The Food Police

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Many of these authors share a common rhetorical strategy. They refer to the statistics of rising obesity rates, the surfeit of calories taken in relative to those expended, and the inexorable road toward illness with concomitant rising health care costs. They go on to discuss the ubiquity of fast, junky food in order to make their points about what constitutes “real” food. But whereas most of the popular writers on fat attribute growing obesity to a variety of culprits—watching television, long drive-to-work times, supermarket product placement, working mothers, baggy clothes, marketing to children, poverty, affluence, and modernity, basically everything under the sun—Pollan’s analysis is more pointed. As he puts it, “All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to search for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat.” Pollan then points to the culprit: corn.

He tells a compelling story about how corn has become the foundation of the national diet. He traces this first to the transport of corn from what is now Mexico to points north, where it took hold and outdid wheat in yield and ease of cultivation. But corn’s strength turned to its weakness; it was prone to systematic overproduction in U.S. agriculture, so surpluses ended up to no good. Corn whiskey was the beverage of choice in pre-Prohibition drinking binges. Since the 1970s, national farm policy has buttressed overproduction with subsidies. Pollan reminds us that corn is omnipresent in a fast-food meal: the high fructose corn syrup that sweetens the soda; the feed of the steer that goes into the hamburger; often the oil that fries the potatoes; an ingredient in the bun. Processed food, Pollan argues, makes us walking corn, and the “Alcoholic Republic” has now given way to “the Republic of Fat.”

Pollan’s critique of the cost-cutting measures of the fast-food giants, the nutritional impoverishment of processed food, and an agricultural subsidy system that encourages ecologically problematic monoculture, horrendous animal treatment, and food dumping in the name of “aid” is spot-on. I could think of no clearer path to a more ecologically sound and socially just food system than the removal of those subsidies. Yet, in evoking obesity, Pollan turns our gaze from farm policy to the fat body. Should fat people bear the weight of this argument?

There is much to criticize in the public conversation about obesity. The evidentiary basis of an “epidemic” is weak, as it relies on changes in average body mass index, a contested way to measure obesity. Moreover, the relationship between food intake, exercise, and growing obesity is poorly understood. Michael Gard and Jan Wright’s exhaustive review of research shows that the notion that weight gain results from a surplus of calories has not been borne out; at best, caloric metabolism appears to explain less than half of body size variation. Finally, claims that obesity is a primary cause of disease are filled with logical flaws, chief among them that obesity may be symptomatic of diseases such as type 2 diabetes. Gard and Wright argue that obesity research itself has become so entangled with moral discourses and aesthetic values that the “science of obesity” can no longer speak for itself.

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