To consider legislating weight control—the problem I have set myself to thinking about here—requires honestly considering the ways weight, and, more to the point, fat, works in American culture. Here personal experience clarifies things for me: A few years ago I lost about sixty pounds (more or less by eating less and exercising more), but until I was 30 years old I spent most of my life being what other people called “big,” what I thought of as “fat,” and what my mother occasionally referred to as “obese” (the ugliest word in the language). For me the major emotion associated with fat is rage—that is, a kind of anger tinged with humiliation, the kind of anger that comes from and represses but can never repress enough the humiliation from which it stems. Now, when I see overweight people, I am often overcome, not with sympathy, but with anger, with contempt for their weakness and their inability to control themselves. Such reactions are, if not insane, then certainly irrational, and I wish that I didn’t have them. But I do, at least in the first instant, before the conscious comes in and civilizes me.
Fat people make me angry largely because I am so frightened of going back to being fat, afraid of a return to the shame and embarrassment about the degree to which my body betrayed my desire to be attractive, to be admirable, to be somehow something that I could be proud of. Those people who know me will say, I think, that I was never that bad or that big—but from the inside this is what it felt like a lot of the time, and until I was 30, this self-directed anger and shame was not strong enough to make me do anything about it.
I would like the world better if I thought my feelings were my own, but they explain to me—or rather, they speak of the cultural presence of—a much broader cultural relation to fatness, a condition that encompasses at least three of Christianity’s seven mortal sins (greed, sloth, and gluttony) and whose moral weight therefore runs deep in the American unconscious. This relation includes among other things a nicely binarized take on fat people’s sexuality, which they either lose entirely (the “jolly” stereotype), or acquire in predatory excess (think of Jabba the Hutt).
It is because fat is such an emotional issue (and not just for me) that legislating obesity or the food industry—which, given the serious health costs incurred by habitual overeating, a practice sustained, encouraged, and marketed to children and adults alike by the food industry, is at least something that we are likely to see discussed over the next few years (as in Krugman’s column)—is likely to be inflected by the politics of anger and humiliation that I have just described.
For instance, any legislation designed to help people lose weight or eat less will run up against arguments that suggest that fat people simply need to work harder, be less gluttonous, and simply exercise a little self-control. You see this happening with legislation designed to help the poor: why should we help people who are too lazy to help themselves? Call this the Dr. Phil problem.
And, from the other side, any legislation designed to discourage obesity (taxation of high-calorie foods? Tax credits for low body mass indexes?) will run the risk of being driven by fear or disgust. You see this problem in anti-drug legislation, which justifies its irrational mean-spiritedness through recourse to claims about social ills, the damage to families, and so on—all while locking up people five times longer for using crack than for using powdered cocaine. The law can never admit after the fact to the pleasure the people take in punishing.
The alternative to legislation directed specifically at individuals would be to understand fat as part of a broader process whose dimensions are legal, cultural, economic, and biological. The food industry will resist this, of course, but it’s worth pointing out that the cigarette problem has been solved by combining non-coercive health care information (the surgeon general’s warning) with deep restrictions on marketing (pace Joe Camel) and purchasing (you must be 18 etc.), and a series of lawsuits designed to help states recuperate some portion of the costs they have incurred.
With food, it will be more complicated, and perhaps we will never be able to blame the food industry for doing “this” to “us.” But it feels likely enough that we can change the future’s relation to food and to obesity by considering fat not an individual problem but a social and economic one. Here are six signs that such a change might be coming.
1. A renewed sense of the genetic dimensions of obesity, visible in all sorts of recent studies that show that some people are predisposed to gain weight and others aren’t. This destroys the rational grounds for the moral superiority of the thin.
2. A broader theorization of the “culture of obesity,” that is, a sense of the large-scale reproductive nature of the problem (the passing on of certain habits from parents to children, from communities to their members, and the like) that seems to me to draw on a Daniel Patrick Moynihan-esque reading of the “culture of poverty,” a sense that individuals cannot be held responsible for acceding to a cultural message that establishes the very air of thought they breathe. (Not that there aren’t problems with the “culture of poverty” structure).
3. On the heels of “culture of” language, “war on” language—the notion of a large-scale politically effort (since the government or NGOs are always the origins of such declarations of war) designed to treat obesity as an enemy to be defeated. This kind of language seems dangerous, most likely to catch up individual fat people in its wake, and most invested in blaming: think here of how the war on drugs and poverty have functioned to blame drug users and the poor. (For more on wars "on," see here and here.)
4. Lawsuits against McDonalds, which though they have been unsuccessful so far nonetheless indicate that a kind of thought is becoming available, and that citizens are looking for ways inside the legal structure of the polity to fight against the forces they hold responsible for their weight.
5. Super-Size Me and Fast Food Nation: popular cultural products designed to produce an awareness of the food industry as part of the problem, either by highlighting its economic interests and abuses or its false marketing.
6. The possibility—not widely available, to be sure—of beginning to think the difference between the species and its culture. I mean here at some simple level that humans evolved genetically to consume certain kinds of food and at certain rates, giving them a set of genetic predispositions that I believe are fundamentally incompatible with the world of food as it exists today. Both the deliciousness and the availability of food to the vast majority of people in the developed world (a fact to be considered alongside the fact that lots of people outside the developed world are starving) operate at a scale that must be understood as fundamentally inhuman—that is, as fundamentally outside or beyond the genetic capacity and needs of the species to comprehend.
I mean “comprehend” in the etymological sense of to grasp, to seize, and I imagine the scale of comprehension to be planet-wide: that is, I mean to indicate the degree to which the species as a whole cannot integrate the food industry into a coherent and species-internal life. Here I recall Heidegger’s insistence—and Lyotard’s, later—that the world had become devoted to the evolution and development of technology rather than of the human species. Though I’m suspicious of the dream in which we all return to the Black Forest, I think a serious understanding of the politics of fat will have to begin from a clear sense of the fundamental incompatibilities between human beings as genetically limited animals on one hand and the scale, developmental structure, and desire of the culture they have constructed on the other.
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