Jezebel Express Instagram – Just saw an image of a crowded vintage beach scene w/ the caption “A Beach in the 70s. Not one fat body. My, how the food industry has destroyed us.”
Fat people have always existed. It’s not shocking that they’re not in old beach photos— they were taught to hide. When y’all act like fat people are a brand new problem, you help prejudiced people feel justified in othering us & painting us as abnormal. We are not. Fat people have been around.
Body diversity is normal. Every mammalian species exhibits it & we think nothing of a bigger gopher w/a smaller sister. There’s no need to rank gophers (or people) according to size.
Capitalism HAS affected our population’s health in a bunch of ways, including what foods are available/ how they’re grown, but posts like this make it hard to talk about, because their framing is so reductive & misguided.
Let’s talk about food deserts, or Monsanto, or the racist roots of fatphobic thinking, or how “obesity” is a made-up disease that prevents people from getting adequate healthcare. Or the ways an ever-increasing work week has changed our exercise habits. Or when diet drug Phen-Fen was taken off the market because it was killing people.
Let’s talk about practical reasons for our fatter population, like folks living longer & having access to medical intervention. We could discuss the ways eating disorder treatment fails so many people who are suffering & then have the exact same conversation about bariatric surgery.
We could talk about factory farming, or food choices being ascribed moral virtue, or America’s prejudice against disability being reflected in anti-fatness. We could discuss the “war on obesity” harming to people of all sizes, or food consumption as stress response, or the myriad ways people are denied access to psychiatric & medical care in America if it doesn’t line exactly the right pockets.
Does that sounds like too much work? Is it too complicated to talk about fat in a way that encompasses data other than “calories in, calories out”’?
You’re right. Let’s just say the problem is “the food industry” making people “fat”. That way, the solution is simple: just don’t be fat.
That’s how this works, right? | Posted on 21/Aug/2023 19:39:31
