America’s Overeating Paradox

 

In Francine Prose’s book Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins she ponders the stigma that afflicts the obese in our country. She writes that the overweight are often perceived as being “self-indulgent, sloppy, lazy, morally lax, lacking in the qualities of self-denial and impulse control that our society (still so heavily influenced by the legacy of Puritanism) values and rewards.” 

Prose goes on to point out that this stigma turns into outright resentment in situations where the obese infringe on our personal space by taking more than their fair share of it. She provides the example of the non-obese person who shudders at the thought of having to sit next to an obese person on an airplane and how this imposition has compelled airlines to charge obese people for not one but two airline tickets since it’s apparent that the obese require two seats. 

In a country that sees obesity as a spiritual problem, it makes sense then that the cure for obesity is sought in the spiritual sphere. Thus many try to cure their overeating with repentance, prayer, Twelve-Step Programs and other forms of contrition that might temper their ravenous appetites. 

While it’s apparent that the causes of obesity—poverty, lack of education, the ubiquity of cheap, calorie-dense foods, to name a few—are complex, we do have a reflexive moral revulsion toward the obese, as if some rotten core in their soul is at the root of their loathsome condition and it is this visceral reaction that makes obesity so painful and humiliating. 

But our hostility toward overeating is contradicted by our celebration and gleeful worship of it, evidenced by the growing popularity of eating competitions, which are chronicled in  Jason Fagone’s Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream. 

Fagone observes that eating competitions embody many components—some good, some bad—of the American Myth. On the sunnier side, eating competitions are a light-hearted, “low-brow” pastime that brings communities together in a benign shared experience. 

Nothing like taking the family to an event in which grown men and women stuff thousands of cannolis, donuts, or hotdogs down their throats and ingest so much food as to cause their organs to swell and their intestinal lining to stretch more than a woman pregnant with sextuplets. 

Fagone also asserts that eating competitions embody the American can-do attitude of optimism and he recalls the film Cool Hand Luke in which Luke, played by Paul Newman, defies the harsh prison conditions of his captors and inspires his fellow prisoners to endure by eating fifty hard-boiled eggs. 

Indeed, eating gargantuan quantities of food seems to be a show of strength, triumph, and enduring masculinity. 

Of course, this sense of strength and triumph can veer too far and become part of America’s arrogance and gloating—qualities rooted in America’s sense of world domination and undying abundance. 

Fagone points out that American critics relish in eating competitions as evidence of our dystopian excesses: “If anti-American zealots anywhere in the world wanted to perform a minstrel show of our culture, this what they’d come up with. Competitive eating was a symbolic hairball coughed up by the American id.” 

For Fagone, the eating competition embodies the strengths and grotesqueries of the American character so powerfully, that his prose becomes excessive as he rhapsodizes shamelessly in the presence of an eating contest: 

"Whatever’s happening doesn’t feel shabby or small, but instead—I swear to the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese—broad and big and consequential, as though America has vomited up its deepest hope and deepest dread in one place and now something worthwhile having to do with this big, fat, infantile, stupid country can be learned, or accomplished. The whole goopy range of it, everything that makes America so undeniably great and infuriating, loved and hated . . ." 

Fagone is a witness of a country enamored by eating competitions, a country that sees virtue in being able to consume over 11,000 calories in one mad eating frenzy. 

How can we reconcile this worship of overeating with the contempt toward gluttony that Francine Prose describes? 

It appears that Americans don’t condemn overeating per se, but a particular symbolic meaning of overeating. If overeating represents personal defeat, sin, and being an imposition against others, then overeating is a sin. 

On the other hand, if overeating represents masculinity, domination, and power—qualities highlighted in a competition—then it is not an expression of overeating so much as an expression of American ingenuity, discipline, and competitiveness, qualities that inflate America’s collective self-esteem. 

Of course, America’s paradoxical attitude toward gluttony is not logical or rational; it is rather rooted in the symbolism and mythology of Puritanism, the religion of our forefathers that taught us self-flagellation for our personal failings and pride for our God-inspired entrepreneurial successes. 

We are additionally a nation easily seduced by the manner in which something is packaged. Market overeating as the sin of indulgence and we will disdain overeating. Market overeating as a competition and a show of strength and we will embrace overeating as one of life’s most treasured virtues.

 

 

Comments

[Ed]

There is a root cause or causes underlying over-eating. We are not addressing those causes in this country because it would be too uncomfortable. I think many of the causes are based in psychological problems, which no American wants to admit to having. If obesity were like a broken leg, no problem, we'd attend to it immediately. But mental issues are swept under the carpet.

[jeffrey McMahon]

We're a nation of extremes. Either we sweep our mental problems under the carpet, as you say, or we flaunt them on Oprah in flagrant displays of exhibitionism.

[Tom Welch]

The root cause is 1st that food is cheap in America, whether at a resturant or grocery store, compared to Europe. And Americans are basically stupid, selfish and lack culture so they spend all their free time at the local mall.

[jeffrey McMahon]

It's economic as well. The richer people are, the skinnier they are.

[Ed]

I know I use food to self-medicate, much as some use alcohol. I don't consider myself stupid.

[jeffrey McMahon]

Food soothes my soul all the time; my intelligence is modest, not woefully absent.

[Tom Welch]

America has 2 wars going and no end in sight for either conflict.

[jeffrey McMahon]

The enemy from without and from within.

[Paul]

Part of the obesity epidemic is about our food itself. Go to Canada or Europe, read the ingredients of similar food items and compare: no hydrogenated oils, no high fructose corn syrup, no artificial colors, very little preservatives, ...

All of these industrial ingredients in turn make the food cheap to produce. Along with various pscyhcological issues Ed mentioned, we then use cheap food to self-medicate.

Another issue is that people in Europe still walk! Walk to work, walk to buy food, walk to see a movie. Here, it's all about cars and the "freedom" that comes with it.

[jeffrey McMahon]

Seattle always is number one in nutritional consciousness and BMI index. Sounds like an educated place. It has the most fit people in the country. The rain doesn't stop them from exercising.

[Tom Welch]

The best walking shoes are of course made in Europe. My personal favorite are Ecco shoes.

[Tom Welch]

I wear Ecco Seawalkers from http://www.eccousa.com/

[Mike W]

Porcine Prose writes :

"...the qualities of self-denial and impulse control that our
society...values and rewards.”

Nonsense.

Our society pays lip service to prudence, but rewards the glutton, the shill, the debtor, the hedge funder, the campaign contributor, the no-money-downer, the welfare deadbeat, and the Ponzi schemer.

Meanwhile honest people who have sweated, saved and gone without for decades see their hard-won life savings diminished in an instant,as happened today on Wall Steet.

[Ed]

All this talk about food and eating is making me really hungry...

[jeffrey McMahon]

I think Mike is conflating hunger for food with greed on this day in which loafer and the fraud have rendered us that much poorer. I'll buy the metaphor, especially on a day like today.