Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place.
It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.
This week, a fascinating long read on an idea somebody had a century ago that still affects the thinking of many people today. In This Doctor Pioneered Counting Calories a Century Ago, and We’re Still Dealing With the Consequences, Michelle Stacey for the Smithsonian looks into Lulu Hunt Peters’ legacy:
Peters was a savvy promoter, but she was also lucky. The decade in which she launched her calorie crusade was uniquely suited to her skills as a communicator—and to her message. A tsunami of social transformations had been building from the turn of the century, including a shifting cultural preference from the curvy Gibson Girl of the 1890s to a whittled-down, boyish silhouette that would become the 1920s flapper. Through the second half of the 19th century a certain plumpness, especially in women, had been seen as charming, healthy and feminine. It also served as a signal of wealth and abundance. As the 20th century began, however, excess weight came to be associated with the lower classes and the poor, while slenderness became counterintuitively a sign of affluence and status.
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