My fat generator idea

This is my train of thought over yesterday condensed into a few paragraphs.

This might sound a little miserable. Don’t read if you want to stay happy.

I was chatting to a neighbour. I told her jokingly that I had a great business idea to solve the obesity epidemic and to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. It’s this.

I want to set up a gym where the cardio machines, lifting stacks, rowers etc. are wired into a giant dynamo. People would come to generate electricity and to lose body fat. Basically it would convert one of the most abundant and redundant sources of energy in the world- human body fat- into energy.

Ha ha. We laughed. Me smugly, her politely.

Later I recounted this jolly tale to a friend. He said “There’s a power plant in London that does that already. Well, not human fat, but grease.” There is. Look.

That’s just interesting though, not really depressing. What’s depressing is what slowly began to occur to me over the course of the day. That we already have the means to burn body fat as an energy source. In fact, we have many means. We have legs, bicycles, skates, scooters, wheelbarrows, hand mowers and so on. We just aren’t bothered using them.

Why would anyone come to my generator gym when they won’t walk the 3 minutes to their local shop, or push a hand mower, or cycle to work?

We live on, as far as we know, the universe’s only hospitable planet, and we won’t even sit on a bike to save it on an average day.

That’s depressing.

But if you steal my fat generator idea you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.

Barry