The Food Police

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Many authors of the recent popular books on diet seem unaware of how obesity messages work as admonishment. According to Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health, the people most personally affected by discussions of obesity are those who want to lose 10 or 15 pounds, despite the fact that those who are “overweight” by current standards have longer life spans than those who are “thin” or “normal.” In a course I taught, Politics of Obesity, I was not surprised by the number of students who wrote in their journals of their hidden “fatness” or eating disorders. The number of entries that stated how the course itself had produced body anxiety and intensified concern over diet and exercise, however, was shocking, given that much of the material was critical of obesity talk. The philosopher Michel Foucault might have called this the “productive” power of obesity talk—naming a behavior as a problem intensifies anxiety about that behavior. Yet entirely absent from the pages of the recent popular books is any authorial reflection on how obesity talk further stigmatizes those who are fat, or on how this social scolding might work at cross-purposes to health and well-being.

But there is something even more disturbing about these books. Pollan claims that people eat corn because it’s there. They are dupes. Jane Goodall makes a similar leap when she writes, “There is no mechanism that turns off the desire—instinct, really—to eat food when it is available.” Even Marion Nestle’s concern with supermarket aisles suggests that people mechanically react to product placement. This raises an important question: Why are Pollan, Goodall, and Nestle not fat? If junk food is so ubiquitous that it cannot be resisted, how is it that some people remain thin?

It appears that these authors see themselves as morally superior to fat people in the sense that they characterize fat people as being short of subjectivity. Goodall makes the above assertion having just written of “sad,” “overweight,” “overindulged” cats and dogs being “killed by kindness,” seeming to equate fat people with pets. In the “documentary” Super Size Me, virtually all shots of fat people are headless. Some might argue that having no personal identifiers protects fat people in the camera’s eye, but headlessness also invokes mindlessness. Moreover, protection assumes that fat people are ashamed of their bodies and their eating habits. This presumption is precisely the problem that Kathleen LeBesco captures in Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, including her critique of the fat acceptance movement itself. At best, fat people are seen as victims of food, genetic codes, or metabolism; at worst, they are slovenly, stupid, or without resolve. Meanwhile, she notes, many thin people can indulge in all manner of unhealthy behaviors without being called to account for their body size. In other words, fat people are imbued with little subjectivity no matter what they do, while thin people are imbued with heightened subjectivity no matter what they do.

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