英美报刊阅读教程中级精选本 第五版 端木义万lesson 5 Food and Obesity

Lesson5 Food and Obesity

Being fat is be coming the norm for Americans.As it will soon be come in this country, I have seen the future, and it's extra large.

By Joan Smith

A friend who happens to be both American and a superb cook-his poulet de Bresse en deuil is one of the most memorable dishes I have tasted--called me a couple of days ago,enthusing about a lecture he had just at ended.The thesis,he said,was that the human body has changed irrevocably over the last quarter of a century and that the physical environment—chairs,beds, airline seats-will gradually adapt to accommodate the new shape.It is,of course,in the US, where my friend no longer lives,that this evolutionary experiment is most advanced;for years now, millions of people have been gorging themselves on vast helpings of fast food, with the consequence that about 60 percent of the population is overweight.

According to Greg Critser, author of Fat Land：How Americans Became the Fattest People in the Word, none of this has happened by accident. Critser argues that the challenge to the US food industry in the 1970s was that the population was growing more slowly than the food supply, so people had to be persuaded to change their eating habits. Fast food, invented after the Second World War as an affordable way of getting families to eat together, became a means of selling surplus fat and sugar to the far-from-unwilling masses. This is a social revolution on a grand scale as scarcity, with which most human beings have had to struggle throughout history, has given way to an apparently permanent state of plenty.

It may also help to explain why the magician David Blaine, suspended without food in a Perspex box beside Tower Bridge,has such a grip on people's imaginations.In an astonishingly short period of time, starvation has metamorphosed from a threat to a spectacle, and families are turning out en mass eat weekends to see how his hunger strike is going. For the fifth of the British population who are obese, and unused to doing without food for more than a few hours, the notion of someone giving it up for 44 days is unthinkable, some normal-size people have turned up to mock, throwing egg, cooking food and even trying to cut off the water supply to the hung American. Perhaps this is the point, that there are so few starving Americans in the world, which makes his self-imposed ordeal appear ludicrously self-indulgent.

Yet it is possible to take Critser’s argument a stage further and suggest that millions of Americans are trapped between two industries, fast food and slimming, which enjoy a cosily symbiotic relationship. Research by a fast-food chain showed that what customers cared about was neither taster nor quality but portion size; what they have come to expect from food, and what their neighbours are beginning to want as well-obesity has increased by 158 per cent in Mexico in a decade, since fast food outlets began to replace the traditional diet-is a feeling of being stuffed to the gills. Cooking has become a spectator sport, something to watch famous people do on telly, as the populations of affluent countries rely increasingly on supermarket meals and takeaways. For many people, eating has become an addiction rather than a pleasure, and going on a diet merely replaces on morbid habit with another.

In the circumstances, it is not really surprising that people are confused and

angered by Blaine, whose stunt highlights the disordered relation to eating which has become habitual in Western societies. Far from being an object of derision as his body enters ketosis, the state in which it starts to consume itself, he should logically be the envy of all those individuals who are endlessly trying Atking and other fashionable diets. We are so used to hearing people pay to get hungry, turning the condition of starving Africans into a longed-for luxury. There is something shaming about this, and about the extent to which so many people-like Kafka’s hunger artist, who was addicted to starving-have lost control of their appetites.

Perhaps the thesis my friend described to me on the phone is correct, and houses and cars and planes will just have to get bigger as the human race-the affluent part of it, that is-continues to inflate itself with empty calories. Bizarrely, being fat is fast becoming the norm for Americans, and even in this country it will soon be people like me(5ft 5in and a paltry nine stone) who are the freaks. I have seen the future, and it’s extra large.

Plain food moves up a class

I was supposed to give a talk myself at the weekend, on food and class, but had to pull out because of an annoyingly persistent throat virus. I was going to discuss “ eating above your station”, which is something I learnt to do, like many people of my generation, when I went to university. Until then, I had scarcely ever eaten in a restaurant and I had never tried what my family referred to as “foreign muck”. Ever macaroni cheese was too exotic for my parents, who tipped it into the bin when I came home from cookery class with a Pyrex dish full of overcooked pasta and melted cheddar.

Food was plain, served on a plate with thick portions of gravy or custard, and the idea of helping yourself from serving dishes seemed the height of sophistication. What strikes me now, looking back on that traditional working-class diet, is that it was unadventurous but it didn’t do me ant harm. My father grew vegetables, my mother shelled peas and sliced carrots, and I don’t recall anyone in my family being overweight. It’s hard to eat too much when someone else puts the food on your plate. These days, if a working-class diet can be said to exist, it is surperficially much more cosmopolitan-curries, pizza, the ubiquitous Chinese takeaway-but adapted to satisfy the British appetite for saturated fat, salt and sugar.

In a curious reversal, plain food-simple grilled fish with a green salad, such as the wonderful meal I ate in Marbella in the summer-has become the province of the middle class. I am one of those lucky people who changed class at the right time and in the right direction, but the effects of our eating habits-a slender elite, as millions of ordinary people pile on the pounds-suggest that class divisions are as deep as ever.

Bring on the euro

I was driving back from a health farm the other day when the friend with whom I had just shared three days of massage, facials and Pilates said rather nervously that she wanted to ask me a question. I naturally assumed that she wanted to talk about men, underwear or the least painful way of shaving your legs, as women do when they know each other well, but it turned out to be something far more intimate. Am I, she asked, in favour of joining the euro?

Oh God, anything but that. Admitting that you fell no attachment to the pound, and would like to use the euro in Waitrose, is like telling your friends that you have joined a weird sect. I don’t think people spend much time thinking about Gordon Brown’s five economic tests, but there is a presumption that the British did jolly week to stay out of the eurozone when all those foreigners gave up their currencies almost two years ago. And now we’re supposed to admire the Swedes for resoundingly voting “No” at the weekend.

I don’t think I’ve ever confessed this in public before, and I suspect I won’t be invited to any smart parties for weeks at the very least. But I really want to join the euro. And since we both came out somewhere on the M1-it was a relief, I can tell you-I now know at least one other person who feels the same.