What I wish I could tell food justice advocates

Sometimes I wish I could make everyone in the food justice movement read these fat acceptance 101 resources (or any fat acceptance resources).

I’m so sick of reading article after article, interview after interview, holding my breath for the inevitable reference to “obesity.”

The latest one is Feministing’s interview with Saru Jayaraman, the founder of Restaurant Opportunities Center United and a leader of campaigns to establish a living wage, paid sick days, and freedom from sexual harassment for restaurant workers.

She talks about the importance of sustainable labor practices as well as sustainably-grown foods; about the high poverty levels among restaurant workers, especially women and people of color; about the vulnerability to sexual harassment that comes from dependence on tips to make a living; and about the need to organize both in person and online for better wages and working conditions.  I couldn’t agree more….until I got to this part:

The reason for the fact that you have the largest and fastest growing industry in American proliferating the absolute lowest paying jobs is the power of the National Restaurant Association, which we call the Other NRA. They really are, we like to say that they kill more people annual that [sic] the Rifle Association because of obesity.

I just wish I could take Jayaraman aside and tell her:

“Obesity” is not a disease.

It’s just a ratio of height to weight. It was never intended to be used as a measure of individuals’ health, and it doesn’t tell you anything about how healthy a person is.

“Obesity” doesn’t kill people. Fat stigma does.

Restaurants don’t make fat people fat. Fat people have always existed, and always will. There are thin people who eat out regularly, and fat people who hardly ever eat out.

Fat bodies are not a symptom of corporate irresponsibility or unjust food systems. Fat bodies just are, and we’re sick of being used as pawns for pretty much every social justice cause under the sun.

Where does fatness come from? Who cares?

Another day, another article purporting to explain why fat people exist.

Funny how no one ever asks what causes thinness, or tallness, or brown-haired-ness. It’s almost like those traits are rightfully accepted as part of the natural diversity of bodies or something.

I’m sick of so many people, both liberal and conservative, treating the existence of people like me as a mystery to be solved. Conservatives blame the individual, liberals blame societal factors or try to find scientific explanations, but no one stops to think that maybe fatness is not actually a problem that needs solving.

No one stops to think, even though fat activists have been doing their work for decades. Even though the facts are out there for anyone who actually cares to look.

I’m sick of fatness being a marked trait. In her book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Julia Serano describes marked identities as those that are considered artificial, unnatural, subject to questioning, while unmarked ones are seen as natural and unquestionable. For example, people often ask transgender people why they’re trans, but no one thinks to ask a cisgender person why they identify with the gender they were assigned at birth; and people often talk about femininity as unnatural and performative, even though it feels natural and right for many people, like Serano (and myself).

Where do fat bodies come from? I don’t know, but we sure can dance.

Internalized fat-phobia within fat-pos spaces = the worst.

I’ve been reading through the responses to the “What it’s like to be a fat woman” questions, and they’re really interesting. I hope that some men and non-binary people answer the questions as well, because I would love to read a broader range of experiences.

But one of them had a line that made me stop dead in my tracks:

Being a mother now myself this is a tricky one. I want my child(ren) to grow up the happiest way they can and so the truth is I don’t want my daughter to grow up fat. I don’t think that she is genetically wired that way and I’m going to try to ensure she doesn’t develop the weird relationship with food or body image that I did. 

I don’t even know where to begin with my rage at this one. It’s so, so frustrating and painful to come across attitudes like this while reading supposedly fat-positive blogs.

You can’t tell by looking at someone, especially a small child, how they’re “genetically wired.” Some fat kids grow up to be thin. Some thin kids grow up to be fat. Puberty does some weird shit to people’s bodies. The interactions of genetics and environment are complicated, and thinking that because your kid is thin now, they’re meant to be thin forever, is only going to hold them to an impossible standard.

Fat doesn’t mean unhappy. Fat doesn’t mean having a weird relationship with food or body image. Believe me, plenty of thin women have that too.

I can understand why someone who’s dealt with fat stigma wouldn’t want their children to face the same stigma. But the problem isn’t the child’s body–the problem is the stigma itself. Saying you hope your daughter doesn’t grow up to be fat contributes to that very stigma: to the idea that fat is inherently a bad thing, something to be avoided, something less than ideal, something that needs an excuse (like “genetics”) to be acceptable.

It’s like a gay person saying “I hope my kid doesn’t grow up to be gay” rather than “I hope that by the time my kid grows up, no matter what their sexual orientation turns out to be, society has become much more accepting of queer people.” (Which is not to say that fatphobia and homophobia are the same–they definitely operate in different ways, and many people deal with the intersection of both–but I think the basic analogy works. In each case, a parent who hopes that their child does not develop the same marginalized identity they themselves have is contributing to the stigma against that identity.)

If you don’t want your kids to face fat stigma, then fight the stigma itself.

Make it clear–through both words and actions–that all bodies are good bodies. That’s there’s no wrong way to have a body, period.

Anything less is bullshit.

What being a fat woman is really like

My glamorous fat life: hanging out on a farm after going to the beach for my birthday last summer

Through this post from Bethany, I found out about a surprisingly fat-positive interview that was recently published in Cosmo (!). Bethany and a bunch of other bloggers decided to answer the same questions, so here are my answers! You can find a roundup of all the participating bloggers here at Charlotte’s blog.

How do you feel when other women around you complain about feeling/being fat?

Luckily, this doesn’t happen to me often–and when it does, it usually involves friends writing about their body image struggles in their own online spaces, which I could choose to stop following if I wanted to.  I feel simultaneously frustrated–because fat is not a bad thing, and I’m usually bigger than the person doing the complaining!–and understanding, because the pull of weight loss culture is so strong, and I remember what it was like to be utterly convinced that I needed to be thin to be attractive and healthy.

How has your body image changed since high school? College?

SO MUCH. In middle school and high school, I hated my body–even though I also enjoyed dressing up, and never had much desire to hide behind baggy or plain clothing. I remember stepping on the scale at the doctor’s office when I was 17, and seeing it hit 201–and that felt like the worst thing ever. In my mind, 200 lbs was hideous, far beyond the realm of normal people, and crossing that line made me officially, terribly, disgustingly fat (which seems funny now, because I weigh about 240 and am much happier with my body!).

I spent most of college dieting on and off before I came across Shapely Prose through the feminist blog-o-sphere, and my mind was blown. It took some time to truly accept everything I was learning, but when I did, it made such a difference. I still have bad body-image days occasionally, but for the most part, I’m happy with how I look. When I was younger, I never could have imagined that!

Have you tried dieting? What happened?

I started dieting fairly late, compared to the experiences of most fat women I know. In eighth grade, I went through a phase where I did ten minutes of crunches a day in hopes of shrinking my stomach–but I didn’t start seriously dieting until senior year of high school, and then I was doing it “for my health.” I never did anything really drastic, but obsessing over the calories in everything and going to the gym constantly just wasn’t sustainable for very long.

In college, I kept falling off the wagon and then starting again, yo-yo-ing up and down within a range of 40 or so pounds–until I learned about fat acceptance and stopped altogether. My weight settled about about 180 then, although a few years later I ended up gaining weight for unrelated reasons, and who knows if that was partly affected by the way dieting can change people’s metabolisms?

We’re worried about penguins’ weight now? Seriously?

My friends are great at finding adorable things, and not too long ago, a few of them shared a link to this ridiculously adorable video of a penguin chasing her zookeeper:

Unfortunately, the post also includes this bit:

We almost feel bad for her, but her “happy feet” and the way she cuddles up to the zookeeper at the end make it clear that their bond is super strong. Also, with penguin obesity rates on the rise, it’s important for the flightless bird to get in some gym time.

Yes, it linked to an entire article about a zoo’s attempt to prevent OMG-besity! in their penguins.

Penguins.

Seriously.

Every time I think the moral panic about “obesity” has reached the most epic, ridiculous lows, it goes lower.

Fatness is double-plus ungood.

Last night, in my internet travels, I came across this New York Times op-ed from a former hedge fund manager who left the world of finance when he realized it had turned him into a greedy, wealth-addicted jerk.

Although I couldn’t wrap my mind around the sheer enormousness of the numbers the author, Sam Polk, was talking about (multimillion dollar bonuses? It’s like a completely different reality), I liked some of his observations. Like this one:

I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

And then I got to this part:

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. 

Right, because fat bodies are an injustice, not the stigma and discrimination we face. Not the $60 billion industry devoted to eliminating us. Nope, just the fact that we exist.

Let that sink in for a second. Fat bodies. Are an injustice.

The exorbitant salaries of the financial sector that the author left behind aren’t the only thing that’s deeply distorted.

And when he left it, guess what he did? Did he devote his life to helping people who had been harmed by Wall Street’s predatory practices, perhaps by fighting foreclosures or supporting living wage campaigns?

No, he started a non-profit “to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction.”

Food addiction. Food addiction. Not hunger, or food insecurity, or lack of access to nutritious food options, but food addiction. And fatness. Because heaven forbid poor people ever enjoy food or be anything less than thin. Because clearly what poor people need isn’t money, but rich people telling them how to eat.

I just …my head spins trying to make sense of it.

All the sense I can make is that power distorts thinking, twists the urge toward compassion into condescension. Into a sick sense of superiority and a savior complex.

Polk says he finally feels as if he’s making a real contribution. Well, he’s certainly contributing to fat hatred, to a toxic culture of moralizing about food, and to the lack of respect for poor people as humans with intelligence and agency.

Note #1: Chris Maisano has a great analysis of what’s wrong with the op-ed, which he calls “chicken soup for the neoliberal soul”: an individualistic approach that erases the need for collective action.

Note #2: Hedge funds always make me think of hedgehogs. The world would be a much better and cuter place if we could replace all hedge fund managers with hedgehog managers.

Sometimes…

Sometimes I just get really angry that we live in a society where size is seen as a proxy for health, and health is seen as a proxy for virtue and worth.

Fuck that shit. We’re all worthy.

I hate how pervasive this shit is. How pervasive the stereotypes and assumptions about fat people are–such that sometimes, they come out of the mouths of the people you’d least expect. Out of them mouths of people who, 99% of the time, are on board with fat acceptance and HAES.

Those offhand remarks from supposed allies cut so much deeper than the constant stream of fatphobia from the greater world–which I’ve mostly learned to tune out, laugh at, or analyze intellectually.

It’s not fun to get hit in the gut with a reminder that the world sees me as inferior.

But it also motivates me.

It reminds me why I do fat activism. Why I post pictures of myself and others being unapologetically fat and fashionable, why I’m working to build fat community here in Boston. Why I stand up for the inherent worth of all bodies.