Tommy Tomlinson is the author of The Elephant In The Room: One Fat Man's Quest To Get Smaller In A Growing America.From the transcript of his interview with NPR's Melissa Block:
BLOCK: Let's go back a bit and talk about your family because you write about your parents growing up poor during the Depression. They were families of sharecroppers. And food, for them, was vital. It was sustenance. There was never enough of it - really changed for you, as a kid growing up in Georgia, when food became equated with love, that this was something that they could provide for you, that they could give you enough to eat. And you did.--Marshal Zeringue
TOMLINSON: Yeah. I grew up in a Deep South family. My mom and dad always worked with their hands and their backs. They burned off thousands and thousands of calories just at work. And my generation - by the time I came around, I led sort of a soft life thanks to all the work they did to get us there. And so I basically have had desk jobs my whole life. I've always - almost always been a journalist.
But the Southern meals - those big fried chicken and collard greens and biscuits and cornbread and pecan pie, all those sort of things - those never went away because those became not just fuel for the generations that came before me. By the time I came around, it was a tremendous symbol of love and wealth, you know? In a poor Southern family - this, of course, is true in many cultures - food is the richest thing they have. It is - in my family was - the one thing where we felt wealthy is when we sat down at the table.
And that was also an expression and still is in my family of love. Look at this thing...[read on]