The human race faces many dire threats. War, famine, disease, terrorism, giant asteroids, Donald Trump. But the ever-alert readers of the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit know that all these threats pale in comparison to the greatest threat of all. I am speaking, of course, of fat chicks.
In a post with the thoughtful title “Dear obese women I f*king hate you,” a Reddit MGTOW calling himself iamlikethewindbaby outlines his case against these horrible monsters. Speaking fluent SARCASM, he addresses fat chicks directly.
“Thanks for turning average chicks into supermodels and ugly chicks into average chicks,” he declares.
Thanks for filling up my newsfeed with memes about how beautiful fat chicks are. Do you even know how attractiveness is determined? The more healthy and fertile a woman is the more attractive she is. Being obese makes you unattractive, period. F*ck you.
Er, I’m pretty sure attractiveness is determined by whatever the hell people happen to think is attractive. Some people find skinny people attractive; some find fat people attractive; some people don’t pay much attention to weight. There are even a few perverse souls who find Donald Trump attractive, if you can believe that.
Thanks for making a generation of men feel bad about themselves because a fat chick is the best they can do, it’s not their fault 70% of you are overweight.
That’s actually not quite right. According to the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of American women classified as overweight or obese isn’t 70%; it’s 64%. The percentage of men classified as overweight or obese? 74%.
That’s right, fellas; there are more fat dudes than fat chicks in the US.
The percentage of American adults classified as obese? 36% — exactly the same for men and women.
Now, there may be legitimate reasons to wonder if these categories really make sense as they’re currently defined. But one thing is clear: for every fat chick out there fat chick-ing, there’s a fat dude to match.
Thanks for being 400lbs and yet somehow still unable to cook. That’s great. It’s a good thing we did away with those sexist home economics classes.
Dudes, given that you’re all devoted to GOING YOUR OWN WAY and all, shouldn’t you be learning how to cook your own damn dinner?
Thanks for being so fat that being 20lbs overweight isn’t even considered fat anymore. Nothing is sexier than a 5’3 150lb women.
According to some number I found on the internet, the 5’5″ tall Marilyn Monroe saw her weight fluctuate from 115-150 lbs at various points in her adult life. I don’t know why we know this, or if we should, but apparently we do. Here’s a picture of her at one of her more voluptuous moments, in Some Like it Hot.
What a hideous monster!
Thanks for having personalities that match your appearance. It’s important for people’s insides to match their outsides.
Based on iamlikethewindbaby’s personality, I can only assume he looks something like this:
I can’t wait until all your cold-giant-black-hearts explode.
What a lovely fellow.
Iamlikethewindbaby also blames obese women for rising insurance premiums, and snickers a little at the thought of obese women dying before retirement.
It’s true that obesity can increase health care costs and lower life expectancy. But you know what else increases health care costs and lowers life expectancy? Being an angry dickhead.
“There is a direct connection between being constantly angry, competitive, and aggressive, and early heart disease,” notes an article on the “health costs of anger” on mentalhelp.net.
[R]ecent research suggests that men who have poor anger management skills are more likely to suffer a heart attack before age 55 than their more emotionally controlled peers. A separate study indicated that older male subject’s hostility ratings (how hostile and irritable they tend to act towards others) predicted heart disease more accurately than other known risk factors including cholesterol, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking and being overweight. …
The evidence from numerous studies is clear: constant chronic anger, hostility, and aggression raise your risk of developing various deadly forms of heart disease by as much as five times the normal rate. The more hostility you tend to express, the more prone to heart disease you are likely to be.
And the lovely iamlikethewindbaby is hardly the only Reddit MGTOW who fits the angry dickhead profile, as a quick skim through the comments on his post reveals.
Indeed, the lovely fellow who calls himself lordjedi may have cut several weeks off his life expectancy with all the anger in this comment alone:
Not that I haven’t tried a couple times, but my policy for many years has been my bedroom is off limits to fats.
I’m sure the “fats” of the world feel just awful they don’t get to partake of lordjedi’s charms. He continues:
That means no easy money for fatties either. Get a f*cking job, Porkins, if you want to sleep indoors. Every dollar you spend in your short worthless life will be earned by you with your fine arts/wymyn’s studies degree and your $90K student loan debt, while stocking shelves on the 3 AM Walmart shift. Enjoy your Cool Ranch Doritos. Why don’t you f*cking marry them if you love them so much?
If you love your hatred so much, lordjedi, why don’t you marry it? Oh, wait, I guess you have.
MTGOStark, who has clearly never spoken to a woman in the real world, offers this thought.
If being not obese is literally the only thing they have to do in their life to succeed, and they still fail at it (and complain on top), it’s just truly pitiful.
Aanarchist apparently spends much of his Going His Own Way time scanning through profiles on online dating sites.
i see those online profiles where the woman is like 50 lbs overweight and she puts down average. a few extra pounds means 100 lbs overweight. big and beautiful means THAR SHE BLOWS. the funny thing is they want you to ignore their weight, like it has nothing to do with who she is. it’s like she wants you to watch her eat an entire f*cking cake with her bare hands, and treat her as if she’s eating salad and a water.
Huh. That actually sounds like a fun date. Who doesn’t like cake?
For a second my brain thought he was naming himself iamthewhiningbaby, and was like “well if you say so…”
But as concern troll pointed out it doesn’t evn do justice to actual babys – in my experience they don’t actually manage to be that whiny…
@CrysT: Maybe this point was lost in my prior wall of texts (my apologies if so). I would argue (and I have argued on prior threads) that an obese person who exercises and eats a diet rich in vegetables and fruits and low in red meat is healthier than a thin person who never exercises and subsists on McDonalds.
One question about your father (I don’t know nearly enough about his case to come to any informed conclusion about it, this is just a ‘first glance’ reaction to the story you gave us): hospital acquired infections are a huge issue, and one that medicare (and the wider healthcare community) is finally waking up to. Also, there is a large amount of ‘fat blaming’ that infects healthcare providers, driven both by wider social biases and the fact that we see so many sick and obese people, so I can easily believe that your father caught an infection due to neglect because of either his weight, or reaction to his history of non-compliance (there are few things more certain to make a physician see red and bypass our cognitive reasoning skills than the words ‘non-compliant patient’ in a chart. It seems to be part of how we’re wired)
That said, poorly-controlled diabetes (no matter the type) does inhibit the immune systems ability to fight infections from any source. Is it possible that he would have survived the infection if his diabetes had been better controlled through either medication, exercise, weight loss, or any combination of the above? (crossing my fingers and hoping I don’t come across as victim-blaming).
Sorry for a double posting after a teal deer, but, I just can’t: @joekster You advise your patients to lose weight? Well, if you can sleep at night with putting in them in the position of having to do a thing that even the flawed research that is out there recognises is virtually impossible for all but a small minority, causing them shame, anxiety and the inevitable self-loathing when they can’t magically achieve the unachievable, go for it. I’d have thought it would be much more productive to teach them exercises that would help with their symptoms, and also improve their overall health (bearing in mind that they could ALREADY be doing a reasonable amount of exercise), but hey, I’m not a medical professional. I have the stupid idea that helping to improve people’s lives is more important.
Also: paleo diet? FUCK OFF with that stupidity. I am full to the teeth of the USian medical establishment and its Puritanical, morality-driven, “suffering and deprivation is GOOD” approach to patient care.
Last night after I went to bed, this thread was still in my head & I remembered the first doctor who ever fat-shamed me, when I was about 10 or possibly younger. Only a few years after that, he died of a heart attack in his 40s. So yeah, the so-unhealthy fatso has already outlived his self-righteous ass.
Anyhow, I’m off to work now. I’ll check this thread when I get back 🙂
Everyone, have a wonderful day.
Yes, joekster, I knew you would try to turm it around to “but his faaaaaat.” No. It was NOT FUCKING DUE TO THAT. As the subsequent investigation proved.
So yeah, it is coming across massively as victim blaming.
You need to be aware of that tendency of doctors to take the position that fat people are liars, and so automatically dismiss any evidence that contradicts your Fatz Is Kill dogma.
It was that sort of thinking that led to my depression, IBS and PCOS not being diagnosed until I moved to UK and finally had GPs who listened to me rather than just look at an animated, lying blob of fat.
@ marinerachel
I was thinking about that reading this thread.
Specifically, for various reasons I’m involved in trialing some software for the NHS. It’s about costs (in monetary terms) and health. Basically you enter in lots of details about clients (everything from biometric data to excercise regime, costs of equipment, travel costs, time off work etc) and then submit it to the NHS for compilation (underneath it just seems to be a big SQL database).
Essentially they’re trying to establish financial costs of prevention versus financial costs of treatment.
Now, forgetting the controversy about causation and how you cost treatment, one thing it specifically excludes is cost of injuries arising from excercise. I did raise this and they acknowledged it was an issue (I wasn’t the first obviously).
Personally just about all my NHS usage has arisen from ‘healthy’ activity. The one possible exception was a kidney stone but the chief suspect for that was a combination of vitamin supplements and a low fat diet (apparently some vitamins are only soluble in fat and an excess can crystallise).
I’m far from a marijuana expert (just a casual, occasional smoker), but I would never smoke every day like some people do. It doesn’t seem like it makes them very happy or productive. Instinctively, without taking any sort of data or research into account, it seems to me like there must be negative long term effects from inhaling smoke and taking drugs every day.
For me, it just replaces alcohol sometimes on weekend nights or when I want to zone out by myself. It’s a lot easier to smoke a joint than to drink enough alcohol to get drunk. It’s also normally cheaper. It’s not a bunch of unnecessary calories, and I don’t need two full days to recover afterwards. When I’m drunk I just feel gross and fat, but I care less than usual about feeling those things. When I’m high I feel no arthritis pains, I’m not constantly worrying about everyday problems, and everything feels fun and somewhat unpredictable for an hour or two.
Hope that doesn’t come across as too glorifying. I’m just saying that, for me personally, weed is a lot better than alcohol in every way. Of course, it’s probably better to take as few drugs as possible, unless it’s medically necessary.
VioletBeauregarde
Yes. Oh gawd yes. People seem to find it a combination of confusing and buzzkilly to hear a toothpick like myself speak in defense of fat people. I’ll take it though -_- I’ll never see worse than what fat people get for speaking in defense of themselves.
Delurking late because this one really pushes my buttons.
Obesity and health issues are (not all that closely) correlated in the same way icecream consumption and shark attacks are. It doesn’t matter how strong the link is, banning icecream will not save the swimmers.
Obesity and health problems are generally both results of a whole range of other issues, including diet, activity, genetics, aging, socioeconomic status, geolocation, health service availability etc ad nauseam. There are a few things mentioned by joekster that are causal, but not something as vague and hand wavy as ‘health.’ Obesity might be a sign of health problems both caused by something else, just like icecream and shark attacks are both signs of hot weather.
Apart from the massive problems fat shaming causes in and of itself, focusing on getting thin as the answer is just a quick, victim blaming excuse that takes the focus away from tackling the things that are really causing the problem and let’s society have an easy out. If you want to save the swimmers, shark nets, pools, life guards, patrols and no swim areas are way more costly and inconvenient, but might actually have an effect. Banning icecream sales is only going to make people feel bad and achieve nothing.
If you are concerned that my glorious arse is going to leave the planet too soon: a) Find out if it’s actually a problem (it isn’t, I’m extremely healthy even though technically obese). b) Talk to me about ways to rearrange my work or otherwise change the things that could cause health problems, not how I affect your bonerfeels. The lack of them isn’t going to hurt me one little bit. But worrying about them and ignoring genuine risk factors might hurt me a whole lot.
@IP
Whatever works for you. Just try to keep it away from the pets. Not good for them at all. Even second hand. You’ll know there’s a problem if Fingie’s tweets get even more introspective than normal
http://orig06.deviantart.net/dbe5/f/2015/104/3/0/profile_picture_by_hanon131-d8poyb4.jpg
Re: pot
I never smoke, personally. I used to smoke tobacco and will never do that to my lungs again. Not to mention watching people suffer from cancer. I do take a tincture (legal here). It helps the pain in my joints and gut. I recently switched from a 2:1 CBD to THC ratio to a 10:1. The former gave me cognitive issues while it was in effect, but the latter does not at all. It’s not as effective against the pain, but it’s more effective than NSAID pain relievers, plus it helps me get to sleep and I feel more rested from that sleep than when I take sleep aids, prescription or otherwise.
What I’m mainly wondering is whether there are long term cognitive effects (studies I’ve read are inconclusive and some point to yes while others point to no), what negative effects come from CBD specifically, whether any of the negatives are any worse than the NSAID pain relievers are on my system and whether it disrupts REM sleep the way sleep aids do.
It’s hard to make informed decisions when the Reefer Madness mentality is still present. Kind of like how it’s hard to make informed decisions about my weight while the war on obesity is still being waged.
@Dash
I’m just going to leave this here: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
@ Axe & IP (or any botanist)
Is cannabis related to catnip?
Moggies do seem to be fascinated by the stuff, especially in bush form.
(Also: what is it with catnip generally? Is there some weird evolutionary symbiosis like with nectar/pollen?)
@Alan
Catnip is in the mint family, but that’s about all I know other than having heard the effect on cats is similar to oegasm. (Not sure it that’s true.)
@kupo
Well the fuck outta my expertise (that is, complete lack thereof). That said, THC is the psychoactive component. CBD antagonizes (opposite reaction to) THC. The schizophrenia source I put upthread suggests that CBD might offset some mental health risks posed by THC. Beyond that I couldn’t tell ya 🙂
@Alan
Well, both weed and nip are flowering plants, and both dicots. They’re cladistically separate otherwise
@ kupo & axe
Thank you. 🙂
*goes off to look up ‘dicot’*
@kupo did you see the word might? As in they might both be caused by some third thing?
Given that I was arguing strongly that they are not causal, and that telling people to lose weight is not a solution and hides genuine problems, it seems a funny thing to pick on.
I even pointed out that the correlation isn’t particularly strong.
But you can go too far the other way too, it really sounds like you are dismissing any link because spurious correlations exist. That’s possibly easy with autism and organic food (sort of, there are also reasons to suspect a weak correlation through a third factor of socioeconomics and demographics, exactly like I’m talking about above). But when you are talking about a range of biochemical responses within the same body, saying that they aren’t related is a big claim.
“Maybe genes are causing both person A’s obesity and their health problem” or
“Maybe poverty is contributing to person B’s health problem and obesity” are questions worth investigating. Both because they suggest possible solutions to multiple potential problems, and because it can be easier to investigate complex traits by looking at defined subsets.
Dang it, I always come late to the party here. Especially sad since fat shaming/body positive articles are my favorite to comment on. So since everyone has most likely said everything already, “these MGTOWers are dumb.”
Also I am a thin white male so if anyone wants to take out their aggression on me I submit to the good fight.
Sarcasm? I mean, the last sentence is a joke but not sarcastic. Whatever, you are all smart, you’ll figure it out.
@Dash
I thought your comparison between shark attacks and ice cream was funny, and thought I’d share a funny website it reminded me of. No need to attack me for it.
With the caveats that I am not a scientist & claim no expertise in any of the varied functions of the human body, I’d like to put on my tinfoil hat here & raise a question that I, with the above caveats, think is worth exploring.
I know that the current “obesity epidemic” came at least in part from clever goalpost shifting re definitions, but my own experience – which I recognise is anecdotal – does lead me to believe there has been a noticeable rise in the numbers of fat people in the past 30 years or so. Unless I am mistaken, right around this time, there was also a huge shift in the way that most of the food that those of us living in Europe and North America eat.
Now, I’m just an ignorant layperson, but maybe this is something that all these researchers who are so concerned about fatness could look at? I mean, as many have pointed out, this is probably a multi-causal phenomenon, but is it so much less likely that radical changes to our food supply are not to blame at all & this is all about a sudden spike in people’s “laziness” and “lack of self-control”?
ETA Good points, Dash
Bah, editing time ran out: “huge shift in the way that most of the food that those of us living in Europe and North America eat is produced.”
Shit.
I’m so going to get that book on Kindle once I get the chance…hopefully there will be some correlation between chewing gum and something totally outlandish
@kupo, you are more forgiving and graceful than you have any need to be. Thank you. I’ll try to be better!
(Also, I love that website :3)
@cleverforagirl, congratulations! That’s such a huge thing! You feel free to feel whatever emotions you’re feelin’ as you get through the withdrawal. We won’t be upset over it.
@msexceptiontotherule,
Oh my :3
Well, regarding the whole correlation =/= causation thing, and how to get around it, the thing my lab’s been looking into is called Propensity Score Analysis.
Typically you do a proper double blind trial by grouping participants into affected and control groups, with the control group getting a placebo or ‘normal’ treatment, and the affected group getting the thing you’re looking at studying. You then have to control all of the other variables you can.
This works great for, like, physics, or chemistry, or the fiends where people aren’t involved directly. You don’t have to worry about the diet of an electron, or the long term health ramifications on erlenmeyer flasks. As soon as you involve people, though? You can’t control most of those variables. People have different living requirements, people live in different conditions, they come to the experiment with hundreds of different variables that you just can’t do anything about. You also can’t bring a study to its full conclusion. If you’re testing a cancer treatment and some of your patients in a group start taking a turn for the worse, you have to get them different treatment, immediately. Group membership is fluid, and the edges of the study are ragged. Data become really questionable, especially when compared to the sturdy six-sigma findings of fields that don’t involve people.
(This is really the core of the whole ‘soft-science vs hard-science’ divide. It’s not that soft sciences are wimpy and don’t push for the extreme accuracy of the hard sciences, it’s that you’re dealing with human beings, so you can’t push for six-sigma without being an inhuman monster. I get annoyed when MRA jerks trash soft sciences, they’re all a bunch of amoral nazi-science-worshippers.)
So findings in the human sciences tend to be sort of oatmeal-consistency. You have to do a lot of work to firm them up. One of the methods that was first introduced in the 80’s and is slowly gaining traction is PSA, Propensity Score Analysis. In it, you don’t even form your control and affected groups until after the study! When you register people for the study, you record all of those gloriously messy variables of their lives, everything you can: age, gender, educational background, economic background, work history, etc. All of that. These variables are called your confounders, because they can interfere with observations of your desired result. Then you just record their progression through the thing you’re studying as individuals – they leave the study when they have to leave, and if you have to change the treatment for ethical reasons, their data are still useful and valid!
For each of the confounders you can generate a propensity score, based on the probability that the confounder has an influence on the outcome. With these scores you can match each participant to a control or affected group, which you can then run a standard multivariate analysis on! Voila, you’ve created a lab-safe study without having to limit the medical treatments (or educational treatments, or whatnot) of the participants! Statistics is Magic.
It’s not perfect. You’re limited to around 20 confounders just due to the way that the math scales up when you add them, for example. It also provides a probabilistic solution, which makes the six-sigma-or-GTFO ultradorks sad in the pants, but I see that as less of a problem and more of a beneficial knock-on effect. But it means that you can generate reliable data on a lot of things we simply couldn’t examine reliably in the past! Potentially life-saving techniques can be studied rigorously without jeaopardizing the participants; educational methods can be analyzed and tested without having to risk the educational quality our children receive. Environmental studies, pharmacology, all sorts of things can be examined in detail with this! It really is a wonderful technique. It’s still gaining traction – science is a desperately conservative playground – but I look forward to seeing it used all over the place. It’s a wonderful, wonderful technique.
adjusts dork glasses and pocket protector aheh. There you go, your moment of nerdery. Carry on!
And thanks for spinning a scenario full of Things That Have Never Happened, Windy.
I would say “you’re welcome”, but I suspect you’re not one of my friends. With an attitude like that, you’d never make the cut. Several rather beautiful women who just happen to be “fat chicks” have, however.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. It’s subjective and varies from person to person, and even from time to time. I used to find blond guys attractive, and only blond guys. Now I’ve branched out into all colors! But, strangely, one thing that’s always remained UNattractive to me is men who judge women on their size. Or some other stupid thing that, for all they know, the woman has no control over but that they THINK she should, and so they resent her for not controlling it to death.
In short, dude, YOU are unattractive. And it no doubt shows in your face, which is why women are scurrying away from you like frightened squirrels. Yes, even the fat ones you think should be desperate for a piece of YOUR body. But yes, keep pretending that YOU are the one in control, and that your means of control is by Going Your Own Silly Way. At this rate, you will only be a bitter, angry, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Actually, dude, it’s guys like you who are making them feel bad…by telling them they should be “upgrading” from someone who is actually fine and lovely, and with whom they would feel quite content if they didn’t have idiot buddies who razzed them about the Fatty McFat-Fat they’re dating, and told them they should be striving for a replica of Claudia Schiffer, or whoever. Even if they look like Joe Putz from the garage next door.
(True story: I dated that guy. He was a shit who never stopped telling me food was my enemy. I wound up depressed. As soon as he dumped me, my depression magically lifted! A few years later, I bumped into him again and didn’t recognize him, because he’d gained a LOT of weight and wasn’t a cute young thing anymore. Meanwhile, I still looked about the same.)
Also, thanks a lot for pulling bogus statistics out of your ass. I’m sure that will make all the women conform in NO time!
(said no woman EVER)
Don’t talk to yourself, dude. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re hugely unattractive in every conceivable way? Must you repulse women further by muttering angrily under your breath?
Well, good, because mine’s not gonna. It’s too full of good stuff…like chocolate, and kitties, and Latin America, and books, and tomatoes. But you’re welcome to continue your own implosion, if you like.
Actually, I weigh less than half that, and I can cook as well as any chef. But you’ll never be asked to dinner at my house, because your sour attitude would only rot the food right under your nose. So…SUFFER.
Thanks for being so ignorant and judgmental about things that are literally none of your fucking business. Nothing is sexier than a man of whatever size (probably considerably more massive than the women he whines about) and zero perspective!
(said no woman EVER, either)
Translation: No woman wants me because I’m such a dickweed, so I’ll just pretend that I have a no-fat-chicks policy and THAT’s why I’m an incel.
Surprise! Most of the women you’re whining about DO have jobs! And they work harder at them for less pay than you’d ever dream about, Mr. Barely Adequate! Maybe you’d know that if you’d ever had one yourself, and had to make do with the cheap nasty food that would be all YOU could afford.
Actually, I prefer pretzels and dark chocolate. And red wine. But thanks for being so bitter that no one would even contemplate marrying YOU. It sure must suck to have to compete with a bag of chips for women’s attention.
Ha ha ha, ho ho ho. That’s a riot, dude. Actually, to succeed, we have to work twice as hard as any man, make do with half as much respect, 2/3 as much pay, and weigh roughly just one-quarter to one-third of what you do, by my calculations (based on what you guys think is “overweight” and “obese”, and based on all the photos of actual MGTOW I’ve seen). Tell me again how easy it is to be us.
Translation: I am an incel and have met literally no women EVER. Much less talked to one for even five minutes. Also, I am an idiot! Ladies, where are you going? And why are you running so fast?
@Crys T,
It is! I’m not a health scientist by any definition, just a computer scientist with a focus on AI techniques (i.e. statistics and general weirdness). I do get to see a whole lot of other fields, though, since my field is all about sussing out probabilities and the like. I don’t do health science, but some people in my lab do.
(Please pardon my ramble below, i get into a pretty marxist tiff. The TLDR is that I agree with you that food type availability is a major factor!)
It’s certainly studied, and in depth, in the professional field. To my understanding it’s sort of taken for granted at this point – the point has been proven very well (Take that with a huuuge grain of salt, though). The reason it isn’t talked about overly in popular science, though, is pretty basic. There are a lot of big companies out there with big interests in marketing that unhealthy food and unhealthy lifestyle. A lot of science is with industry partnership these days, which somewhat limits the results you can search for. (I’m on one of these right now which is huuugely frustrating).
If I’m in a lab getting funding from Company X+ and my research discovers X-? I don’t publish that, for the simple fact that I like paying rent eating food, and having co-workers that pay rent and eat food. (As it stands I’m not that deep in, and I’m actually in the situation of working for Company X+ while finding X-, but because I’m backed by an educational institution funded by the government, I don’t have to bury findings. But I totally sympathize with those scientists in that situation.)
Further, science journalists often don’t really know the science well, and they go for the headlines. It’s just not an interesting headline to say “eating boxed crap food is bad for you”. They want to sell magazines. They’re much more interested in telling people that bacon and chocolate’s good for you, so if they see that sort of a study they’ll jump on it.
Science is not a clean enterprise, and it’s not the perfectly rational process that many people like to think it is. (Not suggesting you don’t realize this!)
In my personal opinion, it all leads back to the end of the second world war. The big companies that were providing material to the american war machine – General Mills, GE, etc – realized that the gravy train was coming to the final station and didn’t like that. The white papers and documentation of the era is pretty clear, really. They were trying to set up a consumer culture of the same sort of consumption as an active military.
They shifted production of tinned and preserved food, prepackaged consumables, from military to civillian consumption, and then marketed the idea that it was a superior way of living. Stodgy old housewives baked their own bread; the modern home of the future was full of canned goods and factory-prepared foods! They also introduced the concept of planned obsolescence, which had actually been suggested as a way to end the Great Depression:
London, Bernard. Ending the depression through planned obsolescence. 1932.
The war basically did that for them, but afterwards they brought the idea into mainstream western life. Foodstuffs especially got this treatment, following along the heels of the green revolution. This was accelerated in the 60s and 70s as women started leaving the role of housemaker and moved into actual jobs – but were (of course) still expected to be the ones preparing the meals and keeping the house clean. Preserved and frozen food was a miracle! (Nevermind that the actual problem was the expectations of society that women needed to do all that while working, but still)
Ever since then, the incentives have been towards cutting costs in food production while maintaining its appetizing qualities, resulting in food low in vitamins and minerals but relatively rich in salt, fat and sugar. This keeps people fed without taking much time, allowing companies to keep their wages low and the costs of their services high, since preparing food and maintaining a home no longer needs to be a full time job. Get the women out there working, pay’em a pittance, then take the money back in mortgage payments and boxed lunches!
The end result is what we’ve got today; huge volumes of boxed, frozen foods that are highly processed so as to be as cheap to produce as possible but as highly attractive to the taste buds as possible. Makes me nauseous to think about how grotesque the western system is.
@Scildfreya Thank you for supplying some concrete examples for things I’ve suspected for a long time. There’s a lot to assimilate in your post. Also, I hadn’t thought of planned obsolescence playing a part – wow, untangling all this could very easily become a full-time job.
Re the cheap to produce but tasty food, it’s also no coincidence that ricker people can afford to buy specially produced food, and that, unlike in the past, obesity has become correlated with low incomes. At least in modern times, poor people have always had poorer health, they just didn’t used to be fat so often as now.
What frustrates me is that, to the extent fatness is a problem, it’s a problem of economics and of the reverence we give to paid employment to the extent that most don’t see any problem with a society where work consumes most of our lives.
If we really wanted to make people healthier, we’d be advocating for widespread social change, no just framing health as the responsibility of the individual.