I believe Mr. Engbar uses poor data to support a valid point critiquing a movie in a manner that misrepresents the point of that movie.

Reading Engbar Responds! in the Fray, he points out that there will always be a normal distribution of skinny/obese individuals in any population. But it's how you define the population that's more relevant than anything else, even genetics, in Engbar's example: every day people choose to belong to either a fast-food nation of consumers or a locally and organically grown population of vegans. I exaggerate the extremes, of course, but considering those populations separately you likely (I have no statistics) have the same relative distribution of weight (or BMI if you prefer) but with vastly different means and medians.

In WALL-E you see a future where the consumerist Buy-N-Large population has successfully eliminated all other populations on the Axiom. Note that we see this on the AXIOM, not necessarily on the pre-evacuation Earth. We don't know what Earth was like before the Axiom left; maybe all the healthy folk left a dying Earth centuries before the Axiom did in a last desparate search for bountiful asparagus. Maybe they took some of the earlier ships, the ones we're told were NOT the most extravagent. But what we do know, from looking at the ships captains, is that constant exposure to the Buy-N-Large lifestyle, with no need to work, limitless leisure, and unending advertising, all spread over multiple generations, successfully converted all the shipboard individuals to a single unhealthy population of consumerists.

I don't expect children watching WALL-E to pick up on any of this, of course, nor do I profess the veritable truthiness of my argument. However, I expect Mr. Engbar to pick up on thematic elements like this while dissecting the movie for an article for Slate. He did not, instead using the excuse of WALL-E to push an argument that other authors in the Fray have clearly demonstrated is only weakly supported. For this reason Mr. Engbar's article was strongly disappointing.

None-the-less, I think many people are missing the forest for the trees. Mr. Engbar was partially right in his original assessment: WALL-E showed obese people because the easiest way to show rampant consumerism is to show someone we assume has over-consumed, and this may not always be an accurate assessment.