Many in America these days are, to one degree or another, overweight.

No big thing, unless of course, you’re trying to get to Heaven.

The Bible, I believe, is a prescription for getting to Heaven. And one of the things it says is: If you have two coats and your neighbor has none – give him/her a coat for goodness sakes. (“Average Joe” paraphrase.)

Now it doesn’t take the Pope, or Billy Graham… to figure out this might not just be about “coats” in a literal, ‘London Fog’ type sense.

Let’s say you’re an overweight American. And someone else is a frightfully skinny (read: undernourished) Haitian.

You, as the overweight American, eat three quite square meals a day, and snacks; while the undernourished Haitian (Ugandan, Columbian…) eats one rather meager meal a day. (At least half of the Third World eats this little.)

Biblical corollary: The American has two quite heavy coats, and the person in Haiti has a quite thin, threadbare coat.

So if I’m an American who wanted to follow the true spirit of this Bible passage and give one of my coats to a neighbor in need, wouldn’t I cut my food intake almost in half (less portions, fewer snacks), and take the savings to help better feed my brother/sister in Haiti?

Well, sure.

Problem is: Not many in America, or many in the other more well off countries for that matter, are doing this!

An Aug., 2004 National Geographic article on being overweight in America noted that in an “historical first,” there are now as many over-nourished people as under-nourished people in the world. (What’s more, according to U.N. figures, 24,000 people in the world actually starve to death – every day.)

Many die from physical complications that come from lack of protein.

However, some folks in rural Dade City, Florida are trying to change that in a big way at the Morning Star Fisherman Center. A non-profit, non-denominational project, Morning Star teaches those from the Third World how to start “fish farms,” combined with the growing of some vegetables with recycled water from the large fish tanks.

On a recent tour of Morning Star, Franciscan Sister Kathleen Keck told me the primary fish raised here is Tilapia, which is reported to have the highest protein content of any fish in the world.

And it will be Tilapia that Glenys Carmona will raise in her Honduran village of Elcallejon (pop. 250) when she gets back. Ms. Carmona, 22, whose scholarship through Georgetown University allows her to study at Morning Star, told me a Spanish non-profit agency and several local merchants have pledged some seed money for her fish farm.

But it won’t be enough.

So I was thinking…

Average Joe Schriner writes about moral and social issues from the backroads of America.