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Naturally, when biomedicine met demography in the early twentieth century, fat was part of the synergy. Infamously, it was the Metropolitan Life Insurance company that began, in the 1910s, to use height and weight as part of their demographic analysis to predict risk of death and thus allow them to maximize profits. Demographers and public health officials quickly banded together, slide rules and adding machines in hand, to work out mathematically the dangers of fat, literally calculating the perils of having a body that did not fit the norms. In an era in which previous centuries’ leading causes of death— infections, epidemics, childbirth, accidents—were rapidly becoming problems that public sanitation prevented or that medicine could successfully treat, other causes of death such as heart attacks and cancer FOE 69 rose to the tops of the charts, where demographers promptly linked them, with or without actual evidence, to fat. No less an authority than Ancel Keys would later admit that the evidence did not, strictly speaking, provide particularly good support for this link, but he felt it was still reasonable simply because he found fat so unpleasant and disgusting. Thus fat officially became not just a personal problem or a source of disgrace, but a public health concern. But unlike cholera, which could be stopped with proper sanitation and sewers, or smallpox, which could be prevented by vaccine, only individuals could fight their bodies’ tendency to accumulate fat. The burgeoning economy and capitalist creativity of the post–Second World War years created the next field of battle in the war on fat: the weight-loss industry. The emphasis on fatness as an individual problem with an individual antidote, bolstered by an increasing interest in “health foods,” created a market for weight-loss books and advisers. These “experts,” many of whom had no relevant credentials, often did quite well for themselves by convincing people to pay for their insights on how to achieve a physically superior, aesthetically compelling body, one with the potential for admiration, desirability, and upward mobility. One of the most famous of these so-called weight-loss gurus was a self-identified “fat housewife” from Queens named Jean Nidetch who stumbled into creating a weight-loss support group among some of her fat-fearing 1960s neighbors. It proved enormously popular, popular enough that in 1963 Nidetch parlayed it into the familiar company Weight Watchers International (now known simply as “WW”). Weight Watchers soon became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Nidetch, already a weight-loss multimillionaire, ultimately sold the concern to the W. J. Heinz company in 1978 for $78 million; Heinz in turn sold it in 1999 to a private equity firm for $735 million. Today, despite the vast competition that has arisen in the fifty-seven years since its founding, WW International still makes vast sums of money. The 2018 annual report listed WW’s revenue at $1.514 billion. This dramatic rise in profit tracks perfectly with the expansion of the cultural role and intensity of the war against fat since the 1960s. The US weightloss industry, which is to say the industry that makes money off the war against fat, is currently worth a record $72 billion annually according to Business Wire. It makes sense: capitalism loves a nice hungry war, and neoliberalism adores a problem that can be dropped with a stern finger waggle into the lap of the individual, the better to ensure that government remain untaxed by addressing whatever systemic causes may contribute to the mess and the individual can be made, metaphorically as well as literally, to pay for it. The war against fat is the best of both worlds. Follow the conflict, the fear, the need, the money. Why, indeed, would we not rush to buy whatever armaments might help us win even a tiny battle against this slippery, disgusting, destructive foe? Fat stigma is everywhere, and lest you think my claim of fat people’s dehumanization is a bridge too far, a 2019 report published in the medical journal Obesity bears me out. In this report, a comparison of results across four studies and about 1,500 respondents showed that “people with obesity” were blatantly dehumanized, believed to be “less evolved and less human” than their thinner counterparts. Other studies have confirmed this in a variety of specific environments, such as medicine and education. Fat-hating socialization starts very early. Researchers have found that even toddlers absorb the anti-fat attitudes of those around them, particularly their primary caretakers: although infants are perfectly happy to look at images of fat people regardless of how their parents may feel about fatness, toddlers whose mothers showed strong anti-fat bias were not. For these children—and in all likelihood most American children—to learn to communicate, understand, and absorb the messages sent by parents was to learn to hate fat. Let me be clear: we live in a culture in which even toddlers learn that fat people are unworthy of being acknowledged as human beings who we can look at with recognition and welcome. What would you not do, what would you not give, what would you not pay if it offered you even temporary acknowledgement as a human being? What would you not do simply to be allowed to remain one? Fat may well be our genuine enemy. This may be true in all the realms so far asserted and in realms we have yet to imagine. It is quite possible that as I sit here writing, my fat has already bought me a one-way ticket to an early, avoidable death. I suppose we’ll all find out eventually. And yet. And still. I reserve the right to question the validity of any enemy, and the nature of any foe, presented to me in such totalizing and emotionally devastating terms that it compromises not only my personal ability to think, to evaluate, to discern, but also that of my culture. Coercion and manipulation, after all, are our enemies too. One day not so long ago the tiny Mennonite-run grocery store in the next small town over, on which I rely for Amish cheese and bulk baking supplies, suddenly sprouted a set of end cap shelves devoted exclusively to jars of coconut oil. Coconut oil is, shall we say, not exactly a traditional Mennonite ingredient. Yet there it was, jar after jar of the stuff, a testament to the depth and reach of a particularly strong and fashionable fat fetish. Touted by health food enthusiasts as being almost as good for you, point for point, as actually being fat is claimed to be bad for you, coconut oil fans claim that it can reduce belly fat, reduce harmful LDL cholesterol, strengthen the immune system, prevent heart disease, curb appetite, and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to say nothing of keeping your teeth and gums gleaming and cavity free. Coconut oil has long been popular with vegans because as a fat that is 80 to 90 percent saturated, it behaves a lot like butter, which makes it especially useful for baking. But its current trendiness has nothing to do with the fact that you can make a pretty good puff pastry with it. Rather, a few currently trendy weight-loss diet regimens, like the ketogenic and “Paleo” diets, tout coconut oil as a wonder worker, and so it has become ubiquitous, even on the shelves of a little store in a small town in Ohio staffed by freshly scrubbed women in high-necked cotton dresses, sturdy shoes, and pleated white caps. Mind you, according to the Harvard School of Public Health, the few daily tablespoons of coconut oil that anyone is actually likely to consume isn’t enough to make much difference one way or another. But the actual functionality of an object has never been the point of a fetish. A fetish, in the broader, nonsexual meaning of the word, is an object that is worshipped for its associations, its symbolic content, its magical powers. In the United States, for instance, some people fetishize the Confederate flag as a touchstone for the rebellious, the anti-government, the independent, the southern, and, in addition, the racist and the white supremacist. In a very different direction, others fetishize old-school vinyl audio recordings as talismans of a time when they believe the music industry, or perhaps music itself, was somehow “truer” and “more real” than it is today. And so it is with fat. In 2018, the Californian food writer and chef Samin Nosrat appeared in a Netflix television series based on her excellent 2017 cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Each of the four episodes focused on one of the titular elements of good cooking. The very first to air? Fat. One can easily see why the producers would choose to kick off the series with this paean to everything unctuous. The episode is a bucolic, golden, luxurious affair set in Italy, where Nosrat leads the viewer through a playful yet worshipful investigation of olive oil, the fats in cheese and pork, and an utterly irresistible focacciamaking session. (The technique for focaccia shown in the episode, incidentally, is a sensual revelation to knead and shape and produces an exceptionally satisfying loaf.) In this remarkable hour of television, the viewer is shown not only what to fetishize about this fat, but how and why. Fat’s primal connection to the abundance of the land, the fact that it delivers flavor like nothing else, its luxurious looks and textures, and its connection to Italy’s long-lived culture are all reasons to ooh and ah, to touch and taste, to pause reverently when tasting and close one’s eyes for a moment in sensual reverie. Not a word is spoken about fat as a problem, an enemy, or as a problematic excess. Indeed, a largesse of fat is, in this particular bit of television, unequivocally a vehicle for wonder and shared joy.