The Embarassement of Being Overfed

I've been thinking about food a great deal recently. Of course, thinking about food is not exactly a new pastime: I think I have thought about food a great deal all of my life. However, travel does make me think differently about food, as did the two books I read on the trip, Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen and Her Fork in the Road edited by Lisa Bach.
Thomsen spent four years in the Peace Corp on the coast of Ecuador in the late '60s. His chronicle is well written (Happy Cricket's long ago review points out some of the funnier passages), unintentionally depressing, and food obsessed. He reminds readers of the close relationship between food (particularly protein) and development, particularly intellectual. He finally realizes that his efforts to better the situation in the impoverished village he lives in fail not because of bureaucracy, laziness and cultural differences (which all play a part), but largely because for several months every year there is not enough food to support men working or children's brains developing.
Her Fork in the Road, is much, much different. The book is a collection of essays celebrating women eating and travelling; the kind of book my mother and I eat up. While in Ecuador looking at small people (knowing that most of adult size is nutritionally and not genetically determined) and being fed meat at every meal, I was not as impressed by the essays discussing eating as a passion of the senses as I usually am. I found myself drawn to the essays describing hunger (and Kelly Winters' descripion of hunger on the Appalachian Trail and Dawn Squires' essay about a food-less Solomon Islands feast are both spellbinding).
Overall, I concluded that being overfed is really an embarrassment. By eating too much (and having the resulting body), I am shamelessly flaunting my wealth, working against my environmental principles, and acting irresponsibly with regards to my own health. I should be ashamed.
This did not stop me from buying the local specialty, a layered homemade ice cream bar, as our bus ambled through Salcedo.

Both books, by the way, are highly recommended. I did have the impression reading Her Fork that I had heard a lot of this before. As a reader of MFK Fisher, Ruth Reichl, Elizabeth David, Frances Mayes and Isabel Allende, I had actually read much of it before. I also had the nagging impression that "I could write better." My mother, who believes in food writing and my ability to write more than I do, might have given me the book (twice!) to remind me exactly of that. If food (and plant) writing is my calling, why am I not doing it?