They are wont to say that food is cheap in the US to the point of bragging before their compatriots back home that what Pres. Obama is eating is also eaten by members of an average American household.

There’s no quarrel in this reality. Why?

Because food is cheaper in the States than almost anywhere else. Food figures showed that in 2007, only about 6.9 percent of U.S. consumer spending went for food at home; Germans spent more (11.4 percent), as did Italians (14.5 percent) and Mexicans (24.2 percent).

But why is food so cheap in the United States?

As Bryan Walsh explains in this excellent TIME article, it starts with corn. American corn production has tripled in the past 40 years, from 4 billion bu. in 1970 to 12 billion. Billions of dollars of subsidies have injected steroids into corn production, and our farmers have injected chemicals into our fields -- "American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990." Money might be scarce, but cheap food is abundant. As a result, food expenditures as a percentage of income have fallen by half in the last half-century, and obesity rates have doubled. Two graphs, just to drive the point home. The cheap food revolution hasn't just given low-income families cheaper options. It's come at the expense of healthier food. A dollar today buys 1,200 calories of potato chips and 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. Walsh gets it right: "it simply costs too much to be thin."

But that is not the bottom line of this piece.

What we are driving at is the propensity of half-baked Americans (Filipinos converted into American citizens) to flaunt in their Facebook accounts the food they are eating in the States. From these FB postings, these Fil-Ams made a public display of what they are eating as if to impress their folks back home that they are well off in the States.

Well off? That’s the big question.

We have this unbridled lamentation of a Fil-Am daughter who disabled her “friendship” FB account with her mother after she was scandalized with the postings of so-called amazing eats in America—oversized ham, all kinds of steaks, exotic Mexican foods, etc. Her argument was that while these Fil-Ams are highlighting the kind of food they are eating, is it possible that they are also up-to-date in sustaining money for maintenance medicines of old folks they left behind?

If they cannot, then they must be hard up and all this public display of abundance of food in the table is all for show. Yes, it’s all” show biz” in the literal sense, unless they are indeed rich in the real sense. Unless, these bunch of hypocrites is like a lady we knew from way back who was married to a rich American. Though old, this retired investment banker who married a former sales executive of a local resort, was indeed awash with retirement money , that when her old boss visited her in California, the visitor was shown the family garage where a fleet of American cars including limos was parked. The old boss was made to chose what car he would like to use as service vehicle while touring California. This means that this rich American is not particular of what food servings he can afford, but what he is up to, is the impression created by the number of cars found in the garage-- as the ultimate barometer of how rich he is.

To our mind, the issue here is not of plenty, but of insensitivity. While the Americanized Filipinos are wallowing in cheap food by posting them in their FB walls, hundreds of thousands of Boholanos have a hard time getting their next meals. This means many of their “kababayans” are going hungry while their compatriots are wallowing in comfort foods in the US. Now, with cheap American food that they have been used to, how cheap is cheap. To an average Boholano, we may not be eating Stateside foods as hyped by relatives in the US, at least we are free from diseases associated with so much cheap food.

And what most Americans get from partaking low food prices?

We have this stark revelation that rich American food yet cheapy to their standard is fast becoming a weapon of mass obesity. A study as recent as 2006 indicated that about 34 percent of U.S. adults were judged obese, triple France's rate (10.5 percent) and four times that of Switzerland (7.7 percent).