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| Home Front: Culture Wars | |
| A broadside in the war on blubber | |
| 2004-06-01 | |
| Steyn of course Just for a change in the old columnar diet, I thought I’d weigh in on Britain’s obesity epidemic. But, on closer inspection, the war on blubber seems to be the war on terror by other means. In the Guardian, for example, Polly Toynbee had no hesitation in deciding on the root cause: "America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest," she wrote. "Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems earliest... But the narrower the status and income gap between high and low, the narrower the waistbands."
Also, when it comes to Ms Toynbee’s "income gap", the United States is 41st in the world, the United Kingdom 63rd and Australia 74th. But OK, by Fleet Street standards of pundit accuracy, that’s close enough. Oh, and the Greeks have less income inequality than the British, but are much fatter. And the country with the highest obesity mortality rate in the world is apparently Denmark. Don’t ask me why. I saw a report at the weekend detailing the remarkable rise in Danish breast size over the past two decades, so maybe it’s sweaty Danish fat guys keeling over at the sight of all that fabulous Jutland cleavage. But I digress. When Polly says America, Britain and Australia are the fattest countries in the world, she’s making a broader point - that the coalition of the willing is also the coalition of the swilling; that there are terrible aesthetic consequences for any nation that heeds the siren song of America ("Would you like fries with that?"). This has been a barely disguised subtext of the new war ever since 9/11. In February 2002, Salman Rushdie reported back to New York Times readers his experience of metropolitan dinner parties. "In the non-American west, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners’ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centredness: these are the crucial issues." When the press warns that Britain is becoming a nation of obese children, who does that sound like? In America, you can be an obese child at 45. In Paris a couple of years ago, my French dinner companions harangued me at length about how they could no longer bear to walk down American Main Streets, filled as they are with 300lb middle-aged toddlers waddling along the sidewalk in Xtra-large Disney T-shirts and slurping super-sized sodas from plastic bottles with giant nipples. "It is a culture of arrested development," one disdainful Parisian sniffed wearily, "of perpetual childhood." Naturally, when such a culture sallies forth into the world, it will be crass and blundering - see Sir Max Hastings, for most of the past year, on what hopelessly vulgar imperialists the Yanks make. Indeed, when Europeans gleefully contemplate America’s imminent "imperial overstretch", the very phrase takes on awesome metaphorical power, conjuring a pair of polyester check pants straining at the seams across some huge global butt. Thus, in January the municipality of Carquefou in north-western France held a competition. The town’s schoolchildren were asked to illustrate what America meant to them. The older pupils turned in pictures of an enslaved Statue of Liberty being run over by Uncle Sam on a motorcycle (liberty, or at least the statue thereof, being a gift to America from France) or of three hands - Stalin’s fist, the Hitler salute, and Bush’s fist clutching a cross: the axis of evil as seen from the Continent. Yawn. But even more weirdly obsessive were the entries of the younger children. For them it was all about the evils of Coke and McDonald’s. Corpulent American moppets were pictured devouring giant cheeseburgers and sipping giant colas over explanatory slogans like "Obesité assuré". To French schoolchildren, Americans are a race apart - strange, misshapen monsters staggering from across the ocean to devour anything in their path. As the French student advances toward graduation, he comes to understand that the condition of the American behemoth approximates that of the dinosaurs of old: huge bodies, tiny brains, doomed to extinction. After which, the natural leaders of the world will resume their rightful role. That’s why Michael Moore makes such a perfect performing seal for the European intellectual class: the vast bulk of his credibility derives from his vast bulk; to the sophisticates at Cannes, he’s their very own Uncle Tom who growed like Topsy. As to Polly Toynbee’s economic arguments, I don’t buy that. The EU will have collapsed under the weight of its social programmes long before America collapses under the weight of its weight. VS Naipaul was closer to the mark in his book A Turn in the South, marveling at how Americans had "turned fulfilment and the glory of abundance to personal fat. A kind of suicide, it might have seemed; but I also began to wonder," he wrote, "whether for these descendants of frontier people and pinelanders there wasn’t, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion." British obesity seems, to these eyes, a sadder affair. But you can see why it bothers the nation’s increasingly unrepresentative attenuated elite as they nibble their curly endives in Islington and Hampstead. How can you argue that Britons feel more and more European when they look more and more Floridian? One day the bony-butted Dutchmen and Swedes will notice; one day the French school competition will be won by some drawing of corpulent West Midland tykes gorging on Cheesy Wotsits. That’s what’s at stake. If Polly Toynbee and the nannytollahs can’t fix things now, the bottom will drop out, literally, of Britain’s European future. | |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #6 "Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. Yeah, now check out the relative suicide rates. What Scandanvia has is apparently a bunch of skinny and, oh so VERY depressed, people. |
| Posted by: Anonymous5085 2004-06-01 4:53:42 PM |
| #5 Recently made my first European trip, mostly in Italy, and I made the same "Aha!" Gromky does on a lesser scale... No morbidly obese folks anyway. I pondered it a number of times and realized one issue is sheerly logistical. If you were "Mama Cass" big, you would never be able to fit in the micro cars that are most popular in Rome. I wondered to my wife if all the fat people were stuck in their rooms, ala " Gilbert Grape". I made friends later with an Italian restaurant owner who had spent 13 years in NJ. He blames Americas weight issues less on Mickey D's, and more on the amount of "processed foods" that Americans face at every meal, including breakfast. "We eat what is fresh, in season, and simply prepared." I had a walk through of his restaurant, and he had less shelf space dedicated to pantry's, spices and refrigeration than many upscale American kitchens. He said if he were to come to America and be my personal chef, the first thing he would do would be to dump most of the crap on the inside of my refrigerator door! When I went home and looked, I realized that many of the foods I considered to be part of a healthy lifestyle, Salads etc, were completely bad for me by the time I finished pouring on dressings etc. His food was fabulous, by the way... It's not rocket science...Eat well but make it from fresh components. |
| Posted by: Capsu78 2004-06-01 12:00:15 PM |
| #4 Well, Kimmie might be the only fat guy in North Korea, but I don't think we ought to adopt their anti-obesity program. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-06-01 10:13:43 AM |
| #3 As a young American punk rocker living in London 20 years ago, I would sit for hours drinking cider with my Brit mates, and watch the lovely birds stroll down the King's Road. I appreciated the great looking legs (more walking, less driving there) and said so but the Brits complimented the American bust line. I pointed out that was a product of high caloric intake. We were at an impasse and had to agree to disagree. |
| Posted by: JDB 2004-06-01 8:45:31 AM |
| #2 I have found myself listening to Londoners’ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry And don't you forget it. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-06-01 8:00:11 AM |
| #1 Well, it's pretty fruitless to argue against the "Americans are fat" point. Last year, when I was in China for a month's time, I noticed something odd that I couldn't put my finger on. In an "A-ha!" moment, I realized that there were no fat people in China. There are certainly no shortage of huge crowds here, either. Just on a trip down to the shopping areas, you can see hundreds of people at once, and several thousand in the course of an hour. Know how many of them were fat? NONE. I kept count of the fat people I saw. After a month's time, I had seen exactly four fat people. The sad thing is, two of them were children...I think maybe China will give us a run for our money in 10-20 years. When I returned to America, I saw four fat people on the walk from the jetway to the terminal. Anyway, the pioneer mindset is still there..."clean your plate" is a theme that burns in my mind constantly, it's how I was brought up. My parents would be angry if I didn't eat all my food, especially the meat (you're wasting money, boy). In other cultures, there's no pressure to finish everything, and indeed in China it's considered rude to finish everything...a sign of good hospitality is that there is plenty of food left at the end of the meal, it means the host is prosperous enough to afford it. |
| Posted by: gromky 2004-06-01 3:41:25 AM |