Prometheus 6

You probably had no idea it was this easy to manipulate humans.

Maybe I was, in other words, the subject of experiments like those just completed by a team of psychologists from UC Irvine, whereby researchers figured out ways to subtly manipulate the minds of happily naive subjects so as to actually implant -- wait for it -- positive or negative food associations. False memories. Bogus likings. A distaste for strawberry ice cream and a deep love of asparagus. And so forth.

This is true. This just happened. And the reason they did it? Get this -- they did it, ostensibly, to help people diet. Right.

...They did it through having subjects fill out complex questionnaires and then flagrantly lying to them about the results, by looking all serious and scientific when they said, "Gosh, Billy, our complex mathematical data reveals that strawberry ice cream made you sick when you were a child," and Billy replies, "Oh, wow, really? It says that? Yeah, um, OK, sure! I remember now! Yes, I got sick eating strawberry ice cream! I hate strawberry ice cream! I shall never eat it again! Yay research!" And the psychologists snicker at their amazing powers of suggestion and Billy looks confused and everyone goes home and gets drunk.

This was, in a nutshell, the methodology. They used no chemicals, no drugs, no secret Russian mind-control radio waves because who needs that when we've clearly become so mentally feeble and cosmically weak that we will happily let our brainstems be tossed about like ping-pong balls in a wind tunnel just to make us stop snorting ten-pound bags of McDonald's French fries and injecting Coke by the gallon and suffocating our kidneys?

...Yes, we are an obscenely obese nation, the fattest on Earth and only getting fatter and clearly we are still desperately hungry, insatiable, our appetite only growing and our butts only widening and our sense of true health and whole foods and the appreciation for our radiant flesh all dissipating like honey incense in an oil fire. We have now accepted this as indefatigable truth, the sad American way. But you have to ask, how the hell did this happen? And what, really, are we truly so hungry for? Why can we not get ourselves full?

Look at it this way: A balanced and humane, sexually healthy, well-educated, spiritually empowered nation has no need to gorge itself on poisons, no need to bloat itself and add massive layers of enormous flabby cushioning (mental or physical) to its body in order to protect itself from the violence of the world and the shrill ignorance of its warmongering leaders and hey wait did I just begin to answer the question?