Post-It note. When I have a steak, I want a thick 12- or 14-ounce New York steak, not some dainty 6-ounce filet. When I go to a restaurant with a great chef, and he offers to prepare a menu with a double-digit number of courses, I almost always say the same thing: “Yes, please.”

But I don’t eat steak or hamburgers or multi-multi-course dinners every day -- or even every week or every month -- and I try to be reasonably moderate about everything in my diet (including moderation). Despite an occasional burst of gluttony, I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a super-sized anything.

Many Americans do so daily, though, and Hardee’s and Taco Bell have a lot of company in the rush to make them fatter than ever. Pizza Hut is selling a Full House XL Pizza that’s touted as being 30% larger than its regular pizza. Del Taco has burritos that weigh in at more than a pound apiece. Chili’s invites customers to “Build your own ‘Big Mouth burger.’ ” Carl’s Jr. has a 1-pound hamburger -- and a double pastrami burger.

Speaking of pastrami, have you ever tried to bite into a pastrami (or corned beef) sandwich at one of those famous New York delis -- Carnegie, Stage or Katz’s? As one Zagat contributor said of the pastrami sandwich at Katz’s a couple of years ago, they’re “so big you’ll need a tire jack to get them in your mouth.”

Quantity over quality

Back in the gastronomic dark ages in this country -- before cheap transatlantic airfares, nouvelle cuisine, Julia Child, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck and the New American cuisine transformed the way we think about food -- Western Europeans (the French in particular) used to make fun of American eating habits -- not so much for the great quantity but for the abysmal quality of what we ate.

Now, of course, the best restaurants in this country challenge the best restaurants anywhere -- even France, where the prestigious daily newspaper Le Monde announced not long ago that the best French chef in the world just might be an American (Thomas Keller). Moreover, standards have slipped in France, and the long-derided American fast food movement has established a beachhead there and throughout the world. McDo, as it’s known in France, is now very much an accepted fact of French life. Paris alone has 65 McDonald’s.

Today the difference between us is more a matter of quantity than quality. I’ve heard that observation time and again from chefs and others who have worked, lived or traveled extensively here and in Europe, and I’ve seen it myself as well. Europeans are stunned by how much we eat in this country, on a single plate, in a single sitting.

If you’ve ever been to one of those all-you-can-eat buffets in Las Vegas, you know that many Americans think the “arrangement” of food on a plate simply means piling as many different items on top of each other as you can carry back to the table without spilling anything or getting a hernia en route.

And what about pasta? Before the low-carb, no-carb diet craze, many Americans thought eating pasta -- as opposed, say, to meat -- was a good way to lose weight. But Americans don’t eat pasta the way the Italians do. Pasta portion sizes in most U.S. homes and in typical Italian restaurants here are far larger -- and are covered with far more sauce -- than any self-respecting Italian would ever consume.

Why do so many Americans insist on gorging themselves on such huge portions? Is there something in our national character/culture/psyche that predisposes us to behave this way?

I’ve always thought the answer is that we do it simply because we can, because we live in a country of abundance and freedom, and we’re resistant to any limitations, even those that might be wisely self-imposed.

Morgan Spurlock, whose fast-food documentary “Super Size Me” recounts the damaging effect on his health of a 30-day diet of nothing but McDonald’s, attributes the big-portion phenomenon to what he calls “the value proposition.”

“We’re raised to think value is important -- two for one, all you can eat, get your fair share,” he told me when we spoke last week.

Thus, all those feel-full items at Taco Bell are listed on the company’s “value menu,” and several of McDonald’s oversized offerings are include in the Golden Arches’ “value meals.”

Spurlock thinks this is a byproduct of the Great Depression -- and several subsequent recessions -- and he calls it a “recession mentality.”

But why would this be unique to Americans? Western Europeans have had their own depressions and recessions, and one could argue that the deprivations and rationing of two world wars should have left them even more determined to eat a lot than we generally more fortunate Americans.

“America is historically a country of immigrants, though, people who came here seeking a better life, trying to leave poverty behind,” says Darra Goldstein, editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. “Their diets had been mostly circumscribed, and meat was a rarity. Then they came to the United States, and even for those immigrants who still lived in poverty, a wider range of foodstuffs was more available in this very large country.

“People got used to eating more, eating things not available in their native countries, especially large hunks of meat,” Goldstein says. “That became the American way, the mentality that if you’re eating larger portions, that means you’re better off, even if you really aren’t.”

That mind-set, Goldstein says, was passed on from generation to generation.

French versus American

In her new book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” which last week shot up to No. 2 on the Amazon.com bestseller list, Mireille Guiliano says the “greatest enemy of balanced eating [in the United States] is ever-bigger portions,” which she terms “a gastronomic Waterloo....

“The essence of French gastronomy,” says Guiliano, the French-born CEO of Champagne Veuve Clicquot, “is to have a little of several things rather than a lot of one or two. This is the exact opposite of the American sense of portion.”

Barry Glassner, a USC sociologist who’s writing a book on Americans’ beliefs about food, says big portions are just a natural concomitant of most Americans’ approach to life. “Americans like everything big,” he says. “It’s integral to the American ethic, to how we see ourselves. We like big cars and big homes and big portions and politicians and movie stars who are larger than life.”

“Look at the term ‘superstar,’ ” Glassner says. “I can’t imagine that expression developing in any country but the U.S. It all goes back to our sense that bigger is better and to our notion of limitless land and our reluctance to accept limitations on that, too, even at this late date. It’s the way we think.”

It’s also the way we get fat.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.