Why the Poor are Fat

Posted on May 21, 2004 in Class Sugar and Fat

It’s politics Friday.

When epidemics flash across a nation, the poor are often the most foully affected. The Obesity Epidemic afflicting the United States is no exception and, as usual, the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel when it comes to defining why the problem exists. Excess fat has become yet another way for the now slender and fit rich to diss’ the poor’s “lack of iniative”, “attitude”, and, in subtle ways, genetic heritage. “Our poor are fat” is a way of exculpating the rich from responsibility for the worsening state of affairs in this country: it is as if they are preparing to justify the widespread hunger they are about to inflict on the working class by their onerous taxes, loss of jobs, and retraction of social benefits. “It’s for their own good,” said the rich, hiding the real motivation: the promotion of their own financial obesity. Food, at least, is a biological necessity. Money is merely a symbol. The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

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Why are America’s poor so fat? There’s no pointing to any one factor, but just about all of them tie into the new capitalism, the mindset that sees Americans not as citizens but as consumers:

• Attitudes: as new immigrants come into this country, they bring with them ideas that are not appropriate for living in America. Where many of them come from, work is back-breaking, soul-killing, destructive. One does more walking or bicycling to get around. Too much exercise — the running, the jogging, the working out that our professional classes promote — can be harmful. But here, particularly in our car culture where we get less exercise than we need — they have become necessary. So the ideas that they bring are out of sync with their new reality.
• About those workout rooms: In the higher-priced suburbs they are not hard to find. They cluster there. They can be staffed with personal trainers who not only help you set proper exercise goals, but also keep out undesireables. In poorer areas, exercise rooms may be a magnet for organized crime types and bullies. Community college tracks are free, but seldom watched. This makes a difference in poor areas.
• Crime: It’s been shown that poor children — especially African Americans and Latinos — spend more time in front of the television than white children. Part of the reason for this is that it’s too damned dangerous to go outside! Where would you rather have your kid after school?: on the street where there are knifings, shootings, and street drugs or at home putting on the pounds?
• Decline of Physical Education: Thanks to the white middle American tax revolts, schools have cut way back on physical education. It wasn’t all that hot in our youth, what with the sit-ups, push-ups, burpies, jumping jacks, and forced mile runs around the track, but cutting it altogether has meant that kids get no instruction on healthy exercise at all.
• Little or No Nutrition Education: One aspect of physical education that was never emphasized much is what constitutes a proper diet. This still continues to be skipped over. Homeschoolers are no exception.
• Junk Food in Schools: Thanks to that precious tax revolt, schools must often strike devil’s bargains with the pushers of junk food for course materials and a share in the profits of “lunches” sold out of vending machines. These “free-market” solutions to school deficits are a form of poisoned taxation: the poor get to pay for food that isn’t good for them. Often, they aren’t even offered healthy alternatives. More and more school districts are just saying no to junk food and commercials in schools.
• Absentee Parents: Of course it’s best that they spend more time with the kids. But to make ends meet, they must often work two or three jobs. So the kids are unsupervised. Convenience food becomes a necessity because kids don’t have the skills to prepare appetizing meals for themselves.
• Sheer exhaustion: When you work two or three jobs, you come home tired. These aren’t desk jobs, but real work involving lifting, pushing, carrying. Who can blame you for going down to Kentucky Fried Chicken for a box crammed with twenty pieces of cunningly cut, parboiled, and well-greased poultry parts?
• Lousy Food: This brings us to a final point. The rich buy the best: the seafood, the prime, leaner cuts of meat. This drives prices up. So the poor buy the bargain fatty meats. Then there is the question of the nutritive value of fast food. Crammed with corn syrup, palm oil, and soybean oil, these legacies of Nixonian-era agribusiness politics are the biggest reason (super-sizing is next) for the increase in the national girth. Furthermore, like dealers in street drugs, fast food chains target those portions of the city where resistance to their presence is weakest: lower class neighborhoods. They aren’t interested in bringing a healthy product to their customers, only what can be counted on for a healthy profit margin.

e rich want to think that the poor are as greedy as they are, conspicuous consumers who cannot be trusted to do what is right for them. What is actually true is that the hands of the working poor are tied so that they have fewer choices and few opportunities to educate or better themselves.

It’s time for a new tax revolt, one where the wealthy are made to pay for the costs incurred by their relentless profit-seeking. They say they don’t really care about the money. So they won’t mind if we raise their taxes to pay for better programs in schools, higher wages for the working poor so they don’t have to work several jobs, and a reduction in crime outside of the gated communities, right?

Don’t count on it. They say one thing and live and vote quite another.

We’ve got to stop them: their economic ideals are mercury injected into the backbone of our nation.

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On African-Americans liking plump women: It’s true, but not as true as the pundits would have you believe. African-American men do indicate that they like plumper women — about ten pounds heavier than what the average white male likes. This indicates that the claim that fatness among African Americans is a matter of taste is a myth: it doesn’t go nearly far enough to explain why so many African Americans are obese.

Once again, what this amounts to is a way of blaming the victim. Racism and class warfare are the real culprits.

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Read this book to learn about the etiology and remedies for rampant obesity: Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Crister.