Obsession with Weight, Part 5

The Obesity Myth
by Paul Campos, J.D.

(Page 5 of 6)

I have no affection for conspiracy theories; and most popular accounts of how information gets interpreted and distorted by the media tend to be both too rationalistic and too conspiratorial. But I will say this: The experience of reading hundreds of articles about fat published in our nation's major media over the course of the last few years, while at the same time actually studying the primary scientific research regarding the subject, is something that can make theories of manufactured consent and the like begin to look fairly plausible. As the joke goes, a paranoid person is somebody who suspects what's really going on. Except that it isn't always a joke: Spend three years reading the scientifically spurious propaganda of the diet industry dressed up as "investigative journalism," and then get back to me.

Anyway, back to "Let Them Eat Fat." The most valuable feature of this essay is the relatively clear glimpse it provides into many of the emotions, ideological inclinations, and outright prejudices that help explain why we are beset by so many irresponsible public policies directed toward the issue of weight in America. This is, in a sense, to its author's credit. For Critser does not, like so many other writers on this subject, wholly repress any explicit acknowledgment of the more disturbing impulses that fuel the war on fat.

Critser thinks he has found, on the streets of Los Angeles, the answer to his question regarding how Americans can be so health-conscious and so fat at the same time. A recent article in Glamour magazine, written by a Glamour editor whose assignment was to go an entire week without weighing herself or counting calories (this was clearly meant to be perceived by the magazine's readership as a Herculean task) describes Los Angeles as a city where it's "illegal to sign a lease if you have a body fat percentage of more than 6%." That's one side of the city to be sure (the west side, more or less). But in what Critser describes as "the heart of the San Fernando Valley's burgeoning Latino population," the situation is quite different. It is here that Critser attends the opening of a new Krispy Kreme doughnut store, and witnesses scenes that he describes in something akin to the tone of a Victorian missionary confronting the savage rituals of the natives, somewhere deep within the heart of darkness.

Critser interviews the manager of the store, who touches on the elaborate marketing strategies that go into choosing the location of a new Krispy Kreme outlet: "'The idea is simple - accessible but not convenient ... We want them intent to get at least a dozen before they even think of coming in.'" Critser asks the manager who these prospective marketing targets might be. "He gestured to the stout Mayan doñas queuing around the building. 'We're looking for all the bigger families.'" "Bigger in size?" Critser asks with what appears to be an almost pornographic air of fascination. "'Yeah.' [The manager's] eyes rolled, like little glazed crullers. 'Bigger in size.'"

At this point I should say something about my own background. My parents came to the United States from Mexico in the year of my birth; my mother remained a Mexican citizen for twenty years after that; and I spoke only Spanish when I began going to school. All of which is to say that as a Mexican American, I'm naturally more attuned to the resonance of statements involving "stout Mayan doñas" than most of my fellow citizens. At the same time, however, I'm someone who has always been suspicious of identity politics in all of its forms, and who has said so repeatedly in print. Few things annoy me more than any sentence beginning "As a (Latino/gay/Asian/feminist etc.), I am offended by...."

I mention all this to give some context to my reaction to what follows in Critser's essay - material whose full flavor cannot be appreciated without extensive quotation.

At my local McDonald's, located in a lower-middle-income area of Pasadena, California, the supersize bacchanal goes into high gear at about 5 p.m., when the various urban caballeros, drywalleros, and jardineros get off from work and head for a quick bite. Mixed in is a sizeable element of young black kids traveling between school and home, their economic status apparent by the fact that they've walked instead of driven. Customers are cheerfully encouraged to "supersize your meal!" by signs saying, "If we don't recommend a supersize, the super- size is free!" For an extra seventy-nine cents, a kid ordering a cheeseburger, small fries and a small coke will get said cheeseburger plus a supersize Coke (42 fluid ounces versus 16, with free refills) and a supersize order of french fries (more than double the weight of a regular order). Suffice it to say that consumption of said meals is fast and, in almost every instance I observed, very complete.

Again, note the lurid tone: You would think the author had been watching teenagers exchange sexual favors for crack cocaine, given the text's mixture of salacious detail and horrified sanctimoniousness.

And that is not all. Critser goes on to agonize over the contents of the "jumbo dietetic horror" he has witnessed, and to describe the "endocrine warfare" he believes is sure to erupt in the bodies of the wretched refuse of our teeming shores who engage in such flagrant self-abuse. Then he really lets us know what he thinks:

If childhood obesity truly is "an epidemic in the U.S. the likes of which we have not had before in chronic disease," then places like McDonald's and Winchell's Donut stores, with their endless racks of glazed and creamy goodies, are the San Francisco bathhouses of said epidemic, the places where the high-risk population indulges in high-risk behavior. Although open around the clock, the Winchell's near my house doesn't get rolling until seven in the morning, the Spanish-language talk shows frothing in the background while an ambulance light whirls atop the Coke dispenser. Inside, Mami placates Miguelito with a giant apple fritter. Papi tells a joke and pours ounce upon ounce of sugar and cream into his 20-ounce coffee. Viewed through the lens of obesity, as I am inclined to do, the scene is not so feliz.

By now, we might wonder, why hasn't the frantic author hurled himself bodily between that giant apple fritter and poor little Miguelito, or at least called the police? Indeed, at this point even the most anti-PC Hispanic you can find might well want to ask the author a couple of questions. Such as, did some urban caballero ride off with his girlfriend or something? And what is it with these skinny uptight Anglos, anyway? Who exactly deputized them to be the fat police at their local fast-food emporia?

Critser has an answer to these questions (or at least to the latter one). His focus on the ethnicity of all these Mayan doñas and peripatetic black kids and doughnut-crazed Mexicans has nothing whatsoever to do with the phenomenon of upper-class white people being revolted by the sight of fat, working-class, non-white persons, possibly of extra-national provenance, gorging themselves like animals in a viscerally disgusting (but actually quite tasty - ever had a Krispy Kreme doughnut?) bacchanal of forbidden treats. Oh no. He is merely sounding the alarm, in a desperate attempt to save these hopelessly simple people from themselves. "The obesity rate for Mexican-American children," the author informs us sternly, "is shocking." He returns to the scene of the ongoing doughnut crime: "The lovely but very chubby little girl tending to her schoolbooks ... will begin puberty before the age of ten, launching her into a lifetime of endocrine bizarreness that will not only be costly to treat but will be emotionally devastating as well." Critser doesn't need to add that all this "bizarreness" will also give her a big head start over all those anorexic (and therefore infertile) white girls in the nicer parts of Pasadena, in the Darwinian struggle to produce the next generations of (respectively) Krispy Kreme junkies and Diet Coke addicts.

To be fair, Critser doesn't really want to focus on what he calls "the inevitable divisiveness of race and gender." He wants to talk about the relationship between fat and social class. On this topic, he actually makes a good deal of sense. He notes that, in America today, the poor are fat and the rich are not - and he even considers the possibility that the rich would like to keep things that way. "In upscale corporate America," he notes, "being fat is taboo, a sure-fire career-killer. If you can't control your own contours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget and staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: To the man, and the occasional woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat."

One would hope that a journalist confronting a situation such as this - in which a physical characteristic was being used to disenfranchise a significant portion of the citizenry from the upper echelons of money and power - would display a modicum of curiosity about whether the things the people with the money and power were saying about the supposed awfulness of that physical characteristic were actually true. But, at this moment in America, when it is no longer possible to observe that a glossy brochure contains no pictures of women, or non-whites, without being expected to wonder if there's a legitimate reason for that absence, it is still possible - and indeed almost obligatory - to assume there is a good reason for excluding fat people.

It would be difficult to come up with a better illustration of the distorting power of the war on fat than Critser's explanation for why Americans - specifically poor and working-class Americans - are getting fatter, when being fat has so clearly become an enormous social disadvantage. According to Critser, it's because America's elites have been afraid to say or do anything to signal social disapproval of fat. Cowed by, among others, "a very vocal minority of super-obese female activists ... the media, the academy, public health workers, and the government do almost nothing" to let Americans know that being fat is undesirable. This hypothesis, of course, is simply insane on its face.

Copyright © 2004 Paul Campos

About the Author

A professor of law at the University of Colorado and a nationally recognized expert on America's war on fat, Paul Campos is the author of a weekly opinion column that appears in more than forty newspapers nationwide. His articles have appeared in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.