The p-word
From a Fresh Air conversation via J.A. at Miscellany Room:
By the time they enter kindergarten, most American children believe that being “thin” makes them more valuable to society, writes journalist Virginia Sole-Smith. By middle school, Sole-Smith says, more than a quarter of kids in the U.S. will have been put on a diet.
Sole-Smith produces the newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. In her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, she argues that efforts to fight childhood obesity have caused kids to absorb an onslaught of body-shaming messages.
And also, no doubt, to do a lot of bullying of kids who are fat or chubby or not quite thin enough. On the other hand some of what she says in this conversation seems a little silly to me.
So the fact that the first thing we’re all asked to do at a doctor’s office is to get on a scale, right there, you’ve immediately given the doctor this number to focus in on that doesn’t tell your full story about your health, but that narrows the focus of the conversation down to weight.
Like that. That’s silly. Of course it doesn’t tell the full story, but no doctor thinks it does. They don’t weigh you and then tell you to leave. It’s one thing they can check quickly and easily, but so is blood pressure, and they do that too.
Thin privilege is a concept that is tricky to get our heads around, because if you have it, you don’t really see how much you have it. I mean, it’s a lot like white privilege in that way because you don’t see how much it’s benefiting you.
Errrm no it isn’t. That’s worse than silly, it’s…well I guess the word is “appropriation.” That can be an irritating label, but it can also name something real. I think it names something real here. I think Sole-Smith is kind of helping herself to a form of oppression that isn’t hers, to make herself sound more serious and activisty, and to make her subject matter sound more profound. I can buy that thin privilege is a thing; I’m not buying that it’s comparable to white privilege.
The thin ideal is definitely a white ideal. When we trace the history of modern diet culture, we really trace it back in the United States to the end of slavery. And Sabrina Strings‘ book Fearing the Black Body is the iconic work on this that I would refer people to. But her research talks about how, as slavery ended, Black people gained rights, obviously, white supremacy is trying to maintain the power structure. So celebrating a thin white body as the ideal body is a way to “other” and demonize Black and brown bodies, bigger bodies, anyone who doesn’t fit into that norm. So this is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy.
Wtf? What is she talking about? Not all white people were thin, and not all black people were fat – in fact it’s far more likely that most of them were too thin, on account of having been enslaved. I don’t think free black people were so generously paid for their work that they could eat all they wanted either – I think this branch of her argument is just trying to add gravitas to her work.
It’s beginning to seem like every “movement” is trying to coopt racism these days. Trans are doing it in heaps; now this. Tie your arguments to racism, and you don’t have to do the hard work of demonstrating actual oppression.
I do think our society isn’t kind to fat people, but I find much of what the anti-body-shaming movement says to be ridiculous. My doctor puts me on a scale; I have diabetes and he needs to know what my weight is doing. Also, if we have a sudden weight gain or weight loss, that can tell them something. If our weight remains stable, that can also tell them something. It isn’t a simple datum that a doctor does because it’s easy; it’s important.
When I was anorexic, my doctor put me on a scale because I was losing weight too fast and they needed to make sure I didn’t, like, lose so much I died or something. That’s not trivial.
I could do with loosing some significant weight and I think the current trend to excuse being overweight as fat phobia is a load of bollocks. Yes there are all sorts of body types and metabolisms. yes, some ethnotypes are less well evolved than others to cope with a ‘western’ diet. You know what though? No ethnoytpe is well evolved to cope with incredibly high energy dense diets coupled with incredibly sedentary lifestyles. none. Obesity is a problem everywhere that has energy dense diets coupled with insufficient physical activity.
That’s not an excuse to be mean to fat people. It’s not an excuse to overlook the health needs of populations less well adapted to diets and lifestyles they didn’t evolve with. But get over it. Carrying too much weight not only puts you at increased risk of many diseases and conditions, it’s just plain hard on joints and makes routine life more of struggle and at times downright painful. it’s also a damn site harder to loose weight than to keep it off, especially as you age. Sigh.
I might add, as a kid I was an appropriate weight and never put on a diet, but that’s because what there was to eat was what my mother cooked and nothing more. She cooked reasonable sized meals for my age and activity, not an excess that would allow over consumption. meals were also focussed around traditional limited meat and lots of vegetables. modest fat consumption and very little free sugars, unless it was from fruit.
The fatphillics and TRA’s have at least one thread in common. They both think they can deny reality.
While I totally agree about the appropriative nature of her comparison to racism, I WILL say I’ve gathered a fair bit of anecdotal evidence over the years that many doctors do, indeed, hyperfocus on an overweight patient’s waistline. If I were going to make a comparison, it would be to some of the stories I’ve heard about doctors discounting women’s complaints, assuming that a certain degree of un-health or pain is simply a woman’s ‘natural state’. Getting the doc to move past weight in order to consider other possible causes can be astoundingly taxing work.
It’s a complicated issue–of course, the doctor can’t just ignore their patient being 50 or more pounds overweight, but those discussions absolutely can suck up the oxygen in the room, preventing the doctor from moving on to other potential issues. (Of course, a lot of this can also be laid at the feet of the American medical system, which favors rapid-fire short visits with your GP where you actually only have the doctor’s attention for 10-15 minutes before they move on to the next patient, while the rest of the work is done by the less-expensive–but honestly quite invaluable–nurse practitioners. Of course, more NPs are women, so naturally they’re paid less for doing the bulk of the work.)
Oh, I’d like to make one other note–in the US, at least, obesity and poverty do, in fact, tend to correlate, much moreso than in much of the rest of the world. This is because we have a vast array of highly processed, high-carb, high-sodium foods that are infinitely cheaper than a remotely healthy salad, or even lean beef. You can get enough calories to live on surprisingly cheaply, but those calories come in the form of Top Ramen and Wonderbread. (The off-brands available along the periphery of many food deserts are often even worse.)
What is the p-word? Pudgy?
Colin, I assumed privilege.
Freemage, those are also very valid points. Many doctors do tend to fall into the ‘you’re old and overweight’ trap. Many of those cheap foods you refer to are essentially low grade carbohydrate, oils and sugars with high energy density and cost in their favour and not much else. Awful things. We’re fortunate in NZ that even if you can’t grow fresh veggies (or afford them in poor growing seasons), frozen from the supermarket is still cheap and good value.
Yes, privilege.
Point taken about poverty and obesity, and I agree, but I was disputing Sole-Smith’s claim about the end of slavery. There weren’t 7-11s full of ramen in 1865.
My students have actually been doing empirical research on food cost for the past fifteen years. So far my findings? Healthy food is cheaper. No, not arugular or asparagus, but if you focus on things like beans (high in protein), chicken, and the more standard vegetables (broccoli tends to be cheaper than any sort of fast food I know) you can eat extremely healthy diets on much less than junk food.
I have always found the claim of healthy foods suspect, because when I was on food stamps, I didn’t buy junk food for my son. I couldn’t afford it. Yes, carbs can be inexpensive in the form of pasta, and they’re easy to buy and fix and everyone thinks about them…but the lack of knowledge of how to buy and prepare a proper diet (common among many in the middle class, as well) does not mean the food is more expensive. It just means they haven’t learned how to maximize both money and health. It isn’t taught at any school I’ve been to. It isn’t taught in cooking shows on TV. It wasn’t taught in the food stamps classes I had to go to. You have to learn it from the ground up. I learned it from my mother. She was a lousy cook, and her zucchini was inedible (I wouldn’t eat zucchini until about 25 years ago because I always equated it with her horrible fare). Nonetheless, she taught me how to shop for healthy food, and I figured out how to prepare it…mostly by doing the opposite of what she did.
Sorry about the soap box, but I think that particular trope about expense is harmful. Instead of helping people learn to shop, we tell them it’s okay, because it’s too expensive to eat right.
I have data…hard, empirical data…collected over a decade and a half. If it had been collected in a more systematic way, and kept all these years, I could probably publish,. But I am planning to do my research again after I retire, where I can expand it beyond the limited study we were able to do in my classes. But we did find, every year, that pound for pound, calorie for calorie, and nutrient for nutrient, junk food was more expensive.
I haven’t studied this in the detail iknklast has, but my mother raised us on the smell of an oily rag and iknklast’s view feels right to me.
Here are a couple of articles that make the point in a NZ context at least. Even though I earn ok money I still shop for seasonal vegetables and fruit where possible and target cheaper cuts of meat that with a few herbs (dried are just fine) can be made delicious. And yes cooking cheap cuts takes longer and seems hard in a busy life, but we tend to cook those in batches on days off and freeze, or cook the day before and reheat the next day (even better). I appreciate that requires owning a fridge and freezer which not everyone has, but realistically most homed people do have.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/parenting/96829683/a-weeks-meals-for-140-one-mum-shows-how
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-drink/recipes/300559833/cost-of-living-fill-your-freezer-with-100-meals-for-about-260-a-pop
Or chef’s opinions…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-drink/recipes/300541583/how-to-eat-on-the-cheap-according-to-chefs
I appreciate the details are very NZ centric, but everywhere will have some equivalents and the basics can be used to make dishes in pretty much any cuisine with a few basic additions.
And I’ve got a message in moderation…
True, IF you have the means to prepare the food. The main problem isn’t the cost of the food itself, it’s the additional cost of purchasing major appliances and/or finding time to prepare it.
AARGH I’m so sick of hearing this. I’m very thin. My brother is very thin. Constantly receive messages from the “body positive” crowd how nice it must be. Yeah, no, actually. Finding clothes that fit properly isn’t easy for us, either. “Able to eat whatever without worrying about adding weight” translates to “spending a lot of the time being hungry”, when you don’t have the resources to provide access to an unlimited supply of nutritionally-dense foods. As we were growing up my parents were alternatively accused of not feeding us enough or told we must be anorexic; later, they were periodically told to talk to us because we must be taking amphetamines or other drugs. We received plenty of “assurances” from well-meaning teachers and friends and extended-family that we shouldn’t worry because you’ll be so handsome/pretty when your muscles/curves grow in!, and of course in my case the inevitable you’ll fill out so nicely once you have kids!. Every doctor visit for any reason involved a blood test to check thyroid function, and pointed discussions about malnutrition. (Look, I do understand why, but COME ON; I’ve been at the same body weight for… 35 years now? At what point do medical professionals believe that my weight is not a symptom of a new or acute illness, and that I actually DO know how to feed myself?)
Judging people’s character or health strictly by their appearance is irritating-to-gross, regardless of direction.
I’m another data point on the graph of doctors ignoring health issues due to weight. As I was a skinny kid, teen, and young adult, and female, it was obviously impossible for me to develop conditions commonly associated with overweight, middle-aged men; so they must have been all ‘in my head’. Unsurprisingly, mental health interventions – although massively helpful for giving the skills necessary for a chronically ill person to cope with lifelong problems with equanimity – have no effect on the course of the disorders themselves. My heart disorders didn’t obediently become panic attacks, the auto-immune arthritis didn’t turn into posture pain and resolve with exercise, the endometriosis didn’t become hysterical period pain and cure itself when I got pregnant, etc. etc. etc.
Weight is important. I was only able to gain weight in my thirties, to a normal weight for my height and build, after I was diagnosed with cœliac disease. When I rapidly gained weight for no obvious external reasons two decades later, I was diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes. However, someone who has a big body isn’t necessarily suffering from any ill effects of weight (like people who ‘fail’ the BMI test because they’re muscular athletes); each person should be assessed independently.
No-one should be shamed for their weight, but no-one else should be celebrating it, either.
As tigger says, no one should be shamed for their weight, but maintenance of healthy weight range (not BMI) is important for long term health. I’ve got to because I have hereditary issues like hypertension, cardiac disease, type II diabetes, and other weight related conditions that behoove me to maintain a range that doesn’t exacerbate those issues. And once YouTube got hold of that, of course it recommends all sorts of advisory videos. Many are based on junk science, but there are some helpful ones as well.
One study that backs up iknklast’s post, indicated that people who choose fresh foods over prepared foods hunger for fewer calories per day. The study set up to cohorts and each were assigned the diet of prepared processed and ultra-processed foods or a diet strictly of fresh foods. The fresh-food cohort chose to eat on average 300 calories less per day than the prepared food cohort. I have not seen much more coverage, so I am not sure how often its been replicated and if it’s been validated. Yes, there are issues of time to prepare, and access to the necessary appliances, but I think that’s consistent for people who rely on prepared foods as well.
But for the people who have a budget limited by income, it takes some education to know which foods to choose even within their budget. There are whole grain pastas and sauces that don’t have added sugar, learning to drink water with lemon rather than a soda (diet or sugar,) and going to stores such as ALDI or others that have found ways to keep prices low (while paying decent wages) on staples or even grocery stores that stock food past the phony expiration dates, are options that can help people control weight through diet.
I’ve been poor, so I’m not talking out of my hat. It can be a pain in the ass when your kids need to get home to start studying, to stop at the grocery store and make something when you get home. I often was tempted just to say “Fuck it” and stop at the drive through, but just couldn’t afford it.
Bullying people for their weight is something that we shouldn’t do, and it’s not helpful. My daughter is nearly 300 pounds and has been bullied for it most of her life, and it causes more anxiety over food than a desire to lose weight, but now that she’s quit smoking she’s getting help for weight management. It doesn’t help that her group home purchases mostly prepared food, but when she’s over at my place she gets good food.
Whether a form of privilege is real or not, whether it exists or not, the claim that unawareness of privilege is a form of privilege is pure sophistry. It’s persuasive, because it puts people on the defensive. However, all it’s doing is making the accusation of privilege unfalsifiable. (And it is an accusation. That’s another part of the sophistry, but I’ll leave that aside for now.) Demonstrating the trick is easy.
It’s unfalsifiable in the most extreme possible way: If it’s false, then it’s true. This is fine for tautologies. If the law of noncontradiction is false, then we can derive the law again, because ex falso quodlibet. But the existence of thin (or any kind of) privilege is supposed to be an empirical question, not one of analytic necessity in all possible worlds. It must be conceivable that in some possible world, there is no thin privilege. This breaks a fundamental assumption of epistemology.
But as I’ve said at length before, Critical Theory uses its own epistemology. Critical Fat Studies inherits that system.
ibbica, a lot of food preparation can be done without major appliances. A slow cooker may be an initial investment, but they can be gotten in thrift stores and at garage sales for nearly nothing. Same with various kinds of single burners, etc. Most of those also take less electricity than stoves.
College kids all over the world know how to do it; living on a budget may be difficult, but it is not impossible.
And a slow cooker is also the answer to people who say they don’t have time to cook. I have a lot on my plate, and it’s wonderful to put the supper in a slow cooker before I leave for work, put it on low, and pull it out perfectly done when I come home. It also deals with Rob’s issue of cheap meat, because the slow cooking can help make the meat tender.
I am not judging or blaming those who choose fast food or junk food, but if they have the ability to cook Mac and Cheese, they can cook vegetables, so it’s not a matter of appliances. It’s that they have never been taught how to shop for good food on a budget. Or maybe it’s that they don’t like dried beans or vegetables, but if that’s the case, why not say it? Poor people have as much right as middle class and wealthy people to make their own choices of diet; the only difference is the ability to pay for it. So why focus on that, when it’s so easily refuted? Because it takes the onus and/or blame off the poor people. In so doing, it deprives them of choice. They are just victims, all the time, and don’t have any choices.
Not knowing how is no crime. I had to teach myself a lot of it; even though we had a diet of fresh vegetables in the summer when they were available in our garden, the rest of the year we ate pasta with a can of tomatoes dumped into it. But my mother taught me enough about comparison shopping that I could teach myself the rest.
Even in HomeEc, I wasn’t taught that. I was taught to use expensive materials to make pretty but often inedible dinners. And I hated HomeEc. I knew how to cook, I didn’t want to sew, so I paid very little attention. I wanted to take Chemistry, but I have two X chromosomes.
iknklast, that’s your female privilege talking.
Oh, you didn’t know you had female privilege? Being unaware of your female privilege is a form of female privilege. Do better.
Either that or it’s your abuse victim privilege, depression privilege, overworked privilege, or some other (group|adjective|\s)+ privilege. Which of course means you have it.
So do better.
I dislike the concept of privilege because I see it as more a rhetorical ploy that’s intended to put its target down by attacking the person. So someone with “thin privilege” who makes an argument that excessive weight can be a health problem can be dismissed because they aren’t disadvantaged by weight themselves. Or someone with “white privilege” can be dismissed when discussing the impact of illegal firearms being used by gangs in black communities because they’re white and aren’t a victim of such violence. Privilege is just another way of stereotyping people, and it isn’t a reasonable thing to do.
It’s also stupid politically when you accuse white working class people of having privilege when they damn well haven’t had anything handed to them in life. This doesn’t mean that racial prejudice doesn’t exist, far from it. It just isn’t a winning tactic politically to switch from arguing that racial discrimination is wrong to judging someone solely by some racial privilege they have. Like maybe the reason someone is thin is that they have had to go hungry more often that not. Or that a white working class person has had to struggle for years to get by economically and knows poverty all too well.
Not that someone, including myself, can’t be ignorant of the discrimination that others may face because of never having to face it personally. That doesn’t mean that one can’t learn though, which is why the whole privilege line of argument is counter-productive because it isn’t trying to persuade anyone, rather it’s dismissing them. That’s not only stupid, it’s a mistake.
Thank you all for this very interesting discussion. Once again I apologise for showing up after the discussion has gone active, but nevermind, it’s very exciting and I’ll add my few cents. As a disclaimer, like many previous commenters I’ve gone through various wealth and social status stages in my life, including meeting being poor by legal definition, and I am fortunate enough to have gone through this in very diverse environments both temperate and tropical. I am probably more fortunate than many people in that maybe all I had was a PhD in botany, but to be honest I derived most of my diet fortune from using and abusing that trump card many times diet was at stake.
It is indeed a major convenience to have both a knowledge of diet requirements and a basic culture about plants in situation where you can experience being hungry. I’ve often found it helpfull to gather edible leaves and fruits that would become additional resources and improve poor food access.
This is something you can afford more easily in rural areas of course, compared to cities, but even there you may find something. Maybe not about meeting your dietary daily needs, but certainly enough to accomodate quantity and quality constraints.
With regard to the price issue, there’s something I’ve often done, as I’m a long time freegan, it’s dump diving. I remember even once in Paris area, I’ve found organic mangoes from Florida, and I would never have had the monney to afford those. They were not even that bad, merely a few anthracnose rot necroses. I have a single rule in dump diving, it’s “no meat ever”. But for vegetables and grain based foods, it works well. That said, I understand this could not sustain a lot of people, but certainly many more than it does.
Also, one has to realise freeganism is far from an individual take, it can become a collaborative effort. When we were living in French Brittany, there was sort a micro-community with half a dozen hippies, tramps and homeless folks gathering and sharing the resource communally. The mall owner was also complicit, as he was under legal obligation to spray the dump to make any food inedible, but he organised things into bags so that we could still reclaim the wasted food.
Last time I had no easy access to food was ten days ago actually. I am just ending a work mission in Saint Lucia and arrived late and without local monney, and stayed without access to an ATM in the first days. I had no meal in the first two days because the work schedule was also very tight (and I refused to buy the ‘sandwich’ sold on board of the ferry because it was so junk food I could not proceed). Fortunately, I found a few public mango trees bearing fruits, gathered a few cashew pomes, and farmers I met for work offered young coconuts with pulp. Of course, that’s the typical blessing of the tropics, but food foraging may yield some abundance depending on the season in temperate places too.
Though overall, I am also completely agreeing that unprocessed food is actually much cheaper than industrial processed foods. The issue may not completely be about diet knowledge, though. Sometimes it is about daily spending amount. Not everyone would decide to wait a day or two before buying vegetables in greater amount (in the case I have in mind, carots were cheaper than brocoli), but if you do you can escape the inital distress and overcome access to nutritionally correct diet at affordable cost.
Anyhow.
No need to apologize, Laurent! Very interesting comment.