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Saturday night we had a few of the people we’d become acquainted with through teh fatty interwebs, which to me is centered around Bri’s RSS feed called Notes From the Fatosphere. One of the guests said nice things about us here.

Somebody said that, on the way to our house, she realised this was the first time she’d been ever gone to a social event without feeling self-conscious about her weight. Which is kind of cool, but kind of sad as well.

Perhaps next time there’ll be some other guys involved…someone who’d be impressed by all my cool stuff. Or some kids, I guess.

I turned forty years old on the Equinox. I share a birthday with JS Bach and Russ Meyer, so from the sublime to the – well, I guess it depends on your opinion of Bach. I don’t make a thing of birthdays, usually, but I enjoy the type of cooking involved in social events and Kate sold me on a theme for the party.

I have very fond memories of the family get-togethers of my childhood, in rural South Australia through the late seventies and early eighties. If I ever ran a restaurant I would want it to mimic the experience, somehow. There would be a gas griller and a keg of beer, and a tape player with a pile of tapes, all containing the music of Slim Dusty. Trestle tables would be set up and the surfaces lined with butcher’s paper. On one table would be salads, which would all have meat in them, and on the other would be a variety of multi-coloured home-made desserts, usually containing jelly and marshmallows.

To me, that’s probably as good as it gets. While I don’t doubt that finer fare exists, I have yet to enjoy the same level of pleasure in a commercial setting. I doubt that it’s possible without some pre-existing personal relationship between the people who prepare the food and the people who consume it. Social food has meaning beyond and sometimes unrelated to satisfying base nutritional requirements.

Kate sent out invites using modern methods, through email, Facebook and a few phone calls. To suit the ‘theme’, Kate asked people to bring a dessert or a salad, of the kind that was popular in the seventies.

This made me feel a little sad. Somewhere between my childhood and now, food changed. Partly it’s changed circumstances: I sort of made the shift from rural working-class life and culture to a kind of middle-class urbanity. My tastes have changed. To some of my friends, the idea of social food is fairly alien. Middle-class preferences are for reproductions of other people’s cuisines, the particulars of which depend almost wholly on current fashion. The food Kate was describing seemed shameful to some of them, like a trap set to trigger deeply-felt status anxieties. One refused and said they would bring a ‘good’ salad.

The idea of having a theme for a social function seemed alien but unavoidable. Few of the people that I know have a strong sense of identity attached to the foods they consume, not in the way that the people around me when I was growing up did. For better and for worse; I remember various foodstuffs I’d now consider staples being referred to as ‘wog food’ or worse. But at the same time, nobody talked about authenticity, or making other people’s food. The food they made belonged to them, and by sharing it they were sharing themselves.

Browsing through old cookbooks, there was a fairly abrupt transition in the seventies, from cookbooks that focussed on entertaining guests or cooking for pleasure, to books that promoted simple cooking or healthy cooking above all else. The involved desserts and carefully crafted appetisers, meant to be made at home before transporting to social events, became unfashionable and were mostly replaced by commercial substitutes, in much the same way that commercial interests like shopping malls supplanted town squares in the eighties.

An unhealthy paranoia about food hygiene and home preparation standards, often the result of overzealous regulation and commercial lobbying, combined with puritanical notions about health and persecutory fantasies about pleasurable eating, invoking a litany of negative consequences resulting from even the briefest transgression, have made sharing food outside of the immediate family unit a morally and ethically loaded act. The solution, often enough, is to avoid the situation entirely. Eating a meal before the social event or, as host, providing solely commercially-prepared food, are increasingly common occurrences. There is little value given to preparing food for others as an act of friendship, or respect, or love.

Conversely, there seems to be no shame in providing for guests in the most perfunctory fashion. If effort is involved, it is aimed solely at boosting the host’s social status; evidence of the host’s good taste and ability to conform to current fashions through seemingly authentic reproductions of whichever dishes are currently favoured by the established culinary authorities. Any concession to the needs or preferences of the guest are negotiated as a series passive-aggressive refusals, often involving squeamishness masquerading as morality or some self-diagnosed physical intolerance (statistically, these are significantly more likely to be imagined than real).

Puritanism, perhaps an expression of the cultural implications of the fifty-fold increase in the incidence of obsessive compulsive disorders over the last thirty years, has severely curtailed the imaginative and aesthetically grandiose elements once common in social foods. The ideologies of healthy eating have become so constrictive and constipated as to disallow any expression of unrestrained joy through food and drink, even for a special occasion, when the rules of everyday nutritional balance should be relaxed or, ideally, abandoned completely.

The event went well. People ate, on the whole, much more than they should on any average day. There was a trestle table for the desserts, not as many as I remembered from my childhood, and not as skilfully prepared (the knowledge of such things, and the skills required, having atrophied), but still, I was moved that there were people who would care enough about me to do such things.

Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself having heated discussions with people online about food and the politics of food, and invariably the biggest douchebags quote Michael Pollan, usually as their sole point of reference.

I’ve been writing about the politics of food since before Michael Pollan started, so I’ve paid attention to his increasingly quackish claims, and even read one of his stupid fucking books (In Defense of Food; I couldn’t stomach another). I’m not a fan, to be frank. But criticism of Michael Pollan leads to invariably aggressive attacks from his fans/followers, with an intensity that is nothing short of religious fervour.

Which makes me wonder: what is it that makes Michael Pollan’s most ardent fans such total douchebags?

I’ve thought about it, and I have a couple of ideas. The first reason, I suspect, is that most Michael Pollan fans have almost no pre-existing knowledge of the subjects that he makes pronouncements about. I suspect that few of them have any scientific training, or first-hand familiarity with food production methods. Many of them have probably never seen a feed animal up close, let alone slaughtered one. Mostly, their knowledge of nutrition will have come from two main sources: advertising and, since his audience is predominantly middle-class, the lifestyle sections of newspapers, neither of which provide a terribly useful or reliable framework for understanding a very complex subject.

Without any sort of structured understanding of the issues, one relies on feelings or hunches about things; prejudice, in other words. And that’s where Michael Pollan is a viking. There is nothing in his work that challenges any of the prejudices or values that you could expect your average white, middle-class urban dweller to already be convinced are self-evident truths.

Very few of his claims stand up to any sort of rigorous inspection, claims that we are all getting sicker, that the great unwashed masses make poor food choices, and so on. But to a person who instinctively believes these things to be true, to whom these claims ‘feel’ right, having them reinforced by reading them in print bolsters what is, essentially, bigotry.

My partner writes about issues of faith from a sympathetic but outside perspective. While now a firm atheist, she was brought up in missionary communities, wrote a book about English missionaries in the Gobi, and has a pretty firm understanding of the mentality of evangelicals.

Many evangelicals feel confused that non-believers are not convinced by quotations from the Bible. They find it very hard to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t accept that the Bible is the final arbiter of all things, the written word of God. Pollanites are hardly different. There’s the same failure to accept that, perhaps, there’s a whole world of different, often conflicting, research and conclusions and opinions. But, since the word of Pollan is the only authority they are at all familiar with, most discussions end up as little more than a series of increasingly louder repetitions of the same paraphrased arguments. In other words, it’s like trying to make sense to an angry parrot.

But perhaps the worst bit of intellectual charlatanry is the way that Pollan denies authority. Now, as someone with a background in the hard sciences, I understand that you should never accept an argument from authority. But dismissing authority is a different matter altogether. He writes:

So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

The authority of tradition and common sense or, in other words, mindless conformity and prejudice. He both dismisses all others as false prophets and sets up the readers themselves as ‘authorities’ with no need for further qualifications: they already know everything there is to know, and all else is lies and trickery. This, I think, is the real reason why Pollanites are douchebags.

I’ve just uploaded a (leaked) copy of Australia Post’s draft proposal to reduce their workforce by discriminating against fat posties. You can read it here.

I think there are some very clear parallels between Australia Post’s efforts to slim their workforce and Lincoln College’s threat to fail fat students. Except that we’re talking about people losing jobs and ending careers, not for their job performance, but because of their physical size and weight.

I don’t actually see any reportage in the local papers about why the posties are trying to strike. But I did discover that Reese Witherspoon is single again. I wish her all the best.

Here’s something I wrote for magazine publication a few months ago which, for various reasons, didn’t happen. But with the posties striking over the next couple of days, I guess this might help explain why they’re doing it:

My dog, Luffy, barks at posties. He hears the motor of the little Honda motorbike approaching, or the sporadic squeal of the Honda’s disc brakes, and runs out to the front fence and barks crazily, in little triplets. Luffy is a chihuahua poodle cross, so he couldn’t scare anyone. But the postie stops and then rides on, and Luffy seems convinced that he scared the postie away.

If I see a postie in neutral territory, I’ll approach them and say hello, and maybe hold Luffy up to be patted. I hope I’ll convince the dog that posties don’t represent a threat. I’m telling you all this, just so that you know I have no special interest in postie welfare, but that I tend to notice them about. I’ve never been a postie but I can recognise that the job involves a fair amount of repetitive physical labour. Posties always seem to have tanned and muscled calves, at least on the leg that I see when they ride past. The gear they wear looks heavy and uncomfortable, and the bikes never get to go fast enough to generate much of a cooling breeze, so in summer they must feel like they’re doing step aerobics in a sauna. They start at six in the morning and often work until past four. And dogs bark at them. A lazy person is not going to become a postie. A lazy person is going to aim for a desk job.

There is a noted phenomena by which a person will see a fault in others as being the result of laziness or incompetence, whereas when they display the same fault themselves it is seen as the result of external forces or unfortunate circumstances. News that Australia Post was planning to make posties who weigh more than a hundred kilograms lose weight or be reassigned really brought out the bigots, with headlines like ‘Post Aporkalypse‘ and the Herald Sun claiming that their excess weight was slowing mail delivery. Rather than get bigger bikes (which would seem the sensible solution), Australia Post plans to force bigger posties to diet to fit the bike’s weight limit.

The basic facts and figures: Australia is the only country that uses motorised postie bikes. It’s a large continent with a relatively sparse population. Even our major cities are huge sprawls, so the bikes were introduced to make the mail delivery more efficient and to make the job more pleasant. The 110cc Honda bikes that posties currently ride were originally rated to carry 130 kilograms. That broke down to 40 kilograms of mail and, at best, a 90 kilogram rider. But they found it too hard to attract and retain posties who also fit the weight requirements, so in early 2008 they asked Honda to reassess the bike’s upper weight limit. Honda obliged, and raised the legal carrying limit to 145 kilograms, meaning they could hire 105 kilogram posties.

But with the economic downturn and one thing and another, the demand for postal services is down right now, and Australia Post is looking to shed some staff, ideally without having to offer redundancy packages. Weight is not a protected characteristic, like age or sex or race, according to the discrimination lawyer quoted in the press in relation to the issue.

So arrivederci, fat posties. And I thought discrimination lawyers tried to stop discrimination rather than, you know, kind of encourage it. I must be so naive.

The question, then, is why is it legal to discriminate against fat people? How is weight different to race or sex or age or, for that matter, sexual orientation? This is where things become contentious. There’s a popular notion that being fat is a lifestyle choice. People who are fat choose to be fat, some argue (always people who aren’t fat). Fat people are lazy and eat too much junk food, watch too much television and put an inordinate drain on the healthcare system. They need to be harassed and constantly shamed into fixing themselves, or be heavily taxed and have their fat offspring taken away, and are generally to blame for all the world’s ills, up to and including global warming. If there were no fat people there would probably be no heart disease, cancer or diabetes, and we’d all live forever, happily.

I’m hardly exaggerating. Susie O’Brien argued in the Herald Sun that clothing stores shouldn’t offer clothes in large sizes because it encourages fat women to feel comfortable in public. She wrote: ‘Alarmingly, a new Australian study of more than 30,000 people shows obese and morbidly obese men are less depressed and less suicidal than those of a normal weight.’ Well, I won’t be sending Susie a Christmas card this year. Michael Smith, in an opinion piece for the Age, wrote: ‘Obesity and related diseases are costing the ALP millions of votes because of premature deaths.’ I’m really not sure how many people he thinks lives in Australia, for obesity to have killed millions of potential ALP voters, but he seems firmly convinced of the need to abandon the most fundamental principles of democracy in order to solve the ‘obesity crisis’. Democracy has met its match. Brought down, not by terrorism, nor by drugs, not even socialism, but by fat people.

There are other people, myself included, who question many of the basic assumptions behind the ‘obesity epidemic’. We’re talking about a flat increase of roughly three to five kilograms in the weight of the average adult born in the last couple of generations, an increase that plateaued back in the eighties, and was probably the result of improvements in food availability and nutritional knowledge, and is at least partially explained by a corresponding increase in average height. People are living longer now than they have ever lived before. Australians have the second-longest life expectancy (behind Japan) of anyone in history. How you turn that into a health crisis is a mystery. Now, while life expectancy is not the same thing as quality of life, it’s the best indicator that we have. Sick and unhealthy people generally die younger.

Your weight is largely determined by genetic factors, so the only truly effective way to maintain a slim figure is to pick slim parents. While there may be correlations between obesity and certain diseases, and while weight gain (or weight loss) can be a symptom of health problems, obesity is not an illness. While the BMI, or Body Mass indicator, has been used by insurance companies for many years to assess health risk, there is no evidence of a correlation between obesity and poor health. The life expectancies of overweight through to morbidly obese people are actually higher than for people with ‘normal’ BMIs, particularly beyond the age of twenty-five or so, when most people put on a bit of weight. Being underweight has the lowest life expectancy of all, even compared to that of the morbidly obese. Weight loss has never been about health, but about conventions of beauty and issues of social class and social status, control and obsessive-compulsive ritual behaviour.

Dieting neither seems to work terribly well, nor be terribly good for you. Two-thirds of dieters who have lost a large amount of weight (think Magda Szubanski) put it back on within twelve months. While you can starve your body of calories for a period of time, unless you plan to spend the rest of your life feeling hungry, the weight is almost certainly going to return. How anybody gets anything done in a constant state of hunger is beyond me, but hell, people have different priorities, right? Ninety-eight percent of people who lose more than fifteen kilograms put the weight back on within three years. Weight loss is a forty-six billion dollar-a-year business in the US, and it doesn’t bloody work.

And while I’m at it, heart disease, cancer and diabetes are all largely genetic. The seeming increase in all three is almost entirely due to an ageing population and the result of improved medical care (and in the case of diabetes, much better detection). You’ve still got to die of something. Since most of the old killers have been eradicated with antibiotics and surgical procedures, and we’ve come up with all sorts of other neat things to protect you from external threats, you’re probably going to end up dying because of something genetic, some built-in design flaw. That doesn’t mean that these diseases are getting more common, just that a lot of the other horses are out of the race.

But with an ageing population, and the very profitable nature of ‘preventive’ medicine practices, politicians are swayed by anyone promising to shift the cost of healthcare on to the individual. Somehow, people living long and possibly full lives became a problem, rather than something to be happy about or thankful for. But the average human body doesn’t need constant medical care and attention. Doctors are for sick people, and while constant medical regulation and governmental intervention might make some medical practitioners’ jobs easier, it really is missing the point. Your body’s not like a rented tuxedo; you don’t get your deposit back if you return it in pristine condition. Your body is not owned by the government, or your employer, or even Australia Post. There is a real threat here, but it’s not from fat posties.