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I normally don’t like the television network news magazine shows with a thesis, as they tend to accept an expert’s thesis and structure the whole program around it. Peter Jennings’ report on American obesity and the food industries, which aired on ABC last night, was no exception. Its thesis was clear: that agricultural subsidies and food marketing combine to encourage unhealthy eating and ultimately an obesity epidemic. The program was so defiantly propagandistic, with D.W. Griffith-style contrast editing and confrontational interviewing, that I almost sympathized with Tommy Thompson and the food industry’s P.R. guys.

Almost. Ultimately, there is just too much evidence against the status-quo-is-fine camp: too many grocery store aisles devoted to soft drinks and snacks, too many resources devoted to developing unhealthy foods, too much candy marketed as breakfast food to children. The show did a good job amassing this evidence and - what’s better - helped make the food culture we see as everyday seem strange and excessive.

It’s food culture in fact that’s the missing part of the puzzle. As with many big-corporations-are-behind-everything explanations, there’s a lack to sociology: why audiences like certain music or movies, why pedestrian culture died so suddenly in the late 40s, and in this case why people buy and eat supremely unhealthy food in unhealthy portions. Any explanation of obesity and general diet problems in this country has to take into factor several points, which the ABC special neglected:

Class difference: All other things being equal, city and megalopolis residents eat better than their suburban and exurban counterparts, and the upper-middle class eats better than the petite bourgeoisie and working class. Part of the difficulty in urging people to eat better is that “better” is in fact a class-bound decision of what a diet should be. Small portions of roasted fish, served with a whole grain dish and vegetables cooked lightly in olive oil? The sort of meal nutritionists recommend, but also the sort of meal that your average Applebee’s patron will reject as pretentious, foreign and/or unsatisfying.

Sexual division of labor: processed and fast food has become popular in no small part because it requires less labor to prepare, yet is in the budget means of most families for everyday meals. If one were to track its growth historically over the last two or three decades, one could see it is directly proportional to the entry of women into the workplace as full-time workers. This is not to blame working women for bad American diets of course, simply to note that with people devoting far fewer hours to unwaged domestic labor, something has to give.

Vestigial food culture: there are accidents of national food culture that linger despite changed historical circumstances. Even before processed food, Americans lived for the most part on a meat-and-starch diet, with vegetables at best an afterthought. Such a diet may have suited an agricultural lifestyle, but has become deadly when combined with low food prices and sedentary white collar work.

Agricultural productivity: government subsidies aside, meat and corn and soybeans will still be much cheaper to raise than fresh produce, because the latter is by nature less efficient to grow. In fact, increasing productivity has in some ways hurt the quality of produce: taste has been bred out of fruits and vegetables in favor of color, size and storage - qualities that are amenable to cross-country and supermarket distribution. How much this contributes to the larger problem is anyone’s guess, but how successful will suggesting an apple as an alternative to other snacks be when the apple one finds is of the bland, waxy, pesticide-tasting variety?

Car culture: The ABC show was dismissive of exercise as the single solution to the diet problem. But if its argument is that government agricultural subsidies encourage bad eating, what about the government policies that have discouraged urban development in favor of pedestrian-unfriendly suburban development? One can be significantly overweight with a pedestrian lifestyle but the chances are definitely lower.

If the left’s food-industry-is-behind-obesity explanations run roughshod over careful sociology, however, then the right’s people-should-be-able-to-make-their-own-decisions response flatly ignores the social. Certainly people are ultimately responsible for what they and their children eat. But they have been increasingly making bad decisions, for reasons that are historical, cultural and related to government policy. More than other areas even, voluntarism is an inadequate response.