FAT FOOLISHNESS
Scientists are queuing up to explain an epidemic of 'obesity' in the West. According to Nikhil Dhurundbar of Wayne State University, Michigan obesity is linked to a previously un-investigated virus AD36. Dr Dhurundar's research was highlighted in a season of 'fat' television programmes broadcast in Britain by Channel Four. Baylor College obesity specialist John Foreyt told Channel Four: 'The idea that someone behind me sneezes and I can catch this virus and I can catch obesity is quite shocking.'
But Dhurundar is competing with a powerful lobby with an equally compelling explanation for obesity: the geneticists. Jeffrey Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University identified a gene that governs the feeling of satiety, whose suppression is credited with causing obesity. Commenting on the genetic explanation for obesity Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of The Hungry Gene: The Science of Fat and the Future of Thin (Atlantic Books) asks us to 'consider the Venus of Willendorf, a hand-sized 25 000 year-old sculpture'. 'She has erupting breasts, a Falstaffian stomach … she is lushly voluptuously obese'. Shell's conclusion is that 'obesity has its roots in the stone age'.
All of the scientific explanations for obesity are interesting and worth pursuing, as clues to the diagnosis of individual cases of obesity. They cannot, however, tell us very much about the much-vaunted 'epidemic of obesity' at work in the Western world. A more prosaic explanation is looking researchers in the face, but is for the most part ignored.
Increases in agricultural output and productivity in food processing has effectively eradicated food scarcity in the developed world. This is a change that has been realised in a single generation. It reverses the ordinary condition of eons of human existence: scarcity. Obesity is a terrible condition. But next to the diseases of malnutrition it pales into insignificance. Depressing as the tendency to over-eating is, it is nothing to the terrible conditions of hunger that have been the norm for so long.
Those looking for biological explanations of obesity ought to consider why the AD36 virus only strikes countries with high Gross Domestic Products, or whether the gene for satiety is associated with white skin. Ellen Ruppel Shell ought to study Bachofen's seminal anthropological account of Mother Right on the Venus of Willendorf. She should understand that the special attractions of plumpness to pre-historic peoples was a compensation for their general condition of hunger.
The general misery over obesity is characteristic of an epidemic of morosity that is gripping Western societies: real social advance seems to present greater problems than it fixes. But this is a misjudgement. Tragic as obesity is, it is a symptom of the first steps to the eradication of hunger.
-- James Heartfield
http://www.heartfield.demon.co.uk/james1.htm