A wider view: in defense of eating heartily, and stiffing the fat police.

ONE of the more amusing events during the Katrina anniversary was listening to Richard Simmons throw a hissy fit about southern eating habits. Simmons, a New Orleans native and former fat boy who now skips rope for a living, announced that when southerners get stressed they eat too much.

Old-schoolers will note the bad taste in crying "fatty" in a city known for its food and drink, especially as New Orleans continues to reel from ministrations delivered by "Mother Nature," as the unreflective call that brutal entity. They will also note that food is one of the greatest of sedatives and southerners are hardly the only people to "self-medicate."

Yet the fitness guru's unsolicited sermon reminds us of the times we live in. Calorie cops roam the nation and especially its airwaves with a missionary spirit that trumps good taste, good sense, and whatever good breeding may have been encountered early on. It is beyond decency to preach the Gospel to cannibals (more about which later) but heroic to thunder at Americans for eating fried potatoes.

Even The Children are fair game: Some school districts have considered designating heftier students as fatties. Perhaps a scarlet F will soon be affixed to their lunch cards.

We southerners, of course, shouldn't be too hard on these people. One must make a living somehow, and it would be far worse, for example, to be turning tricks down at the local Greyhound terminal. At the same time--and especially with the feasting season fast approaching--we might be the best ones to suggest that the nation needs to lighten up on the fat chat. A wider view is in order.

Southerners, to be sure, are the right people to take up this Crusade. Following the example of our Lord, who by all accounts was on the lean side (though he didn't make a show of it), we can preach what we clearly practice. We are tops in the caloric class, with our bona fides recently recalibrated by the Trust for America's Health.

The Trust found the highest obesity rates in southern states: Dixie places eight states in the top ten, including first-place Mississippi, where 30 percent of adults are said to be obese. Other states on the roll of honor include Alabama (28.7 percent), Louisiana (27.4), and South Carolina (26.2). Arkansas and Texas are up there too, but they're not considered southern by all southerners.