A Christmas Irony

While hunger is a very real problem in this country now (an estimated 1 out of 7 of us are on food stamps), I need to pick another bone with - who else - our eminent news source, CNN, about its choice of finding the right words, or in this case pictures, to accurately describe the situation of, well, anything.

In brief:  Don't use an overweight kid to describe starvation.  

But why?  Don't fat kids get hungry, too?  

Of course.  I'm not belittling the fact that while more of us are going hungry, there's even more of us with expanding waistlines, becoming the fattest nation on the planet.  Out of this abundance, we are still worried about our kids having enough to eat.  I must also point out that, perhaps, overweight kids are probably in more danger of being both fat and hungry at the same time, since cheap food is also quite fattening.  How easy is it to spend a few bucks off the Dollar Menu at McD's and feed your entire brood for less than ten bucks?  Yup, that easy.  When money is tight and you need to feed a lot of mouths, the options diminish quickly.

But most folks can't get past the meaning of the picture of a fat kid:  Fat equals full.  Skinny equals starved.  When you're coming down to advertising your product, as CNN must do like all other businesses, we are being presented with an irony, even if it may turn out to be true.  Fat kids in need of more food?  Isn't there something better out there than a stock photo of a child sitting in front of an empty plate, probably looking at the buffet just behind the camera crew?