Over the centuries of human life on Earth, obesity has always been a judgment magnet. Through a long chapter of European history, vast populations of serfs were ruled by a tiny minority of “nobles,” or people with inherited wealth. To the average peasant, a wealthy person’s obesity translated as a painful reminder that peasants were always expected to get along on almost nothing.
For a rich man to be fat was the classic example of adding insult to injury. For him to have a fat wife was what we today would call a “flex,” the cultural equivalent of owning a car that every man who saw it would envy. He was telling the world, “I can afford to support a human who does nothing but eat, and pop out a kid once in a while.”
An overweight member of the royal family was a man whose appearance publicly and proudly announced, “I spend half my day devouring rare, expensive, and fattening foods that you peasants can’t even dream of tasting. Furthermore, there is no such thing as an overweight duke, because however much a duke weighs is, by definition, the correct amount. And oh, by the way, I have never done a day’s actual work in my life.”
Times were hard
Long before money as we know it had arrived on the scene, there were many possible reasons for the lack of food. Maybe no seeds were available to plant because their storage space flooded, or rodents ate them. Maybe there was a drought, or an insect invasion. Or all the healthy men were taken from their fields and sent off to fight the king’s stupid war.
At a different stage of history, there might be no harvest because farm machinery parts were unavailable. Or the civilian population’s food resources might be limited because of rationing, necessary due to another king’s unnecessary war.
At any rate, if some people looked emaciated, the reasons for lack of nutrition were widely comprehended. Regular people understood that only the rich could afford to be well-nourished. Also, the rich could get away with insulting the poor for not carrying much body fat, and thus publicly announcing their low status in the class system, as if it wasn’t clear enough already. In various times and places, this attitude persisted through the centuries.
Bad attitudes
The sight of a skinny person could inspire such cruel reactions as, “You are not worthy of the expenditure of food required to keep you alive” (which would, of course, be verbalized in a much cruder and crueler way). On the most basic level, the obvious implication of pointing out someone’s thinness is “Your mother didn’t love you enough to feed you.” That universally applicable insult is a rude assertion that can be expressed in numerous ways and cause a literal gut reaction.
At the level of least ugliness, the hidden meaning behind insulting someone’s thinness is, “Obviously, you are too lazy to work for your daily bread.” (Otherwise, there would be some meat on your bones.) Some societies do try to feed people.
And of course, there are always a certain number of citizens who hate to be taxed just for the sake of feeding children. Such folks may not even recognize why they feel so strongly about it. But the subconscious mind of this person may be putting up an objection like, “Why should I care about, and be financially responsible for, babies whose own parents don’t even care enough to nourish them?” The thought process here is, “People are required to deserve every bite of food, and if they can’t manage to do that, too bad for them; it’s not my problem.”
There is plenty of blame to go around. A well-fed person might look at a starveling and think, “You don’t work, so why should you eat?” In other contexts, no such resentment has occurred. In India, over the centuries, millions of people have earned spiritual merit by filling the rice bowls of monks who give up everything to spend their whole lives praying for the world and every creature in it.
Nowadays
Recent history has shown us that, counterintuitively, poverty can cause obesity because of the weird ingredients added to hundreds of food products. When it comes to emotions about body size, a lot of deep subconscious material is involved. In recent history, it has been relatively easy to understand why a low income has so readily caused people to be underweight. Quite obviously, the main cause of malnourishment is: not enough money for groceries.
During what is called the Great Depression, for instance, Americans understood this equation all too well. By and large, on the whole, it was a pretty well-settled and comprehensible fact that poor people tended to be thin and rich people tended to be obese.
There seems to be an overwhelming number of reasons to scorn people who are visibly obese. It used to make more sense when it meant, “I hate you because you obviously are rich, and probably keep all the food for yourself, and don’t share.” Except now, that instinct misses the mark, and it is actually more probable that an obese person is not rich. Of course, in some quarters, it is considered okay to hate skinny people.
According to one study,
[I]ncome […] is linked to higher health literacy which, in turn, is positively related to health-promoting behaviors (ie, healthy nutrition, physical activity).
(To be continued…)
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Income and obesity: what is the direction of the relationship? A systematic review and meta-analysis,” NIH.gov, January 2018
Image by jcoope12/Pixabay
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