Tackling the symptoms, but not the problem, of our cultural eating disorder

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
September 26, 2008

Fat. It's journalistic gold. You can get rich deploring its presence on human bodies, its existence in strips along the bone of fine steaks, the smell of it rising in clouds from fast-food fry pits, the way it drips through a warm piece of toast and into your heart pipes.

But a wise – and very brave – Toronto writer named Jennifer McLagan has taken the opposite view in her new book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. How I love contrarians.

Fat comes in many forms, all delicious, she says. We have butter, pork fat, poultry fat, and beef and lamb fat – she expounds on all of them – and eaten the right way, they're not paving the road to hell (good intentions do that).

The book is a tiny, partial, sane antidote to the wave of words published in the Western world on the subject of food, a world where the Wall Street Journal covers pork bellies as an indicator and fashion magazines talk about "Salad: The Silent Killer."

Food crisis or life crisis?

The book that finally made Americans aware that their economy and the quality of their lives was tanking was not James Kunstler's The Long Emergency, but Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. A real crisis comes via the belly. Food, glorious food, indeed.

We read about bad White Rabbit candy, listeriosis, poisoned well water, blood chocolate, the high-fructose corn syrup added to processed food, genetically modified crops, industrial hog farms, the disappearance of peaches that taste like peaches, melamine in Chinese milk to bulk up its protein rating, fish farms poisoning wild and free fish, fish mislabelling in supermarkets ("It's red snapper. No, it's Acadian redfish"), the craze for ethanol changing farming patterns and causing food riots in Egypt and Haiti, Morgan Spurlock's Big Macs turning his liver to paté, 3,000 restaurants going bankrupt in France this year, the helpful chemicals destroying the Vietnamese king prawn industry, pregnant Haitian women eating mud for nutrition (they have nothing else) and, of course, climate change altering everything we know about what will survive on the planet.

These stories are specifically about food, but they are really about the basis of human life, and we should honour that. Food is pleasure and sustenance; we see it as everything but. Our current food crisis arises from the failure of industrial systems, but we don't talk about that.

About face on fat

Instead, we talk about fat. This is front-line social misery, as opposed to the huge economic shock-doctrine juggernaut that determines what and why we eat, and why we can't get it right. But human suffering comes in many forms.

Bad fat, bad bodies, people driven into seclusion, living in shame over what will two decades from now become a badge of distinction. Women suffer more, but anorexia among men is increasing along with the fashion magazine requirement that men wear eyeliner. Men, don't turn into the sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands you see in magazines. Be fat, be jiggly, be anything you please, but try to savour food – one of the few things that is both an orgasmic pleasure and an imperative.

I'll tell you why I don't care whether people are fat or thin, why we should stop haranguing them about it. This is one of my childhood memories: a big, hard, pointy needle in my throat. It was a fishbone. I was five and I was choking on it. It went on endlessly, a child's terror, a mother's irritation and my father going in after it with pliers the size of a brad nailer. He was a surgeon. Surely he had more sophisticated implements than that, but that's what it looked like to a five-year-old.

I was transfixed with terror.

We shall draw a veil over what happened next, but the bone was gone. What a relief. My parents were pleased with me. That night in bed, a needle pokes my throat. It was still there, hiding from my father. And I vow that I will never eat again or confess any weakness to an adult lest they plunge down my small throat with forceps. I will die alone in the night, but I'm fine with that.

To this day, I am what is known as an "emetophobe" and will not vomit in case I die. When I am distressed, I don't go for ice cream or pizza, I simply stop eating. As a feminist, I refuse to weigh myself, so I judge my weight by how well my wedding ring fits (I have an assortment of sizes) and whether my pants fall off my bony hips.

In other words, I am as close to a non-eater as can be without being anorexic, and I envy weighty people, fat people, whatever you want to call them, particularly women with hips. We have messed up food, our farms, our supply, our attitude, our self-esteem. I say take it back. Fat looks good to me, a sign of human vitality.