…The elasticity of the human appetite is the subject of Brian Wansink’s “Mindless Eating” (2006). Wansink is the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, and he has performed all sorts of experiments to test how much people will eat under varying circumstances. These have convinced him that people are—to put it politely—rather dim. They have no idea how much they want to eat or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do French-fry eaters…
…So what’s wrong with putting on an extra pound, or ten pounds, or, for that matter, a hundred and ten? According to the contributors to “The Fat Studies Reader” (forthcoming from New York University; $27), nothing… According to the authors of “The Fat Studies Reader,” the real problem isn’t the sudden surge in obesity in this country but the surge in stories about obesity. Weight, by their account, is, like race or sex or bone structure, a biological trait over which individuals have no—or, in the case of fat, very limited—control…
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3 responses to “From The New Yorker: Obesity, the Bondage of the Will and Antinomianism”
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I loved this, R-J, not least because of the fabulous psychedelic artwork you included in your post. That's an image that could have been straight out of YELLOW SUBMARINE.
The whole article is lovely, and filled with great quotes, but my favorite so far is when the reporter from the New Yorker is discussing a particular weight-loss expert's approach to eating bad-for-you food:
“The substitute for rewarding food is often other rewarding food,” Kessler writes, though what could compensate for the loss of Nacho Cheese Doritos he never really explains.
Love it.
This New Yorker piece reminded me a lot of a article Kendall Harmon linked to, back in Jan 2008, on his conservative Christian blog Titus One Nine.
It lead to a long thread, the responses largely falling into one of two categories.
One group claimed that obesity was fine or it didn't have anything to do with overeating; and the other side pointed out how people only got fat as a result of their "choice" and therefore should be condemned for it. The two groups were also mirrored inside the secular article itself.
My post was toward the end the end of the thread, which I think might be of interest to MB readers. I wrote:
As always, what is missing in many of these kinds of discussions, certainly those in the secular press but also elsewhere, is the Pauline appreciation of the bound will ( e.g. in Romans 7). The two classic postures in every such debate are repeated: one side denies the existence of sin (the weight tables are wrong, the extra pounds have no relation to me overeating) and the other (in this case thinner) side Pharasaically condemns the sinners for failing to "just say no" to gluttony — why can't they exercise their glorious Pelagian free will — why are they CHOOSING this?
The most poignant sentence in the whole article to my mind was
"For many, this is a problem they have struggled with for many years… it gets discouraging after a while."
It's the closest the article gets to a touching compassionate appreciation of the human problem of sin, which never gets "fixed" in this life, even for Christians. (See Article IX of the Thirty Nine Articles!)
Thank God that Christ Jesus is the Friend of Sinners, who's love is showered especially upon the unrighteous, those unable to keep the law. Thank God for the comfortable words repeated in the old Anglican liturgies.
info on obesity here – Obesity Opens Death's Door