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A broadside in the war on blubber
Steyn of courseJust for a change in the old columnar diet, I thought Iâd weigh in on Britainâs obesity epidemic. But, on closer inspection, the war on blubber seems to be the war on terror by other means. In the Guardian, for example, Polly Toynbee had no hesitation in deciding on the root cause: "America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest," she wrote. "Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems earliest... But the narrower the status and income gap between high and low, the narrower the waistbands."
Also, when it comes to Ms Toynbeeâs "income gap", the United States is 41st in the world, the United Kingdom 63rd and Australia 74th. But OK, by Fleet Street standards of pundit accuracy, thatâs close enough. Oh, and the Greeks have less income inequality than the British, but are much fatter. And the country with the highest obesity mortality rate in the world is apparently Denmark. Donât ask me why. I saw a report at the weekend detailing the remarkable rise in Danish breast size over the past two decades, so maybe itâs sweaty Danish fat guys keeling over at the sight of all that fabulous Jutland cleavage. But I digress. When Polly says America, Britain and Australia are the fattest countries in the world, sheâs making a broader point - that the coalition of the willing is also the coalition of the swilling; that there are terrible aesthetic consequences for any nation that heeds the siren song of America ("Would you like fries with that?"). This has been a barely disguised subtext of the new war ever since 9/11. In February 2002, Salman Rushdie reported back to New York Times readers his experience of metropolitan dinner parties. "In the non-American west, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londonersâ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centredness: these are the crucial issues." When the press warns that Britain is becoming a nation of obese children, who does that sound like? In America, you can be an obese child at 45. In Paris a couple of years ago, my French dinner companions harangued me at length about how they could no longer bear to walk down American Main Streets, filled as they are with 300lb middle-aged toddlers waddling along the sidewalk in Xtra-large Disney T-shirts and slurping super-sized sodas from plastic bottles with giant nipples. "It is a culture of arrested development," one disdainful Parisian sniffed wearily, "of perpetual childhood." Naturally, when such a culture sallies forth into the world, it will be crass and blundering - see Sir Max Hastings, for most of the past year, on what hopelessly vulgar imperialists the Yanks make. Indeed, when Europeans gleefully contemplate Americaâs imminent "imperial overstretch", the very phrase takes on awesome metaphorical power, conjuring a pair of polyester check pants straining at the seams across some huge global butt. Thus, in January the municipality of Carquefou in north-western France held a competition. The townâs schoolchildren were asked to illustrate what America meant to them. The older pupils turned in pictures of an enslaved Statue of Liberty being run over by Uncle Sam on a motorcycle (liberty, or at least the statue thereof, being a gift to America from France) or of three hands - Stalinâs fist, the Hitler salute, and Bushâs fist clutching a cross: the axis of evil as seen from the Continent. Yawn. But even more weirdly obsessive were the entries of the younger children. For them it was all about the evils of Coke and McDonaldâs. Corpulent American moppets were pictured devouring giant cheeseburgers and sipping giant colas over explanatory slogans like "Obesité assuré". To French schoolchildren, Americans are a race apart - strange, misshapen monsters staggering from across the ocean to devour anything in their path. As the French student advances toward graduation, he comes to understand that the condition of the American behemoth approximates that of the dinosaurs of old: huge bodies, tiny brains, doomed to extinction. After which, the natural leaders of the world will resume their rightful role. Thatâs why Michael Moore makes such a perfect performing seal for the European intellectual class: the vast bulk of his credibility derives from his vast bulk; to the sophisticates at Cannes, heâs their very own Uncle Tom who growed like Topsy. As to Polly Toynbeeâs economic arguments, I donât buy that. The EU will have collapsed under the weight of its social programmes long before America collapses under the weight of its weight. VS Naipaul was closer to the mark in his book A Turn in the South, marveling at how Americans had "turned fulfilment and the glory of abundance to personal fat. A kind of suicide, it might have seemed; but I also began to wonder," he wrote, "whether for these descendants of frontier people and pinelanders there wasnât, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion." British obesity seems, to these eyes, a sadder affair. But you can see why it bothers the nationâs increasingly unrepresentative attenuated elite as they nibble their curly endives in Islington and Hampstead. How can you argue that Britons feel more and more European when they look more and more Floridian? One day the bony-butted Dutchmen and Swedes will notice; one day the French school competition will be won by some drawing of corpulent West Midland tykes gorging on Cheesy Wotsits. Thatâs whatâs at stake. If Polly Toynbee and the nannytollahs canât fix things now, the bottom will drop out, literally, of Britainâs European future. Posted by: tipper 2004-06-01 |
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