The Fat's in the Friendly Fire

The fat is in the fire on the obesity issue. Do we do fat jokes and make the obese feel bad about themselves or stand idly by and pretend not to notice? Is the choice Ridicule versus Indifference? I don’t think so.

In the words of John Edwards (all I suspect we’ll remember of his candidacy years from now): “There are two Americas.” He’s talking about the rich and the poor, but he could be speaking of the fat and the thin. Only in America are the super rich super thin and the poor disproportionately obese. There sometimes seems to be a race between the rich trying to starve to death and the poor trying to eat themselves to death.

Our idea, or someone’s idea, of female beauty must be seriously warped to look at our starlets. Death-camp chic is just perverse and unattractive—as well as unhealthy and un-natural. Our poor do not lack in calories, but eat fast food and junk food. Sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes convenience.

We often give a cultural explanation, but that doesn’t really work. People explain rationalize by talking about the traditional Hispanic diet of beans refried in lard or the African American diet as being high in pork and other fatty cuts because they were inexpensive. All very tempting explanations.

Sometimes the rationale is that certain cultures traditionally ate coloricaly dense foods because of the great demands of manual labor. They say that the diet has remained the same, but the people have stopped working hard. This, of course, implies the poor obese are also lazy. This is mostly nonsense.

There is an old story of the famous wraith thin English author and wit, George Bernard Shaw sitting next to the rotund William Gladstone, 19th century English prime minister. Gladstone turned to Shaw and remarked, “To look at you Shaw, one would think there were a famine in England.” Shaw replied, “And to look at you, one would discern its cause.”

Well, I don’t blame Gladstone, the poor or even our fast food industry. I blame God. God put the flavor in fat, not celery. God made the ice cream taste better than the spinach. God had other choices and should take some responsibility. After all, why was the apple off limits? There was a healthy, vitamin rich, relatively high fiber snack.

I can’t really answer this theological question, but maybe, just maybe, God is in more of a hurry to welcome and hang out with the zaftig poor than to have to deal with Paris, Lindsey and the other rich anorexics. Who could blame Him?