Our expanding world
Being fat is the new normal. James Marriott says it’s time to put prejudices aside.
What would most surprise a time traveller from 100 years ago about an affluent 21st-century society like ours? Cars would hardly be a shock: the Ford Model T began production in 1908. Similarly, tower blocks and skyscrapers were already becoming familiar a century ago: Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, considered the world’s first skyscraper, was built in 1885. No, the most striking change would be the people themselves. The physical appearance of the average person today is radically different to the average person of 1921. We are much fatter now.
Fatness, once the exception, is now the norm. The majority of adults in Britain are overweight or obese: 60 per cent of women, 67 per cent of men. In the United States 73 per cent of adults are overweight or obese. That means only slightly more than a quarter of Americans are a healthy weight. The slim are a minority. As Edwin Gale, emeritus professor of medicine at Bristol University, suggests in his book The Species that Changed Itself, the sudden fattening of the citizens of affluent nations represents the most remarkable change in human appearance since the agricultural revolution of the 18th century.
Gale proposes that, rather than considering obesity a disease and an aberration, we should think of it as the new normal: the natural state of humans living in a 21st-century environment of consumerism and unprecedented plenty.
In the same way, the normal state of humans living in agrarian societies was to be smaller and shorter-lived than their hunter-gatherer forebears. None of this, obviously, is to deny the risks of obesity, which is a bigger cause of premature death than smoking. From a medical point of view it is better to be slim, though Gale argues that the life expectancy of the
obese is increasing as society becomes more ‘‘fat adapted’’. Whether or not you buy Gale’s idea that obesity is an inevitable feature of modern humanity rather than a disease, it provides a striking way of conceiving the scale and ubiquity of the change.
As a culture we’re still catching up with this physical revolution. We are a Western world full of fat people living with assumptions and prejudices about fatness created by the society of slim people that existed up until about 40 years ago. This is why my answer to the old dinner party question about what aspects of modern life will seem immoral to future generations (a lot of people say meateating) is always: Our attitudes to fat people. ‘‘Fatphobia’’ is not equivalent to racism, sexism or homophobia but biases persist. The belief that fat people are lazy, disgusting or unattractive is widespread and one of the few prejudices you might still get away with expressing in progressive circles.
In 2015 a survey of 1000 employers found that nearly half would be less inclined to hire obese candidates. These prejudices are undoubtedly connected to the perceived link between obesity and low social class.
Over the next half-century we should expect all manner of biases and assumptions about obesity to melt away. This change will be partly thanks to activism but principally, I think, it will be a result of society becoming fatter (we are heading that way: by the time they leave primary school, 20 per cent of pupils are already obese). The more of us that are overweight, the more people will be inclined to sympathise with the idea that obesity is the result of environmental and genetic factors, not a matter of failed ‘‘willpower’’.
We are so accustomed to our prejudices against fat people that it’s easy to forget they are the accidents of a particular cultural moment. The two oldest carvings of human beings (the Venus of Hohle Fels from about 35,000 years ago and the Venus of Willendorf from about 25,000 years ago) depict women who would now be classified as obese. Even if, as archaeologists suggest, these statuettes were not intended as portraits of ideal beauty, they were evidently symbols of power. The paintings of Rubens are almost a cliche of changing beauty standards but they also represent different social attitudes. It was not just Rubens’ nymphs and pagan goddesses who were fat: his Virgin Marys and even his Jesuses were too. Fatness suggested authority and moral solidity.
Fat figures in pop culture who perhaps appear as oddities or instances of tokenism to older generations really represent the beginning of a new normal. We have a fat international pop star, Lizzo; a fat supermodel, Tess Holliday; a fat Hollywood star, Beanie Feldstein. Thanks to pressure from the body positivity movement and the obvious commercial incentives inherent in a fatter society, ‘‘plus-sized’’ fashion models are increasingly prevalent, especially online.
None of this would have been conceivable 20 years ago. To modern children and teenagers it is a state of affairs that probably appears unremarkable.
Indeed in the younger corners of social media this new future has already arrived. Body-positive activists are followed by millions, while traditional fitness influencers are increasingly careful to clarify that their promotion of exercise shouldn’t be taken as an implied criticism of overweight people. We may look back at the early 21st century as the last time a nation of fat people circulated insults and prejudices about themselves and watched only members of the slim minority on their television and cinema screens.