Here’s a quiz: if you weighed north of 400 pounds, and were given free room and board and helped to drop 100 pounds, what would you do?

1. Be eternally grateful.
2. Thank your lucky stars.
3. Sue someone

Since this is America, the obvious answer is C.

Broderick Lloyd Laswell is doing just that – he’s suing Benton County, Arkansas, because he thinks the county is starving him to death.

Laswell is in the county slammer in Bentonville awaiting trial on a murder charge. He and another man are accused of fatally beating and stabbing a man, then setting his trailer on fire. Back in the good old days this might have been written off as an honest misunderstanding, but times are changing in Arkansas.

At any rate, Laswell weighed 413 pounds when he was locked up in September; today he weighs 308 pounds – and he’s pissed. Accordingly, he has filed a federal lawsuit complaining the jail doesn't provide inmates with enough food.

For a guy who tips the scales (and possibly the entire jailhouse) at 300-plus pounds, I’m not sure the jail could provide him with enough food; in fact, I’m not sure the entire county could. But Laswell is not happy, so he’s suing.

In his complaint, Laswell wrote, "on several occasions I have started to do some exercising and my vision went blurry and I felt like I was going to pass out. About an hour after each meal my stomach starts to hurt and growl."

Note to Laswell: that weird, unfamiliar feeling you’re experiencing is called “hunger.” There’s a lot of it going around but in this part of the world it’s seldom fatal.

I’m not sure what Laswell means when he refers to exercising (but I’ll cut him some slack, because I’m guessing he doesn’t know the meaning of the word). In the same complaint he writes, "If we are in a small pod all day (and) do next to nothing for physical exercise, we should not lose weight. The only reason we lost weight in here is because we are literally being starved to death."

Jailhouse meals are provided through Aramark Correctional Institution Services, and average 3,000 calories a day. A typical Western diet consists of 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day. So, a sedentary jailbird like Laswell is in little danger of staving to death, literally or otherwise. And even if that were a starvation diet, at 300-plus pounds Laswell has enough calories stored to keep body and soul together until he is either released or shipped to the Big House.

Laswell’s complaint also claims that the portion sizes of cake differ from tray to tray. So, while prisoners elsewhere get water boarded, or have electrodes attached to their genitals, or get gang-raped in the showers, Laswell’s biggest beef is that Cletus the mouthbreather gets a bigger piece of Duncan Hines. Heads up, Laswell – nobody like a whiner.

I think Laswell should shut his pie hole about his weight loss; in fact, I think he should just shut his pie hole, period. A lot of people would kill to lose that much weight. Oh, wait … he did kill. My bad.

If Laswell ever gets out of jail (which doesn’t look real likely) he has a bright future awaiting him on network TV – he’s a shoo-in for “The Biggest Loser.”