It's just a massive time scale that it happens on, but yes that gives way to feeling like that. Read the first 2, put the last one down halfway through after it started shitting all over the first 2 books with a certain character's actions.
The second book has a really cool few pages that helped visualize what experiencing the 4th dimension could be like.
The series is more interesting for its concepts than it is for plot or any one character imo
Yeah pretty fucked. Let's give the image a ton more credit than it deserves and call it a critique on the increase in childhood obesity and lack of affordable healthy food as well as lack of child nutritional education for parents who may be too lazy/overworked/poor to feed their kids more than McDonald's for every meal