Talking About Obesity Isn’t Taboo: Food Justice Is

The NYTimes recently ran an article about obese pregnant women. Written by an OBGYN, the article starts off with the ominous “One recent night on my delivery shift, eight out of 10 of my laboring patients were too heavy, with two weighing over 300 pounds.” From there, things only get worse. Horror stories of fat women needing cesareans, fat women dislocating the shoulders of the innocent doctors working on them, and fat women who just didn’t get that the whole litany of medical problems they suffered from (diabetes, pre-eclampsia, etc) were caused by or exacerbated by fat. The solution to this “fat” problem, according to the doctor, is to “end the taboo” of talking about fatness. Because apparently, there is simply too much social stigma around noticing and commenting on the fat in the room, as it were, to allow doctors to do their jobs.

And yet, even as that article makes the rounds, news hit that a senator from Missouri introduced legislation that would ensure that welfare no longer pays for “luxury foods” like steak and lobster. Simultaneously, the bill would also prevent welfare from paying for sugary drinks and snacks. Because if poor people aren’t eating steak and lobster, they’re indulging in Cheetos and pop. Which explains why researchers and policy makers think it makes sense to study if SNAP benefits actually make recipients fat (answer: no).

And while more “plus sized” marketing is starting to hit the mainstream (see: the “plus sized” models in 2015’s Sports Illustrated or Layne Bryant’s #ImNoAngel campaign), reactions to these campaigns ranged from worry over what “accepting” unhealthy bodies in mainstream media will do to an already fat nation to outright hostility. Actual fat people noted that not many “plus sized” models for any of these campaigns would actually wear plus sized clothes (this is one of the “plus sized” models in Sports Illustrated) because they aren’t actually fat, they’re just not the size 4 or smaller models that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing.

What all this says to me is that talking about what fat people eat and what their bodies look like as a result, has never been a taboo subject. And yet, the idea that fat people need to be told they are fat persists. As if fat people don’t already know that they are fat and aren’t regularly told so by friends, family, doctors, the media and yes, total strangers. But while there is no lack of opinion on fat people’s eating habits, there is next to no mainstream discussion about the most obvious reason that people are sick: the factory food that makes up the majority of the western diet.

Indigenous researchers and community organizers have long understood the link between western food and ill health. Fry bread, a food created by indigenous women in response to purposefully and very often violently restriction of food access on reservations, stands a prime example of how the imposition of a western diet on normally healthy communities helped bring ill health to those communities. As indigenous peoples who adopted fry bread into their cultures were forced to shift from a local plant/wild game based diet to the high fat, high salt, high processed diet that fat bread embodies, they began to struggle with diabetes at rates that today stand as some of the highest in the world. While fry bread alone didn’t cause this ill health, the overall purposeful destruction of traditional diets did.

Another well researched example is the Okinawan diet that made the rounds a few years back. Researchers linked the long lives of indigenous Okinawans (a population that sees more people live into their 100s than any other in the world) to an indigenous diet high in local plants and animals and low in highly processed western food. Okinawans that moved from Okinawa to the west, or to Japan (which has adopted a lot of western habits) often wound up with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, etc. When those Okinawans returned to Okinawa and their indigenous diet, the problems went away. These findings have consistently been recreated with indigenous diets across the world. When food is fresh, local, and grounded in a historical diet, people are healthy. When food is highly processed, they’re not.

Which means that “fat” is not so much causing the numerous health problems experts like to point to, but that “fat” is an indicator of a highly processed factory food based western diet. Which means that the issue isn’t “why can’t you put the burger down?” but rather instead, “why does the meat in our burgers come from factory farmed animals that fed on GMO corn instead of grass, especially when we know it’s making us sick?” Or in other words, the problem is the food, not people’s bodies.

It’s not that “individual choices” don’t matter or shouldn’t be a part of the equation. But by de-emphasizing the boostrapy “individual choices” and the fat shaming that goes along with it, and centering the various ways systemic violence has played out against communities through food, many communities of color in addition to indigenous communities are growing to understand we need to not just address the question of systemic access, but the cultural issues that can make “eating healthy” difficult. For example, who wants to eat the ‘exotic’ food that got you made fun of and marked as “other” in the school cafeteria, even if it is healthier? Or if the memory of ‘real’ food in your community is so distant, how will you learn to cook it, much less create a system whereby real food is reclaimed and normalized? Many fat people are eating the food they’re eating because their communities were systemically forced to, and their communities found a way to integrate subpar nutritionally deficient factory food into edible tasty meals. How do you recognize and honor this cultural ingenuity and skill, instead of turning it into yet another source of shame?

Responses to these questions from the communities asking them have been multiple and inspiring: Elders are teaching young people how to garden, chefs in multiple communities are teaching themselves and then their communities how to cook traditional foods, and some are even organizing food co-ops or buying clubs. There’s also a growing food sovereignty movement led by sustenance level farmers and even union organizing from farm workers (the latest is a call to boycott strawberries from Mexican workers).

A good talking to from a doctor didn’t inspire or empower any of these communities towards action, and yet all of these actions create far more immediate changes that are beneficial to entire communities rather than just and individual here or there. Doctors that treat “individuals” see this as an individual problem that needs to be fixed through better individual choices and maybe a policy change here or there. But communities throughout the world are demonstrating on a daily basis that only thing that can fix the food system is an extended grassroots movement that confronts the multiple ways that violence plays out through food. Maybe the “frank discussion” doctors need to be having with their patients is how to organize that movement.