As Westerners keep getting richer and fatter, some people are getting worried and want governments to intervene in order to reduce their ability to buy certain kinds of food. John Hawks summarizes their thinking:

Ooohh, those evil corporations. Making food taste good so that we want more of it! Those FIENDS! Why can't they make bad food so that we'll want less?

This kind of mentality leads to nothing good, as Don Boudreaux points out using the example of television instead of food:

Mr. Hill's attitude is the seed of totalitarianism: unable to distinguish what he does voluntarily from what he is coerced into doing, he wants to use force to save himself from the annoyance of fleetingly encountering disagreeable ideas as he flips his channel changer - and to use force to hamper other persons' access to those ideas.

Now, I can afford to laugh at all this because with my fast metabolism, high physical activity level and taste for meat it takes me an enormous amount of effort to gain any fat. Perhaps evolution will weed out the unsexy lardasses. The future may well belong to my descendants who are easily able to remain lean and healthy in an age of plenty. For at least the near future, though, other people do have a problem. It's not a problem government's going to solve, though. Can government make people "eat bad food so they'll want less"? George Orwell wrote about the uselessness of this in The Road To Wigan Pier:

The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

Sounds pretty damn hopeless. You're not the government, though, so you can do something. Become a better cook and make some food for your relatives or friends once in a while. Even if you can't really compete with McDonald's it will make a positive difference, especially if you inspire someone to imitate your ways. Cooking may have made us human once before, after all.

Here's a specific example: Texan grilling methods are vastly superior to those popular in Eastern Europe, perhaps because we just haven't had grills long enough and few know what they're doing. If you lived in Texas long enough that you can make a proper barbecue sauce and know how to use it, you will not only gain popularity but you will also teach people something. Even if they don't actually ask you for advice, just seeing you baste meat will be a valuable learning experience for someone you know. Sure, they may still eat fast food burgers more often than they grill their own, but they'll fire up the grill a little more often once they know how to make their burgers consistently juicy. That makes the world a slightly better place.