BODY LANGUAGE
Jeanette Winterson
This is an expanding universe and we are all getting fatter. Recent reports from health watchdogs had me reaching in a panic for the biscuit tin just as I was about to eat every single Jaffa Cake, I knew I had to throw them all away. Comfort eating is over actually eating is over. We had all better stop now, before it’s too late.
In the United States 61% of adults are overweight. The average width of cinema and stadium seats has been increased from about 43cm to about 56cm and a woman weighing about 382kg (yes, 382) sued an airline that refused to let her on the plane because she couldn’t be strapped into her seat.
American-style fat will soon become global fat, as we eat our way towards parity on the scales. It’s been called the “McDonaldisation of diet”, and the sad thing is that we prefer American eating habits. Burger and chips, Coke and crisps, convenience foods and heavily sauced ready meals have gobbled up the market for lean meat and veg and good, simple cooking. Why?
To call it a class issue is not enough. When I was growing up we were too poor to buy anything but raw ingredients and cook them. Meat twice a week may have led to some protein deficiencies, but meat twice a day, which is the average fast-food lifestyle, overloads the body with toxins as well as fat. The “mechanically recovered” meat in pies and pasties is meat scraped off the animal carcass it’s not a cut, it’s a kind of edible pulp fiction.
The fiction is that we are better off than our parents’ generation, that everyone in the West is well nourished, and if we happen to be a bit porky then, OK, it’s better than starving.
The truth is that increasing numbers of people in the West are starving that is, their bodies are chronically deprived of nutrients, but they are also fat. This is a brand-new problem on the world’s horror list. We have reinvented malnutrition, and we are exporting our new disease.
Developing countries have traditionally struggled with famine and lack. Now they are struggling with famine and fat. In South Africa and Papua New Guinea childhood malnutrition and adult obesity coexist: 70% of Samoans are now overweight. Countries whose chief health problems were infectious diseases and risk of famine must now cope with the diseases of affluence: cancer, heart conditions and diabetes.
No health service has the resources for a long-term epidemic of fat. Four children in Britain have now been diagnosed with an obesity-linked diabetes previously only found in adults over 40. Who is going to pay for their treatment? Well, we all are, but what when four becomes 4-million, or 40-million? Will we have to introduce a fat tax?
A fat tax could be levied, not on individuals but on fattening foods. Why not make chips the price of caviar? Of course anyone can make their own chips, but most people don’t do that; they buy them in a bag, or they go down the chippy.
They are only two ways to halt the fast-food culture make it expensive, and make the alternatives cheap. We could support farmers, we could support organics, we could reintroduce what used to be called domestic science into schools, and make it compulsory for boys and girls twice a week. We could bring back real school dinners and make them free. We could hire Nigella Lawson to impersonate the wartime cook Marguerite Patten and teach us all how to eat healthily using only a bag of mung beans, two fresh eggs and a sing-song round the piano.
What we can’t do is to go on as we are. We can’t afford to be fat. Fat food degrades the environment and it degrades us. Profit-driven factory food is turning human beings into gross parodies of themselves. We can’t live in a world weighed down with greed and waste. We can’t condemn our children to a life sentence in a prison of fat.
Before I get hundreds of heavy letters from the Right to Be Fat lobby, this is not about aesthetics, nor am I a secret member of the Fat Police. Fat is passive tissue and we are becoming a passive society, spoon-fed by faceless multinational interests, pacified on a diet of ready meals and TV.
Our bodies are a warning system we should trust them. Don’t we need to be a little bit hungry? Hungry for change, hungry for a fairer world? One thing is certain a fairer world won’t be a fatter world.