This story from NPR covers an academic paper, which claims watching food TV causes people to gain weight. Couldn't it also be the other way around? People who are overweight (or have some other characteristic increasing susceptibility to overweightedness) are more likely to watch food TV?
Wendell Berry opines about the lack of farmers overseeing farmland in the Atlantic. He seems to overlook the advances in precision ag technology that give farmers more knowledge about their land than they ever had before despite the fact that farm size has grown.