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Here's the leading cause of obesity in America: Grocery Day.

All across this great country, we citizens waddle into gigantic supermarkets once a week and spend way more than we should on way more groceries than we should buy. We cart these goods home and then pig out on them, sampling all the richest, sweetest, highest-calorie foods.

We're bloated all week after this unofficial feast day. About the time we recover, the cupboards are bare because the kids and their friends have eaten everything, and we do it all over again.

Once upon a time, when people still walked places, they picked up only a few groceries at a time from corner markets. Enough for tonight's meal, tomorrow's breakfast. They ate less and they walked more and, guess what, fewer of them were fat.

Before widespread refrigeration and international food transport, shoppers were limited to what was available from surrounding farms, to what was in season. Not a lot of choice, but people also didn't waste much time wondering whether their tofu or their mango should be kept in the fridge.

As SUVs and suburbs and side-by-side Frigidaires took over the landscape, people started to treat Grocery Day less like a safari and more like a stockpiling raid. No longer hunter-gatherers, we became swooping hordes of shoppers, repeatedly pillaging the small village of Safeway, amassing so much loot we need large, wheeled carts to haul it all away.

At least that's the way I like to think of it, when I'm picking over the artichokes with the snowbirds on a Thursday afternoon. I lead a rich fantasy life.

Because we have two strapping teenaged boys at our house, I buy lots of groceries every week, so many I barely can fit them all into one cart. If the dog needs food, too, it might require two trips. The groceries fill the cargo hold and back seat of my Ford Lemonstar minivan.

When I get home, my sons help me haul the booty into the house, oohing and aahing over the Oreos and Cocoa Puffs they find in the bags. We work as a team, putting away the groceries and then we launch into an individual competition to see who can eat the most the fastest.

It's not intentional. But all that sudden variety is irresistible. Even if we try to avoid a pig-out, there are usually some treats lying about, simply because there's not enough cabinet/fridge space to store everything, and it's hard not to graze.

If there are teenagers around, the snacks and sweets are the first things to go. So if we parents want a crack at an Oreo ourselves, we'd better pounce on Grocery Day. After that, good luck.

Of course, we can't eat all the groceries in one day, no matter how we try. Not a whole minivan load of them. So the second day, we're hard at it again, trying to consume all the grapes before they go bad and the last few marshmallows before someone else eats them. By bedtime, we can barely walk.

Consumption tapers off as the week wears on and choices diminish. Everything that's left is either good for you or requires preparation more elaborate than a zap in the microwave. We survive on frozen food and random sandwiches.

The boys wander away in search of sweets and fast food pilfered from friends. Mom and Dad find themselves nibbling plain saltines in front of the TV because that's all that's available.

Time to go pillaging again. It's Grocery Day.

Steve Brewer is the author of "Monkey Man" and 14 other novels. Write him in care of The Tribune or send e-mail to ABQBrewer@aol.com.