Cultural perceptions of fat
This is just the quickest of posts because I was just reading a post by Erinn in Parenting our Children and it made me think about my post yesterday. (I don’t know why 50% of my readers quaver in fear and hide under beds when I say “it made me think.” It’s a mystery to me.)
First of all, I’m not doubting the problems that obesity can cause: I’ve seen them and they worry me. I am interested in the eating and lifestyle patterns that may be at the heart of the problem. I’m even more interested in what is defined as obesity and why, and why some societies favour fat and other societies favour lean. These definitions and preferences have implications for us and our fat.
From a personal point of view, I believe that when fat interferes with your health and well-being then it becomes a problem. If you’re perfectly healthy and have a large waistline then that’s only a problem if other people make it so. But that’s my personal view.
My view as an historian is that we need to look more widely before we think we understand fat. It doesn’t mean we have to emulate other periods and places - there is no need to starve to death in apprecation of the Irish potato famine and there’s no need to overeat just because some people did in Edwardian England.
When I talk to the people who taste test the food for the Regency Gothic banquet, I keep hearing how rich it is. It has a way higher fat content than modern food. Heaps of vegetables. Good protein. Immense amounts of high fat dairy. There’s not much deep frying, so the fats are differently balanced to many of the ones US children eat today. They’re also often sourced diffferently. Fats and sugars both: fructose was only used when it came with its fruit-of-origin. And we don’t know what portions people ate every day, so we really don’t know how their bodies handled their diet. We don’t know their fat problems, bascially.
I guess I’m arguing that reality is complex. We should be looking at foodways (how food is eaten, what value a given food has for a person or a family or a society, how it’s cooked, where it comes from, what lore goes along with it). When we know how various foods fit into a given society then we’re better set up to think carefully about what it means for obesity in children. I really want to know all the main factors so that we can address the causes that are most liable to change, not just make a list of the things that look most obvious.
This is my answer to Erinn’s question “What can we do?”: understand the problem. Work out which aspects are real problems and which are part of our social construct of how much fat is good. All the health issues are real problems, and are measurable and so can be addressed - I’m not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I want to say “Talk to historians. Talk to anthropologists. Talk to ethnographers.” Not instead of the people already involved - working with them.
This is part of the wider relevance of the Humanities (or the Liberal Arts, if you’re in the US). They help us understand the complexities of our lives and to develop solutions that will work. They help us see who we are and where we have come from. It was not co-incidence that most of the recruits had history degrees in the graduate program when I entered the Australian Public Service.
April 19th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
A friend of mine has just submitted her Masters thesis on Ben Jonson as a ‘fat’ poet’… interesting stuff on perceptions of fat and what that meant about him as a person (in his peers’ eyes) and what Jonson himself thought about food and his eating habits…
April 20th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
That’s a thesis I would love to see. When it’s being examined, if you could give me the references (or - better still- talk your friend into possibly emailing me a copy) I would be very grateful.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:34 am
Your post brought to mind some of the diet fads that come around. The Adkins diet comes to mind specifically. It tells you to cut out all your carbs cause carbs are bad for you. Instead maybe they could cut out the donuts and potato chips and eat whole wheat bread or something.
I’m not an expert in dieting. This is just my personal observations. I have never had to lose weight. But I did have to gain some weight once and it was incredibly difficult.
May 4th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I became more interested in health and logevity about 15 years ago when I stopped smoking, started jogging, and began to pay attention to my diet. One book that made a strong impression was Roy Walford’s “The 120 Year Diet” (current edition titled “Beyond the 120 Year Diet”), which is simply two things: Eating substantially fewer calories, and being very selective about what you eat to insure you still get all the vitamins and micronutrients your body needs (yes, vitamin supplements are allowed, but they don’t contain all nutrients). The common name for this is CRON (Caloric Reduction with Optimal Nutrition). Regrettably, even after many years I haven’t been able to stick to this diet, but I’m not going to give up trying. I didn’t quit smoking permanently the first several times I tried, and I’m glad I didn’t “give up trying to quit smoking.”
But your “Cultural Perceptions of Fat” also brings to mind cultural perceptions of thinness. I’ve been on discussion lists for people on the CRON diet, and most people who adhere to it get quite thin on it. Medical tests (such as colestrerol, blood sugar and others) show they are remarkably healthy, yet to others they appear to be too thin and physically ill. No doubt the public knowledge of anorexia contributes to this, but it’s regrettable that so much more is known about an illness that causes thinness than about a healthy diet that does so.