FIVE BACON rashers, three eggs, hash brown potatoes, stack o’ pancakes and mushrooms sounded good to me. Toast on the side, naturally.

Hey, at least it was one down from the “hungry man” breakfast, I told myself, greedily eyeing the alternative start to a day in the southern state of Arkansas that the diner offered. “And what does that come with?” I asked the waitress.

“Owl the reg’lar, agin,” she replied. I wondered how many hungry men had turned into dead men after fateful decisions to have that “all the regular, again” and passed, with some regret. But its existence did at least make me feel restrained. Mine was just the regular, after all, even if my entire daily calorie intake lay on the white ceramic.

The overfed Southerner is an ingrained, cultural cliché of American life, still, and nowhere supports the image better than land-locked Arkansas: scrub-poor, friendly to a fault and always at the bottom of health leagues. Jonesboro, the town I was visiting, had hardly any pavements, for instance, presumably because so few people walk anywhere.

I had Arkansas in mind when wondering about the “humonsters” who lumbered around in my fictional near-future dystopia; an America where being fat is illegal, so dire are the consequences of unchecked obesity.

Far-fetched? The country banned alcohol for 14 years during Prohibition. It isn’t such a stretch to imagine the effect when people realise — as residents of Arizona have been told already — that about 40 per cent of their healthcare charges are spent treating the consequences of avoidable obesity.

The wider political backlash to this problem seems likely to pit those who eat sensibly and exercise moderately against those who do neither. The wind just isn’t blowing in the other direction any longer.

In the past few years, at least 17 states have passed legislation to address childhood obesity. The city of Detroit is considering a tax on fast food; schools in Connecticut have just banned junk food and fizzy drinks. A list of foods that they will be stopped from selling at all is to be published in January.

But one state is going further, putting responsibility back on parents and raising the spectre of weight as something a child should be graded on, just like maths or chemistry.

Mike Huckabee, the Governor of Arkansas, now requires annual fat reports. These are sent to the parents of every single child aged between 5 and 17; a response, he says, to “an absolutely epidemic issue that we could not ignore” in the 1,139 schools for which he is responsible.

The move represents an important shift in thinking, especially in a state where 60 per cent of adults are overweight or obese, by focusing on the consequence of food, not just the content. This is taking Jamie Oliver’s “Turkey Twizzler” furore to another level altogether.

The weight assessments may be just, as the Governor insists, “guidance” at this stage, but things that start in that gentle, unthreatening place have a habit of ending up on a road that goes through Persuasion to end up in Coercion.

Huckabee is no obscure politician, but a shrewd and significant figure. He is a likely Republican presidential candidate in 2008, a man with national recognition. But what also marks him out is how little there is of him these days. He lost 110lb after being warned that his weight, more than 280lb after a life of southern fried food, was a death sentence. A chair even collapsed under him as he was about to preside over a meeting of state officials in Little Rock.

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