I have no taste for Hullabaloo's food fight, so this may be off-topic, but:

Pathologizing a condition like obesity privatizes it, making it a condition of personal rectitude that is my own weak-willed fault, and obscures the social structures that make this condition so prevalent, particularly among the poor.

Let's get the big ticket items like health care and child care figured out before worrying about the breadth of anyone's ass

Hear, hear.

But all the math that needs to be done is not crystal clear.

On the one hand, it's clear that weight is at least partially a class marker -- a calorie maximizing strategy pursued by the poor who have few other options. And busily creating those class markers are, of course, "Whole Foods Nation," or our "creative class." It's clear, for example, that people who do have options are entirely willing to believe that the same options are available to all. At the near extreme, this becomes the "personal responsibility" meme and an excuse for throwing the poor, who are fat because of their own moral failings, under the bus on universal health care and much else. At the extreme, this becomes the very old story of the powerful controlling the bodies of les autres.

On the other hand, we have the whole feminist critique of fat shaming (see under Venus of Willendorf).

On yet another hand -- and this does come under the heading of "the male gaze," sorry, because this is how I experience it -- just cross the border back from Canada to the United States, and you'll see that this country has something uniquely, yes, wrong with what has become of the American body (all genders, all sexes).

And on yet another hand, I accept with all my heart the idea of the Slow Foods movement that we must reclaim taste if we are to reclaim our bodies, our flesh from the corporations who seek to infest our bodies with the desires that they've created for their profit. And I say this as a person who, well, ate too much ice cream last night.

The class marker critique is right.

The feminist critique is right.

The medical critique is right.

The corporate critique is right.

Unfortunately, if not mutually exclusive, these critiques are certainly not entirely compatible, and they all come together at the body: People eating with pleasure, or on the run, or gorging, or binging and purging, or starving, or on a drip... And so forth.

So this is a very tangled topic, and thanks for bringing it up.

UPDATE To this I must also add the genetic critique.

"fat" is relative, and i don't think there's anything horrible about carrying an "extra" few pounds, esp if you're a busy person with limited time for cardio and exercise. bodies soften and change as we age, as well. so i am in no way arguing for the fashion industry's completely unrealistic and often literally fake standards of 'beauty.'

the "body as class marker" critique is spot on. thanks for saying it better than i could, lb. that's almost precisely how it works in big cities. so of course it's no surprise that out here, where no Important Rich people live, there are people of all races, ages and genders who conform to the body shape foisted upon them as a class.

but at the same time, i'm still curious about why so many people who are obviously trending towards obesity resist the idea that they do have (some, limited, often difficult) better choices.

it depresses the hell out of me, when i go shopping. so many unhealthy people (some in riding carts because they can't walk unaided anymore, they are so sick/overweight) crowding each other in the processed "food" aisles, which the aisles with healthier foods are a breeze to navigate.

i got some time in one as a birfday present. it was very nice.

and yes, again the "body as class marker" concept was present. the only significantly overweight person in it was one of the employees; all the customers and most of the (more highly paid) stylists were in good shape. not only that, but this was an Aveda concept spa, so the customers not only enjoy the pampering of their healthy bodies, but they can maintain and achieve better looking hair and skin, bc Aveda products are completely unlike what is sold in big box stores. the latter are actually usually damaging to the hair and skin. a little known truth about make up and hair care product (smugly trumpeted in spas and salons like the one i was at) is the fact that petroleum-based products increase the rate of aging and damage to hair and skin. even the moisturizers and other products that claim to keep one looking young. i learned all about this when I worked at an Aveda salon a gf owned, some years ago. it horrified me. i know it's silly to think we'd ever have anything like "truth in advertising" in this country, but i'm glad that (again, among the wealthy more than the poor) there is an emerging awareness that the things we're sold to "care" for our bodies are actually killing us.

and just to be clear: Aveda is by no means the only producer of better beauty product, and there are some who go much, much further, in terms of making "progressive" product. Aubrey Organics is one such, and it's almost even an affordable line of product. i strongly recommend the Rosa Mosqutea line of products.

I don't think that's quite it, though it may be a piece of it. Two random thoughts:

1. I would bet -- somebody want to do the research? -- that like so much else that went to shit, the trend toward obesity started in the mid-70s, when our rulerz decided to flatten real wages and financialize everything.

2. If by "beautiful body culture" is meant the culture of "the body beautiful", as in certain portions of LA (just watch at LAX, male gaze again), I don't think that's quite it. I can't speak for France recently, not having been there, but for a long time the difference between (sets of) body types in the two countries was quite visible -- despite or perhaps because of the cooking -- "All Gaul is divided into three fats"; butter, olive oil, and lard -- the portions are smaller; IIRC portion control is actually taught in grade school. There wasn't, at least until recently, the "super size" concept.

As soon as you define people as "human resources" from whose flesh value is to be extracted, a lot else, including food issues, falls into place, I think. We seem to have a different model of value extraction here -- corn syrup? -- and so body types correspondingly vary.

chinese food culture is another place we can make an interesting comparison. traditional food prep there emphasizes ideas like "balance," as in not too much of any one thing. the chinese students around here (and there are many, the local state u is a very popular destination for them, foreign students i mean, not just chinese-americans) are a fascinating exception to the midwest trend of obesity. they really stand out, most of them are so slender.

there are at least three asian grocers in this area. that tells me a lot, in terms of who shops for what kind of food.

I don't believe for a second that obesity and poverty are directly related. Instead people across incomes tend to get what they've been conditioned to get out of our grocery stores and markets. Those trends originate from the community and are reinforced by peer influences and advertising.

I've been very poor, but I had enough nutrition study under my belt to know better than to live off of heavily processed foods that offer little beyond empty calories, unnatural fats, and the real killer, high fructose corn syrup. It's possible and affordable to get back down to healthy whole food staples and prepare them without spending a lot of time or sacrificing good nutrition.

Getting away from a fixed mindset regarding what to eat, portion size, and what's socially acceptable for you to eat is where I think a lot of people come up short and end up putting on excess weight due to nutritional imbalance.

Choices take time, and the touted good choices take more time. When I was little, a fast meal took 45 mins. to an hour to get on the table. A regular meal took longer. Schedules were set with the understanding that people had to be at home at supper or they wouldn't get anything decent to eat.

Now, we assume that everyone can grab food whenever -- people can be expected to stay late at work or to go to evening events or whatever. If the family food preparers weren't already pushed with all the time demands of a complex society, this lack of social support would create a problem.

Then there's the sneering at the diet of 40 years ago, when the grocery store produce section was about the size of today's grocery store potato section. Every meal as a gourmet experience is a new expectation, pushed by both advertising and the upscale lifestyle crowd.

Meanwhile, I'm convinced that the kind of food available has changed in ways that wreck the natural balance of our metabolism. Fruits and vegetables have less nutritional value. High fructose corn syrup does seem destructive. And you're bombarded by experts spouting what seems to me absolute nonsense -- "you eat not because you're hungry but just out of habit. Keep celery and carrots cut up for healthful snacks." That's absolute bullshit; you eat most of the time because you're hungry, and frankly, celery and carrots aren't going to do anything about that. You may be hungry because your metabolism has been wrecked by the kind of food you've eaten, but you're still hungry. And you're being told, "You're a self-indulgent dummy, and I know better than you about everything. In fact, I even know how you feel better than you do."

The analysis of food and lifestyle choices that come relatively easily to people who routinely read doesn't come as easily to those who don't.

So why do people resist the idea that they have better choices? I suspect that most of those people actually do diet from time to time. The diet advice they're given subjects them to unsustainable food obsession which then becomes evidence of their weakness. The whole issue becomes an exercise in humiliation. Aggressive defensiveness seems to me a rather natural reaction to people who know better than you and insist on telling you what you ought to do, for your own good.

I agree with you, CD. It depresses the hell out of me, also.

I think, as lambert says, food habits are hard to break and other habits (like exercising) are hard to build. People "know" (to some degree) what would be better for them to eat, in theory, but, when meal time rolls around, the tendency is to eat what one's eaten before, especially if the "environment" (say, the food you have in your house) hasn't changed.

That's not a laziness/blame-the-eater statement but the opposite—an acknowledgment of how hard it is to do: you have to change what you're used to buying, how you prepare whatever it is, the absolute and relative portions—each step is difficult (and wrongly associated with "deprivation"), putting them all together even more so, and the "pull" of the usual way of eating is a strong counterbalance. Michael Pollan's prescription "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" is not as simple to do as it sounds if you're used to eating a lot of stuff that isn't plants and not even food.

And "getting moving" is hard to do, also, when (1) the dominant culture views it as normative to sit on the couch and watch TV, rather than, say, take a walk, and (2) people work an insane amount of hours and our so-called "work-life balance" (revealing even in its existence) is dangerously unbalanced in favor of work—so people are too exhausted to do anything other than sit on the couch and watch TV.

I love your compilation of critiques, lambert. They all seem right to me, also, (but, of course, they never would have occurred to me).

Your guess, lambert, about the mid-1970s about right. Michael Pollan dates the current trend to 1980:

The rise in obesity in American began around 1980, exactly when a flood of cheap calories started coming off American farms, prompted by Nixon-era changes in agricultural policy. American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans) dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and soybeans) dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent. It is the cheaper and less healthful of these two kinds of calories on which Americans have been gorging.

Pollan points to another watershed event from 1978—the shift from eating food to eating "nutrients":

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.”

[…]

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

So, even when people are trying to "eat right," they're trying to eating substances—and eating too much of them—with, say, "low-fat" or "high fiber" nutrients, not necessarily trying to eat food.

As for the Chinese, my observation is the obvious one: that rising living standards and "Westernization" are causing more and more Chinese to have the same food-related issues we are. They're eating more meat (which causes a host of problems) and probably spending more time in front of computers (writing comments on blogs!) and TVs.

Historically, in Nepal, largeness and very large-ness was de rigeur among aristocratic women -- size was a visual indicator of their wealth, just like their gold jewelry.

Even today, being called "skinny" in Nepali, is not a compliment. "Healthy" in Nepali involves some well-fed chunkiness.

People may inquire, as a greeting, "Have you eaten?" hoping the answer will be in the affirmative.

So I'm voting for the class marker interpretation, fat-wise, western-culture-dependent -- "you can never be too rich or too thin." Thin is rich, rich is thin. The enduring charm of dualistic perception, less than - more than.

I don't like to talk about food, diet, nutrition when health reform is on the table. Just as when I am eating I rarely find it helpful to talk about defecation.

In the later case it can almost always cause people to lose focus on the immediate task. In the former case you have the same problem, food, diet, nutrition et al prevents people from talking about reforming a broken system, Charles Dickens knew the ploy, it is used by the well to do to dismiss the need for health care reform.

Talk about defecation issues after dinner, talk about food, diet, nutrition et al after the legislation is off the table.

I am not trying to suppress speech, just suggesting there is an appropriate time for it.

Yours Truly,

Miss Manners

week just in the produce department, I know - know - that people who are on limited food budgets have to be eating the cheap, processed food products, and that's contributing to their obesity. It's cheaper for them to get a meal at McD's or Burger King than to buy the ingredients and cook them; who can make a decent meal from scratch for a dollar, for heaven's sake? A lot of people just don't cook - thay have no idea how to make something that requires more than "just add water," so they, too are getting chemicals and carbs - and fat.

I grew up in a home where we cooked. When my kids were little, and I was working, and my husband and I were tag-teaming the sports and other activities, I packed real food in a cooler for them to eat on the way to whatever it was. I kept a bag of apples in the car for them to eat if they were "starving" when I picked them up. I was the only mother who made the obligatory birthday cupcakes from scratch - everyone else had the "cool" ones with the neon icing from the local store (because a lot of the moms were too busy lunching and shopping to put on an apron and bake). I remember one summer, our older daughter was invited to go to St. Maarten with a friend's family who had a place there (we could never compete on that level, trust me), and when she got back, she told me the thing she missed the most while she was there was real food; she was so sick of restaurants and take-out and no one even made so much as a sandwich the whole week.

So, it's not just poor people who don't eat right - sometimes it's rich people who can't be bothered to cook, and think eating in high-priced restaurants all the time marks them as being among the elite. The rich, though, can also afford the gym and personal trainers, so it doesn't show as much.

Sometimes I wonder why, if cigarettes can be $7/pack, why processed food that is full of fat and chemicals isn't priced like the harmful stuff it is?

I found a recipe for a fish stew/soup that I'm going to make tomorrow. I had to get shrimp and fish and clam juice and fennel and crushed tomatoes and carrots and celery and some other stuff I can't remember. I know it will taste good - I'm looking forward to making it - but I'm pretty sure it's costing me more than a couple cans of Campbell's Manhattan-style clam chowder.

Food for me is also about the cooking; I like putting meals together, creating something from beginning to end - I like knowing what is in the food I eat, seasoning it myself, making it personal. But I have more time for cooking now, so I can indulge myself.

We're coming up on the holiday season, and food pantries and food banks are making appeals for donated goods. What are they asking for? Canned and boxed foods, instant potatoes, stuffing mix, gravy mix - sure, it's all about the traditional holiday foods, but they're about as bad as it gets. But how do you stock fresh fruits and veggies in a food pantry?

Well, I'm kind of rambling now - sorry - but the bottom line is that it isn't just that people need to be able to afford better food, but they have to be willing to accept that it takes more time to transform ingredients into meals, and in this fast-paced, hurry-hurry environment we live in where everyone wants everything RIGHT NOW! that's going to take a real change in mind-set.

I don't think anyone realizes just what chemicals are involved in food. I seriously doubt that anyone involved in the food poisoning system will ever admit that certain chemicals will make certain people unknowing junkies.

Over the years, almost everything that I ate, I became allergic to. I just had to live with it. I always had what I called "afterburn" in my stomach from the chemicals. I could usually neutralize it for a while with using baking soda, which is a base and which neuters acids. When I selfexiled in 2004, I moved to a second world country and then to a third world part of this country.

Right now, the only food that is produced locally that I cannot eat is fish. I assume the ocean has been poisoned.

I can and do eat all vegetables, local fruits, beef, and chicken. I enjoy my food. I will slip sometimes and buy some american product and I know that I will have my chemical afterburn, but the base food is great. Yes, I am sorry for the poor peasants, but they cannot afford to dose the food with chemicals, use chemicals to preserve it and then use chemicals to cook with. Hey, it is great to be able to eat again.

I am extremely allergic to almost all chemicals. I literally cannot eat in the US. Everything is loaded with chemicals.

When I was there the last time, I was dying in a hospital because that place was purely chemicals. I could not breathe, they wouldn't give my any of my inhalers to open up my bronchial tubes. I checked out in less than 45 minutes after coming out of anesthesia because I would not be able to eat food, drink liquids or breathe. I had two flights from hell to get home but I made it.

Look at the number of children in the US with attention deficit disorder, the number that are autistic. Hey, look around. FAT people. I don't remember anyone from MY childhood in the 1950s that had any of these problems.

Is it the chemicals? Damn straight. I hope the farmers here never have enough money to saturate the foods in chemicals.

Got news for foodies and the healthy body culture. Stopping putting chemicals on the food is NOT organic. The ground around anywhere in the US has been poisoned with fertilizers, weed killers, etc. That stuff does not magically disappear just over a couple of years. Growing a garden in your yard, without bringing in topsoil from some place that has not ever been farmed, is not going to keep the chemicals out. Your food, water and atmosphere has been poisoned.

The FDA is a nasty joke.

Let me, uh, weigh in here.

I try to work with people on changing habits like smoking, fast-fooding. Stopping smoking puts $150 back in pockets. Change both habits at once, there's more money to buy better food.

But it's a surprisingly hard sell.

As to not discussing food when health reform is on the table, that doesn't make much sense to me. Health reform is a group project; food reform one can do all by oneself.

than fat people. We almost all eat crap and if you want to know why we do that, read David Kesslers' The End of Overeating, where he talks about the tricks fast food restaurants use to encourage people to eat more.

Around 80% of excess weight is genetic in origin and losing it is very difficult and unlikely. How do we know this? From studies of children in the early and mid-twentieth century who were surrendered for adoption here in the US, in Denmark and in Sweden. Children who grow up in an adopted family manifest the obesity level of their biological parents - not their adoptive parents. So food habits have very little to do with why we become obese. If I'm genetically inclined to become obese, I will do so on 1500 low fat calories a day despite a good exercise routine. If I'm not genetically inclined, I can pig out on pizza, smoke pot and watch tv all day without gaining any real weight. When i do, it will quickly drop off with just a little moderation. Identical twins, separated at birth and raised in separate families have nearly identical levels of adult obesity and that obesity relates to their biological family.

They did a study in Canada years ago, where they put a group of women in the hospital and fed them 500 calories a day, and kept them busy with a supervised exercise program. They all lost weight. Then they scooted their calorie intake up to 800 calories a day and they all gained weight. Remember, these were women in a hospital whose every bite was monitored. The body can gain weight very, very easily.

Stress causes weight gain. Having a middle class salary that you are confident of relieves a lot of stress. Working 50 hours a week, while trying to raise two kids well in a rotten neighborhood will put the pounds on. Factor in the lack of health care, and the lack of access to inexpensive good foods, and you have a problem. Small neighborhood stores that accept food stamps charge higher prices on average than the grocery stores in the suburbs - so that makes eating right even more difficult. Stress may very well be the primary factor that leads to the increased levels of obesity in lower class families making them more vulnerable to the limited choices in food that they have. Let me remind you, that lots of single mothers are in their early twenties, and in addition to not know much about cooking, also don't have adequate transportation to access the higher quality, lower cost goods in the suburbs.

And another thing that I can tell you from my own experience - when I have clothes that I love wearing, I'm very conscientious about maintaining my weight. But for me, that involves being hungry 24 hours a day (because I gain weight on anything over 1200 calories) and at least 90 minutes of exercise every day. None of my cousins who are trim need to eat like that or exercise as much as I do. So many lower income people have very few pleasures that make weight loss maintenance easy.

http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/ar...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health...

http://gumc.georgetown.edu/news/stories/...

for some people. I've done a lot of work with individuals who abuse or are dependent on various substances and food is definitely one of them. A whole lot of eating is also self-medicating.

Eating disorders -- everything from anorexia and bulimia to overeating -- are very difficult to deal with. An alcoholic can abstain from drinking and a heroin user can stop using -- not that either one is easy, but it is possible. People with food issues have to eat, though -- so they're continually faced with a situation that can undo a lot of hard work.

Then at the other end of the spectrum are the women (and maybe men, I'm not sure) doing time in prison for crack, crystal meth and cocaine, who got started because they wanted to lose weight. Seriously. I don't know what the statistics are for that, but it is a very common reason for using amphetamines, etc. I can't even tell you how many former addicts (female) I've met who long for the days when they were a size 0 -- even though those were the same days when they were living on Skid Row.

btw, there was an interesting piece in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, reviewing four or five books on the obesity epidemic. If I remember correctly, the conclusion was that no one really knows why it's happening or what can be done about it.