HERE IS WHY America is such a fucked-up country: " 'Carb counting' doesn't mean giving up your favorite foods." So says the e-mail message header from some marketing flack somewhere, hired to represent some chef somewhere else who's busy whipping up have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too recipes for fat, greedy, entitled, terrified Americans. We don't want to be chubby when we arrive on Mars, ready to start strip-mining!

Of course it is human nature to seek the easiest way, the path of least resistance. Each of us is helpless in the face of certain foods, and most of us want to be healthy. In an ordinary moral universe, this natural, inevitable tension would produce some sort of compromise. I will have the brownie, but then no wine for dinner.

But I am not sure America is, or ever has been, a normal moral environment. The something-for-nothing culture is as old as the country itself, from the "buying" of Manhattan for a few trinkets to the Louisiana Purchase to the unapologetic seizure of most of the rest of North America and beyond. We talk ritualistically and pridefully about "capitalism" and "free markets" and our ferocious ideological adherence to same, but really our economy has long been based on pillage and tribute, on the transfer of wealth from fringe colonies to the center and the use, or threat, of military force to keep the wealth flowing. Ours has been an imperial economy, it has supported us beyond our means, and it has produced a widespread attitude in the people under its sway – citizens is a bit too lofty a word here – that we can have it all and pay little or nothing for any of it.

It is clear that food-industry shills and presidential candidates alike are nervous about telling the people anything they are unlikely to want to hear, no matter how true or necessary. You can't sell stuff that way, and health and politics, having been commodified along with everything else in the culture, have to be sold, have to be pitched and hustled to a buying public used to being pitched and hustled. And what better pitch could there be to a nation of gaspingly fat people that, with a few painless dietary tweaks – "low-carb" buns for their triple-bacon-avocado cheeseburgers, which they wash down with 50-ounce triple-fudge milkshakes – they can go right on gorging themselves while becoming as svelte and sexy as the concupiscent young buffsters they watch every week on The O.C.?

We might be able to cluster-bomb sad countries like Iraq into submission, but our one-two punch of bluster and shrapnel won't work on the basic facts of nature. Neither will the most ingenious marketing. Sorry, no sale.