Before the Obesity Epidemic: How Fat Has Been Viewed Through History

SPEAKER_00 0:00 For kings and rulers of the past, being overweight was seen as a sign of strength, fertility, and authority.

SPEAKER_01 0:07 Unless they fell out of favour, then their once powerful bodies were used to shame and undermine them.

SPEAKER_00 0:15 That's right. For a long time it's been thought that our modern view of weight only began in the 1500s. But it turns out humanity's relationship with fat has always been incredibly complex throughout antiquity.

SPEAKER_01 0:30 And the idea of fat, even the word itself, continues to evoke complex emotional responses in us. So, what can ancient views of what it means to be overweight tell us about our feelings towards obesity today?

SPEAKER_00 0:49 I'm Matt. And I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before, the podcast that charts the history of modern inventions. And today we're speaking to Chris Forth, the author of Fat, a cultural history of the stuff of life, which offers a surprising look at how the West has viewed overweight people through history.

SPEAKER_02 1:08 The tendency to dehumanize fat bodies partly springs, I would say, from our own lingering discomfort with our own animality, discomfort about having bodies at all. And I'm very serious about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:23 In this episode, Chris takes us through historical accounts and philosophical arguments, showing us something very powerful about the way humans form stereotypes and prejudices and what we might learn from this.

SPEAKER_00 1:37 If you're enjoying what we're doing, please subscribe to the channel. It helps us out massively. Now, on to Chris. For how much of human history has it actually been possible to actually be overweight?

SPEAKER_02 1:54 That's an interesting question. And uh it certainly depends upon region, it depends upon time period. I think for a lot of people, their not unreasonable assumption is that during earlier periods of history where food was less readily available and where people were more physically active because they simply had to be, it's very reasonable to suppose that fatness was uh not something that was really available to most people. And so it makes sense to think that those who were fat, that whatever contributed to their fatness must have something to do with their status in society, with the material things they're able to consume, and uh and to some extent the physical work that they were not necessarily required to do. So in in those contexts, I think that having a fat body could suggest those things at that time. Uh but it didn't necessarily have to be that way. Uh some things were described as fat, or some bodies I should say, were described as fat that we wouldn't necessarily consider particularly fat at all. And so for uh it was kind of interesting for uh Greek actors and the Greek actors, especially when they were playing slaves, had to depict themselves as chubby, as having large bellies. And this is not necessarily because slaves were especially well fed. For for the Greeks, it was a question of presenting what they would have considered to be a more grotesque body, a body that could indicate, and this is where things get get even more complicated, could indicate that someone like the slave would be seen as somebody less able to monitor their and control their appetites. So as a result, a depiction of a uh what they would see as a misshapen body would indicate not only uh a difference in status. I'm not saying class here, because I'm not sure that really works, but certainly a difference in status and a difference in relation to uh the qualities of their character. Because for the Greeks and also the Romans, but maybe especially the Greeks, a beautiful, well-proportioned, and harmonious body was seen as synonymous with an aristocratic status. Doesn't mean that they all had these bodies, but it was an indicator of a cli of a kind of uh of a noble status. So compared to the body of a slave, in theater, it became important to depict the body, the slave's body in that way. So some of the images of fatness do relate to the question of who has or who has the ability to consume more and use their bodies less. There is certainly that. But fatness was never just about that. It was always kind of was freighted with these moral qualities that related to questions of of status. But also, I think this is certainly true in the Greek and Roman periods, where it also related to your region in the world. I mean, there was a tendency to depict what they called Asiatics as typically fat. And even if it wasn't the ordinary people, they did, they did emphasize the fatness of their leaders, uh of the Asiatic leaders in a way that was meant to depict their the difference in character between Greeks and Asiatics. And so it always had this dimension of dealing with otherness in a sense. And I think that that is an ongoing theme in the history of fat.

SPEAKER_00 5:26 So, Chris, what I'm kind of interested in is just how far back it was possible to have eaten enough food actually to become overweight. Really, I imagine that it was only possible once we had, you know, after the agricultural revolution. But did you get a sense during your research at all that that it was possible for humans perhaps further back in antiquity to have become overweight?

SPEAKER_02 5:51 That's a good question. I I I did not carefully look at uh the the connection to food supply because that that wasn't really my primary focus. But one of the things, so like so with the prehistoric world, it's very hard to tell anything there. Um I mean, there there is, there has been a lot of work done on uh the so-called Venus figurines, which often depict uh particularly rotund female figures. And archaeologists for uh for a while interpreted them in certain ways, but the um particularly in terms of like uh a kind of matrifocal society, like matriarchy, a kind of uh worshiping of fertility and things like that, because these figurines emerge around the the uh I think it they call the upper Paleolithic or the late, I don't know, the Neolithic. It's not my area. But that way of thinking has been kind of debunked. Uh archaeologists do not agree about that anymore. Uh and in fact, right now, I think it it's safe to say that as far as I can tell, we're not really sure what these figurines ever were. Okay? Uh it doesn't mean we won't know, but some point. But so in that case, there you've got the image of a of a female body that's being represented. Let's let's assume that they were um were pregnant, okay? So you've got an image of a female body that's being uh essentially is essentially ripening. And I say this because analogies between human bodies and agricultural life were made constantly. So this is not me, you know, make a connection that wasn't there. And so it's it's the idea of a kind of body that swells. And the the for in antiquity, as I see it, the swollen body still signifies potentially problematic things, uh, even if the swelling is not the result of fat. And I think that's uh an important uh an important concept. So in the case of the figurine of uh an apparently um pregnant woman, that I don't see that as a negative thing. But if you look at um the Bible, the particularly the the the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, a lot of references there to swollen bodies. But the swelling is not the result necessarily of eating too much food. It's seen almost as an embodied metaphor of their own pride. And so the swellingness is kind of an interesting term, an interesting concept there, because uh particularly for the ancient Hebrews, the swollen body was one that because of the fat, or whatever was calling causing the swelling, um, made them less sensitive. It was the idea that they could not hear uh the word of God. It was almost as if they were uh in the, I think it's a book of Exodus, they referred to the Pharaoh, how his heart was hardened. Um his heart was fattened is actually what those terms mean. So fat has a lot of different functions here. And so we're we're so much in the habit of uh of viewing it in terms of eating too much food, not exercising enough, which which are, by the way, by the way, those ways of explaining fat in the human body medically go back to antiquity. They're not really new uh observations at all. But fat was not never just about that. It was about other things as well. And I think that we we have tended to forget these because some of these other things I think are present in subtle ways even in our modern stereotypes. Um that's why I think going back even to prehistory does shed light on things that are, I think, in in weird ways are kind of operative today as well.

SPEAKER_00 9:34 With the Venus figurines that you mentioned, it is also possible, I guess, um, that artists were imagining what the human form could look like beyond what they could see. Because if you look at ancient statues of um incredibly strong, well-muscled men who look um as jacked as sort of modern-day bodybuilders um roided up on steroids, you know, they didn't have those anabolic steroids back then, but they could imagine a physique which looked like the ones that we're able to achieve now. Because it doesn't take seeing it in real life for a human to imagine what going further beyond uh the natural uh limits are, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:18 Absolutely. And uh the the depiction of muscular bodies is really quite telling. The the Greeks loved muscularity so much that in their statues they included muscles where they never actually existed in the human body. Oh and that's actually very telling because for the Greeks, the the muscled body, again, well proportioned, harmonious, would have been considered to I think is it the kalagakatia? Um I'm not mispronouncing that Greek word, but it's this it's this term that means beauty, but also nobility as well as goodness in the sense of morality. But for the Greeks, muscles also indicated willpower, the ability to take the wishes of oneself and execute them in action itself. So the ancient um associate the ancient, I would say, celebration of a certain kind of muscularity was always about more than just the muscles. Muscles, I guess, symbolized qualities uh that the Greeks like to think that they all possessed. Um again, that's very aspirational and idealistic, but that is often the way that groups of people tend to think about themselves.

SPEAKER_01 11:29 Aaron Powell Do you think it's as simple to say that um for Greeks, you know, these kind of connotations of muscularity and beauty that for them was fatness the the antithesis of that, or was it more complex than that?

SPEAKER_02 11:45 No, it was definitely the antithesis of that, especially as it pertained to males. And this is another interesting feature. Um for a lot a lot of scholarship on on fat, I'm going back to the the 1990s when I I first became aware of this uh like fat studies. A lot of it focuses on the modern period, a lot of it focuses on on women in particular, and in the modern period there are reasons to do that. I I don't have an issue with that. But if we trace this back further, we we find that many of the many actually most stereotypes about fatness were really leveled against men. Because actually, for a somewhat simple reason, for the Greeks and Romans, a female body is already considered to be more moist, softer, colder, and more fleshy than the male naturally. So for now, I'm I'm not saying that doctors like early gynecologists like uh Seranus, who is very influential, they were counseling women who were very, very large to lose weight because that was going to make it easier for them to conceive. They would talk about the functionality of intercourse with a very, very large body. So clearly these were things that doctors were aware of, but at the extremes. But when describing male bodies, typically male bodies would have been seen as uh as uh firmer, harder, that is, uh warmer, or just hot, more slender, not necessarily thin, because the Greeks um had a word for excessive slenderness as well, although that seemed to be less they didn't use it very much, but they did tend to talk about fatness a bit more. But for a male body to for a male body to be fat, in a lot of respects kind of went against the the assumption of what a male body ought to be. And this is one of the reasons why fatness um from early early days took on connotations of femininity. And in the case of male bodies, the feminine can become a real problem there, and because of all all that it tends to uh all that it can uh indicate or imply.

SPEAKER_01 14:58 So I'm getting a sense that there um has definitely obviously through history been various connotations of kind of what it is to be fat and what that might mean uh in a sort of cultural level or what that might imply. But you note in your book that one scholar dubbed the entire sort of pre-modern world as a time before fat. So I was just wondering if we could sort of touch on on what that exactly means.

SPEAKER_02 15:28 Yeah. Um the the the scholar writing that um what was um writing in the early days of fat studies, and a lot back then, a lot of the dominant ways of thinking about the body in relation to uh broad temporal changes. So I'm I'm talking here about periodization. So for a lot of people, almost never medievalists and classicists, but for a lot of people, modernists, they assume that almost they as if the year 1500 is like this cutoff, which which frankly I used to think that too, because it was easier as an historian of the modern period to say that kind of thing and then not look before 1500 and just assume that it's radically different.

SPEAKER_00 16:13 Um I had assumed some sort of cutoff on our ideals of fat of fat.

SPEAKER_02 16:18 Yeah, the the argument that fat is that that uh aversion to fat is a uniquely modern phenomenon that has been a truism for a long time, one that I um had more or less gone along with. Um but when I started to really look more carefully at the pre-modern world, I I found a very, very different situation. So the author writing that, and again, fat studies in the early days was very much marked by this idea that there was a a real sharp division between modern and pre-modern. You see this in the work of Michel Foucault, you see this in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, uh, even Norbert Alias and other theorist scholars who would talk about the body over long stretches of time, did tend to draw a sharp line there. So I do understand why somebody at that time thinking about the body historically would have been swayed by that temporal marker. But I don't think that that holds a lot of water anymore. I do think that we need to think about continuities across this uh supposed divide. I think there are actually many more continuities uh as well as many, many changes that are taking place there.

SPEAKER_00 17:31 But it is true to say, isn't it, that fat wasn't or fatness wasn't always viewed negatively, right? Because we often hear how it was associated with power, wealth, status. One very well-known example of that tends to be King Henry VIII. So how how do you how do we square this sort of Greek ideal, this ancient Greek ideal of what it means to be overweight, with this concept or emerging perhaps, um, of there sort of being this wealth and authority attached to it?

SPEAKER_02 18:05 Yeah, that that's that's a good question because that's been uh an assumption that a lot of people, and myself included, have made. Uh, for me, being more initially a 19th century scholar, uh 19th and early 20th century, uh what came to mind immediately were, you know, uh images of fat bourgeois, you know, fat capitalists in particular. And if you look at um working men's or labor union newspapers and magazines from around 1900, that's exactly how they depict the capitalist as always fat and weak and uh uh sometimes effeminate, almost infantile. But that that's very telling there. Uh of course the working man is always depicted as muscular, uh upright, uh looks a bit grumpy and definitely not like a child. You already see right there a clash between, on the one hand, this image of power uh contrasted with the idea that their bodies are one thing and they themselves actually have characters that go along with their bodies, not as representatives of power, but of uncontrollable appetite uh and a willingness to devour, and which are not really, I mean, the second one can go along with the idea of power, uh, but it doesn't suggest um, it suggests a kind of animalistic devouring. And that whole notion is uh extremely old as well. Um, Socrates was widely known as being fat. I mean, he had a big belly, and this was actually and has been a problem for his contemporaries as well as philosophers since then, because the I the claim was that, you know, it's too bad that his outside is this way, because we know that his inside is that way. And this idea of a contrast between almost as if Socrates was uh actually a thin man trapped in a fat man's body, this kind of idea is really ancient. Um, and of course, we have variations on that that um we sometimes get even to the present. So, yeah, there always was this sense of a tension there. Even if one's fat was a consequence of their power, it didn't necessarily indicate good things, because those in power are not always seen in positive ways. Sometimes they're seen as devouring or vampiric, as semi-human. And so power, you could see it as a good thing, but you can depict your enemies as fat as a way of critiquing the same power, just coming at it from a different perspective.

SPEAKER_00 20:39 It's interesting because it's certainly a modern assumption that is held as well. Um you know, often uh overweight people are seen as lazy, um, which is if you really unpack that, it's obviously hugely untrue. There are plenty of overweight people who are incredibly driven, successful, wealthy. And so we do we like to separate uh overweight with lazy and fit and healthy as sort of like morally um superior in some way. And it feels like that divide in our minds has never, I mean, that's bit that's lasted for a very, very long time.

SPEAKER_02 21:18 It really has. And it's very interesting because I mean, sometimes I get frustrated when I when I read um, and of course, they're not necessarily reading the history. I I get that, but they'll make comments like uh, gosh, it's almost as if good health has a moral value. And my response is, yeah, it always has. I mean, it's it's it's not like we've gotten to the situation where all of a sudden perceptions of ill health have suddenly have negative connotations. In in a lot of respects, they always have. Which is not to say that we have not exaggerated and accelerated a lot of these things in the past hundred years or so. So again, I I by by drawing some comparisons over really millennia, that's not to say that by any stretch of the imagination these are really all that comparable. But there is there is there are continuities that I think um need to be accounted for rather than just ignored.

SPEAKER_01 22:16 And in the case of like Henry VIII, when you see portraits, it's almost like his um his weight was not hidden, but it was almost amplified. And it got me thinking a bit about what you were saying before, sort of this image of kind of power and how this devouring and this kind of these connotations can be used kind of positively and negatively. And you can actually see that I think, despite our sort of cultural ideas of being like a large body today, it's you can really see it's a very large, sort of powerful figure when you see that. Is that kind of the intention, do you think?

SPEAKER_02 22:54 Oh yes. Um and I think that that depiction of um Of his body in that way is it's certainly not accidental and it's not necessarily all that unusual. Also, I I would say that we need to remember that with depictions of fat male bodies, height really matters. Height can make a difference because height emphasizes the sense of I would suggest imposingness, the idea that there's something monumental and to some extent perhaps even potentially a little bit intimidating about that. And that in a way that is not operative uh at all for shorter fat men who do not necessarily automatically have that kind of presence. So I th I do think that that that is a factor here. Um but also there's the connection between having a large body and what do you do with it. Okay, and one of the things I've noticed, particularly with reference to medieval kings, is that one could be fat and it was not necessarily remarked upon unless one kind of lost the plot, or else one was um being described by one's enemies, or if one had simply become a failure as a leader, all of a sudden, it seems all of a sudden, the negative potential of the fat body gets activated in those situations, specifically in regard to political leaders who do not who basically fail in a sense. So the the uh Emperor Veget Vegetius or Vegetius, I'm never really I'm not a classicist, so I'm always making mistakes there. Um we'll forgive you because we wouldn't get it right. I'd agree. Thank you so much. That that's a good example of a of a Roman emperor who just just was losing. He was losing battle after battle. He he the army, I mean, it was and he was ultimately killed by an angry mob. But the the those who were commenting on this immediately tied his his size, his fatness, to his failure. And and that for me was very telling, because if you go forward into the Middle Ages, you have kings like uh Charles Charles Legraux, Charles Legraux, who was the sobriquet, the fat, does not is often not conferred as a result of um is not is not an honorific, let's put it that way. Uh but Charles Charles Le Gros only got the up the uh the moniker Le Gros after he grew fat, when he was not a king anymore. And and in fact, it was almost as if becoming the fat retroactively explained all of his failures as a thin man. It's really wild. It's very, very strange. I mean, so to be called the fat, if you're assuming that fatness in the pre-modern world was always an unproblematic signifier of status, it's not entirely true because the status still had to be in some respects earned, or at least respected through the uh the doing of good deeds. There's another king, and I'm sorry, my memory is terrible, and also I'm now my head is in all kinds of different scholarship now, so uh I've forgotten who I was talking about. Louis VI also called uh he he his original sobriquet was gloriosus. Um later, yeah, and uh and then later they changed it. Priests in France changed it to grossus because not because he was a failure, but because he was not really a friend to the church. But also his enemies, the British chroniclers also really enjoyed describing him and his father as fat. That was those are all ways to just uh to uh obviously to diminish him. And so obviously, you know, being fat as in a king was not an unproblematic combination uh in the Middle Ages.

SPEAKER_00 27:18 Yeah, and you also had the 10th century king Sancho I of Leon, um, who was nicknamed Sancho the Fat. Uh, and I I believe it's because he uh weighed around 240 kilos or something like that. Um so you know, there was a time in in in sort of antiquity uh or pre-modern times where uh actually your identity could be wrapped up very firmly with how you looked and your body shape because of the way that surnames and last names worked. You know, they weren't hereditary names back then, they were descriptive names. So um they told you something about the person, and as a result, I guess it was a way of linking people more closely to their sort of material body in a way.

SPEAKER_02 28:05 Oh, yeah, absolutely. But but like I said, in the case of Charles, it was retroactive because the guy who did all these things that were embarrassing was not fat. He wasn't fat when he did it, he became fat, you know. So it's again, it's here here's a case almost the reverse of Socrates. Here was a fat man in a thin man's body. Think about it, it it's basically what it's suggesting to me. Back to your your question about Henry VIII. Um, that the paintings by Holbein are really interesting because in that case, I don't recall how tall Henry VIII was. I probably looked into it, I've forgotten uh how tall he was. Six foot two, apparently. Okay, I think at the time that was a good size. And yes, and this goes back to what I was saying about why in this case height matters or size matters, but height matters because especially in the hands of Holbein, uh and the expression on uh Henry VIII's face, you have this sense of a kind of monumental, imposing, potentially even immovable force. And that, of course, is was not accidental, okay? But you know, also like uh and again I I I kind of wonder about this because Henry VIII was never called Henry the Fat. I mean, but not because he wasn't fat, but because he wasn't seen as a failure. And and I'm not certain of that that thinking there, but it it seems to be consistent with what I've seen uh in the case of uh of uh of other fat kings.

SPEAKER_00 29:46 So so is this sort of the um uh sort of myth that you're challenging then is that we do have quite a strict idea of fatness in antiquity being almost you know solely related to not just wealth and authority, but also um other sort of beneficial health uh aspects like fertility and beauty. And and you're sort of challenging that assumption and suggesting that actually never in history have we ever been so binary in our view of what it means to be overweight.

SPEAKER_02 30:23 Right. That that's my my my my my my perspective. I mean, uh other other scholars have made this point, and I what I've seen, I I I agree with it. Um typically, because I mean go back to actually the one of the first questions you asked, in antiquity there would not have been that many people, you know, who were you know of that size at the time. Uh so it when fatness was really being discussed, it really tended to be in extreme cases. I mean, Serranos, the gynecologist, uh, wrote about this a lot, about uh, you know, particularly fat women uh try who he he considered to be uh you know less fertile, which is actually supported by medical knowledge today. It's kind of it's kind of interesting how how how they were they were noticing something that was real, even though the way they described it was would certainly never satisfy any doctor today. Uh but it was not nothing they were they were noticing. So no, it's always been ambiguous. Um and even today our binaries are not even all that binary uh because or if it is binary, it's specifically in relation to human bodies, because we still like fat. Or at least we have an ambiguous engagement with fat, which we love to eat. It tastes good, and we're maybe on an instinctual level almost kind of driven uh or always tempted to overindulge with fatty foods because they they just they're pleasing, you know. But at the same time, you know, we make we celebrate olive oil, extra virgin, of course, uh, as an almost spiritual substance. So we which reminds me of the way in which oil was understood in in uh in classical antiquity, particularly with uh the ancient Hebrews. It was it could be viewed as one of the most pure things imaginable. It could also be viewed as that which is absolutely disgusting, and it had this intrinsic ambiguity about it that I find really fascinating. And that's why today we talk about good fats, bad fats. In Spain and Italy, they can talk about olive oil as that which actually causes you to lose weight. So the fat against fat.

SPEAKER_01 32:35 But we have this kind of health uh ambiguity today where there's obviously the good and bad fats. But in the sort of ancient world, or just in in history generally, was there this ambiguity about the health benefits or drawbacks of being fat as well? Or was that kind of uh something that came later?

SPEAKER_02 32:56 No, from day one. If you go back to the works of Hippocrates or the Hippocratic authors, because he he probably didn't write most of the things that have been attributed to him, you see it there as well. Uh and some of the, you know, the again, the sort of what we might consider to be the common sense ways of thinking about what causes overweight, you know, uh overly rich diet, uh not enough exercise, and other factors, because the the Greeks and Romans also talked about environmental factors, like uh if you live in a in an area where the uh the uh the atmosphere, the air is colder and moister. This is how human variation was understood in the pre-modern period. It was very environmentally rooted. So if you're like a scythian, who the Greeks often wrote about, you live in the steppes uh of Central Asia, you are in a colder, moister environment, your body is going to tend to be like that. And so the Greeks always saw their own environment as very moderate, which of course they said is why they have moderate bodies. That's exactly how they did that. So they were already kind of creating a typology of bodies that went with foreignness uh at this at this time. So um so yes, uh diet always mattered in the Middle Ages, and actually throughout this, if I have if I have to say, if there is there one consistent feature that allows, that defines the distinction between good and bad fat, it might come down to the distinction between fat derived from vegetable sources and fat derived from animal sources. It's typically been the fats derived from seeds, for example, or other things that are seen as much more pure. Whereas it's it's the lard, it's the butter that is is viewed in a different way, you know, uh as as less good, as less pure. And I wonder if some of that distinction carries through in our contemporary, you know, uh I I think still I'm not sure if people are still into olive oil like they used to be just about maybe five, ten years ago, but it certainly was a thing. But we do know that that the way in which olive oil is is discussed, uh, it is almost as uh actually it's not far from what the way um when a few years ago did they have this in the UK? Essential oils became a thing. Yeah. Yeah. There too. I mean we're we're we're we're not we're still talking about fat, but not in the way that most people have become accustomed to it. But one of the things I try to insist upon is in the book is that we need to think fat as solid as well as liquid. But we need to feel therefore we need to think of it as adipose, but also as oil, because oil is fat, and it's been understood as fat. And it's oiliness that has been one of the lingering stereotypical features associated with fat bodies. They sweat, they're greasy, they smell a lot of these. The notion of the dirty that goes along with so many very contemporary stereotypes about fat is really worth focusing on because it I think it it taps into some very much older ways of thinking.

SPEAKER_00 36:16 Well, fat is an interesting word when you put it like that, because it isn't just used to describe one thing. We we use it to describe almost three distinct things, and and you know, you you can tell me if there's more, but you obviously we use it to describe the sort of state of a body, um, that person is fat. We use it to describe the actual sort of tissue that um, you know, that this sort of essential tissue that we have for energy storage, insulation, cushioning organs, stuff which we need, even at quote unquote thin people, have fat. And then also, as you're discussing here, we use it to describe the sort of chemical components of the food that we eat. Do you think all of that sort of confounds our concept of fat and influences our view of fatness almost in like a holistic way where all the three different types of fat converge into one view in our mind?

SPEAKER_02 37:11 Yes, and I think that but but we often don't we often ignore a lot of what's implicit there and focus on, you know, fat as an adjective. I mean, very often. And and really what the book is about is looking at kind of the the building blocks of some very durable stereotypes, you know, uh over time. But there's actually a fourth dimension that that I mean, you the things you indicate there are absolutely spot on. There's also the act of fattening, which I think is important. Because the one question becomes what were the circumstances that contributed to your becoming fat? Is it because you cannot control your appetite and therefore your fatness is a uh is an indicator of a kind of weakness? Or did you grow fat because you're a predator or like an apex predator or uh I almost said alpha male? It doesn't quite work here. Yeah, the fat alpha male is just a a cognizant, it doesn't work. You're not gonna make a meme out of that, actually. Um but and and and also the fattening is are you being fattened by somebody else? Are you basically like livestock? And this is a very ancient metaphor. This is one of the reasons why I I've suggested that fat, understood in terms of fattening, has uh has always had not only a question of has status implications to it, but explicit power relationships. Why? Because ancient ideas about fat, um, because so much was modeled upon the the animal world in the agricultural realm, it was modeled upon, well, fattened animals. Which animals get fattened? Um and also think of a hierarchy of animals, not only in the ancient imagination, but also in our own. The animals we do tend to uh to uh whose qualities I should say we like to uh participate in. Uh they tend to be predators. They tend to be, you know, very agile or dominating. They don't tend to be geese and pigs and ducks and and cows. They don't they those are seen as livestock. Livestock that historically and to the present is fattened by others, not for their benefit, but fattened for the benefit of those who are doing the fattening. And this becomes very, very operative, actually, even today, because uh I also do work on masculinity in the far right, and it is not hard to see how, and the far right uh really hates fat. Fatness is really a problem for them. And their association there would be between uh fat bodies and goislop. This is basically you would be the implication, are being deliberately fattened by them so you can be weakened, so that you can be dominated, so that you can be metaphorically consumed or devoured, or at the very least subordinated. And some people make that narrative there uh explicit, other for others it's implicit, but the general shape of it, I think, remains largely the same. So, fatness, when understood in terms also of fattening, there's a power relationship that's always been there. And so, for for example, the Western view of non-Western fat bodies, going back to the Greek and Roman stereotypes about Asiatics, that continues into the colonial period as we have depictions, especially of Africans, but also of uh Indians in the subcontinent, uh in the Chinese as well. Fat becomes a marker of a less than civilized body. But the origins of that are not with Africa, they actually go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 41:03 There's a lot to think about there, and actually one of the things that uh fascinated me with what you said was actually about this sort of far right, and um it made me think of all the times that the algorithm has tried to feed me certain content that is just like you said, this word goislop and kind of like depicting the far left kind of large, brightly coloured haired person, and um yeah, you can see yes, exactly. So that's a little revelation for me on that one. Um but going back on to sort of the past a little, so I wanted to talk about kind of um medical, sort of early medical thinkers and whether they had very different ideas about fat to to modern day. Are there any sort of physicians or medical texts that sort of surprised you in how they understood fatness?

SPEAKER_02 42:01 No. Uh uh honestly, the the way in which fat fat bodies had been understood was in some very, very basic ways really quite similar. I did not see physicians recommending great fatness. Now the thing I and I think this is I think it's important to keep to uh to factor this in. I mean, our parlance today, it our parlance is very binary, when it when in fact it's not really like that. We think in terms of fat bodies and thin bodies, but w what we actually do is we we know what the the overly thin is. We know what that looks like. So and I'm and I say these things because I think it's important to remember that for most of Western history there was this vaguely, very loosely understood notion of a moderate body, which is the body between extremes. And the thing is, it's hard to get a clear picture of exactly what that body would have looked like, because in statuary and in icons, uh you get more of the uh the depiction of the extremes. And so it's honestly hard to tell what the moderate body really was or what it really looked like. But I can say that most ancient physicians, at least the ones, though, the biggies that I've encountered, they always rec r recommended moderation. They always recommended, you know, between these extremes.

SPEAKER_00 43:25 And I guess this was a sort of a time before BMI was invented. Um and I'm imagining it hasn't been a huge period, or correct me if I'm wrong, of human history where we've been weighing ourselves and where we've sort of understood what scale weight is and means in relation to our health. But now we can have, you know, we got pretty uh good stats that help us identify like this much weight is too is too much, and this much weight is just about moderate. So I guess uh sort of weighing ourselves is a fairly modern invention, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:58 It it is, yeah. And I I I I know that I think you can see some origins of this uh, and I I could be wrong about this, but from what I what I've what I've seen, uh 17th century early scholars, uh was it Santorio, Santorio? He was either running or writing about metabolism. He um he would weigh himself uh before and after meals and to try to get a sense of how much his body was essentially kind of burning off. This is an early version of metabolism uh studies, but more likely you were to see these uh the use of scales for this purpose around the 18th, late 18th, early 19th century. I think this is where you you find this. And some of the objections that were made was that, well, you know, in the past, before that time, they did weigh things. They weighed animals and slaves. And so the move towards weighing non human animal and slaves, non slaves, would would have been an interesting change there. And and and I mentioned that because And there's another theme that runs throughout the book, and that's animality. This idea that there is something about fattening that reminds people of our basically our animal natures. There was an interesting book that came out just a few years ago from in France where the woman was describing, you know, how she was treated as a woman of size by French physicians. And the French are really bad about fat, by the way. They they do not. It's worse than in America and the UK. Way more. In that context, there, the uh the doctor she went to see did not weigh her using kilograms. He weighed her using um an old unit of measure used by veterinarians. That's very telling. The tendency to dehumanize fat bodies partly springs, I would say, from our own lingering uh and perhaps irreconcilable discomfort with our own animality. And the the the animality issue, I think, is a uh is a recurring theme and it's very, very ancient. That's why I that's why I keep coming back to it because we we still do that. And I think that the the reason some of the reasons why um we do these things reflects our own discomfort about having bodies at all. And I'm very serious about that.

SPEAKER_00 46:27 I I've got to ask, um, how do people react to your book and your work and your discussing of these issues, where you are talking about the fact that uh being fat, fatness has been viewed um pretty similarly in antiquity as it is today. Broadly speaking, yeah. Broadly speaking, and through which you sort you sort of have to explain that it was seen as undesirable, or it was seen as unhealthy, or uh in some areas of life as disgusting. You're not an overweight man yourself, and so it must be sometimes you I I don't know, do you ever receive sort of criticism from people who who are overweight perhaps um and don't view uh like fatness in the same way and and feel as though there's like a moral implication to what you're saying?

SPEAKER_02 47:20 That's a great question. Uh I I have never received that. I there was one review, um and I get it. Um there because the reviewer was um was talking about, and also I've gotten this criticism at conferences and things like that. So, but but this is not like you know, like angry emails and nasty phone calls. It was uh more kind of, you know, more more more professional. Um it was a question of my uh my use of disgust and the way in which I think think of I use disgust, or at least the ingredients that most often elicit disgust responses. The the suggestion was that I was saying that this that fat is always disgusting, um and therefore am I making it almost a transhistorical thing. That's not my intention at all, okay? Uh because I don't think there's anything unavoidable about these things. There's nothing essential about this. I mean, um it's just that because we're dealing with ambiguous substances, ambiguous matter, and because matter does to some degree motivate the cultural ideas and concepts that we use, I think that's fairly clear now, at least to me, uh as somebody who has worked in materiality studies, that some substances are ambiguous. They just generate different kinds of responses. Uh oil is one of them. And and I and I wonder if to some degree that, at least from our perspective, that's what we're only talking about humans, what we consider to be ambiguous about these substances makes it possible to exploit that ambiguity in relation to actual human bodies and then to tar people with the um the qualities that we tend to associate with the substance itself. Which is why when we talk about grease, we're we apply it as a moral quality. So-and-so is greasy, they're slick, they're this, they're that. We're always doing that. And we see it also in some of the stereotypes about fat people as well. Uh so I often, to be perfectly honest, I sometimes feel very uncomfortable talking about this if the people I'm talking about are themselves very fat. Because I find it hard to describe this without sounding like I agree with any of this stuff. I I I don't at all. And I certainly don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, you know, certainly. But at the same time, this is what I'm seeing, and uh and and I and I I think I have a fair amount of data to to support it, but I'd love to see uh other interpretations of this.

SPEAKER_01 50:03 It's obviously a very evocative subject, and it has been for some time. Uh probably uh a lot longer than we think by the sounds of this conversation. And one striking thing to me uh is how socially acceptable it is or has been, you know, even until recently, it depends who you speak to or who you're around. Um it it is to sort of openly or quite openly shame fatness in some ways that we wouldn't do now we've sort of learnt as a species that racism and homophobia and mental illness and um addiction shaming are not things that we should do. So why do you think that uh fatness maybe is is kind of, or do you feel that fatness is kind of this uh protected almost thing where it's a bit more acceptable to have kind of stronger views on it?

SPEAKER_02 51:02 You mean stronger views in in the sense of um making stereotypes or openly shaming people about it?

SPEAKER_00 51:09 Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:10 Yeah, absolutely. Um and I I found it, I mean, I've written I I don't talk about this in the book, but I've I've written separately about um the role of fat in the political climate in particular the U.S. in the past decade or so. Yeah, the the way in which fat is mobilized by both sides of the political spectrum, um, also by those who self-profess liberals who in any other day would condemn fat shaming, very happy to fat shame Trump and others, you know. And and that, too, I find very interesting because I don't see it as uh as negating anything that I actually is it's a demonstration of the uh the enduring appeal of this kind of thing. Uh because I I think that because fat stereotyping implies stereotyping about class, it implies stereotyping about women, um, and it implies stereotyping about uh certain people of color, it becomes a kind of uh a proxy in a sense, because you can invoke the kinds of things that you that you the kinds of stereotypes that you may have about these people, but because you're not explicitly citing them, but you are identifying a feature that is stereotypically associated with that group, I think it allows you to import kind of uh vitriol in in that way. So some people say there's like uh, and and maybe they're right, that this is like uh the last acceptable stereotype. I I'm sure we have a lot more in us. I'm sure we can do, I'm sure we can do more stereotyping. I really do. Um but if we are optimistic and say this is the last stereotype, I think we need to understand that the stereotype itself is built out of stereotypes that we have discarded. It's built out of stereotypes about class and race and gender and ability and many other things that are unacceptable. But we can express our, I don't know, dissatisfaction or discontent uh with those groups uh through other means. And I wonder if fat also does that.

SPEAKER_00 53:17 It's interesting because I think you know it's very easy for us in the modern day to think that the way we feel about fatness, perhaps if we don't like obesity when we see it, it's because you know it's a sort of biological reaction. It is healthier to be slimmer, so we think it's purely driven by our biology. But as you've described, this has a lot of cultural weight, um, historically cultural weight. It also has implications for other biases and and maybe a proxy for some of the other ways in which we'd like to um express our dislike of somebody and fat is used in in place of that almost. But it also um it also shows just how easily culture can shape our sort of our visual understanding of the world. I think we we kind of think that culture has uh the the only role that culture has to play on us as people is sort of how we emotionally react to the world. But actually how we see and how we feel about things that we see can can also be hijacked by, I don't know, the the way everybody else around us is thinking and talking. And I don't think that's any clearer than now, where we're sort of obsessed with obesity and obsessed with weight and uh dieting and losing weight in any which way we can, especially with the rise of GLP1 medications. But yeah, I I think it's just fascinating to see how strongly culture is associated with how we view the world.

SPEAKER_02 54:45 It it is, absolutely. But I would also throw in their matter, because I think that there's a weird kind of I would actually call it like a philosophical point that runs throughout the text, because I I do have this sense that quite a lot of culture might be something established as a way of coping with matter, particularly living matter, because regardless of what our culture may say about our lives, we our bodies are they uh they're vulnerable. They to disease, to injury, to death, dismemberment, you you you you name it. They are constant sources of anxiety and and disappointment. And of course, a lot of what we do culturally, obviously in relation to the body and other things, are ways of managing this because it is in many respects disappointingly unruly. Our bodies, they may you know do things we want to do now, but eventually it's just not it's not going to work out. There is a there is a expiry date on all of these things, obviously. So I do have to wonder about whether the accelerating and even exaggerated aversion to fat is maybe symptomatic of something else that in fact we have never really been all that happy about being embodied. The bodies that we tend to fantasize about, uh think about the early Christian image of the resurrection body. You know, the res at the end of time, Jesus coming back, you've got the the king, the new the new the new Jerusalem, and the the the dead will be raised, you know, the the dead will be raised and they will they will have their bodies. But everybody wanted to know reasonably, well, you know, what kind of bodies will they have? I mean, if I if I if I died when I was four, am I is that it? Her eternity? I I I had my left arm cut off. Is that it? Or maybe even worse, what is it going to be like? And so these were questions that I think ordinary people, if they heard about this, would certainly ask. But I I know that for a fact that theologians were trying to get their minds around it. But the bodies that they imagined would always be moderate, harmoniously proportioned, almost um Greek-like uh in in a way, but they would never have the those features of the body that we don't like, like that which grows old, that which decays, that which is vulnerable. And so the image of the body that is very often idealized is a body that is free of its organic dimensions, which is really paradoxical. But to think about, but I I wonder if um recent interest in transhumanism, which I would have liked to have uh written more about, but you I mean you get a I I they wouldn't let me write anymore, actually, frankly. That I I wanted to. And they're like, no, you gotta stop. I was already 50,000 words over my limit, so they were already very gracious. But looking at transhumanism, um, the transhumanist image of the body, uh as I understand it, is of a body that is enhanciable, manipulable, where its metabolism can be directly controlled, where something like fatness or excessive slenderness will never be an issue because it will never be really possible. So I I see it as a as an attempt to tame materiality, to tame animality. And this is why, you know, when I I called the book, you know, uh the a history of the stuff of life, I I think we need to take seriously that word there. This is the stuff of life, I think, is ambiguous itself. It can be that which deriv provides pleasure and meaning and belonging, but it's also that which uh will ultimately let us down. And I think it's that the inevitable disappointment of being embodied that some of our aversion to fatness ex uh expresses. I I I I I I I do think that. And and I like the fact that some that some rewers have picked up on this. Um actually the Spanish translation just came out, and there was a nice review in El País where they they make they they actually talk about that. And it is really uh a core theme in the text, as strange as it might seem.

SPEAKER_01 59:14 So there's this kind of feeling of uh an ideal being kind of moderate in in history, it sounds like, uh, in in some of the examples that you've mentioned. And I think there's also in present day, at least my feeling is that there's more of a feeling of trying to achieve perfection. And I was wondering Ollie touched on something before about GLP 1 weight loss medications and some being used obviously for medical reasons, some being used maybe purely for aesthetic reasons. I was wondering if you have a thought on how you feel the vision of kind of fatness or the opinion of fatness might shift with the rising use of medications like this.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:03 I see it. I see the responses getting even more intense. I it'll be those who have access to these things, of course. And then that assumes that in five years we don't discover the horrific things that these things may or may not do. That does seem to be the way these things go. Uh Olestra was kind of like that, and there are other, you know, weight loss solutions that have been offered that uh sound good at first. Um, my suspicion is that this will um exacerbate the pre-existing default lines that already separate groups from one group from one another, where they uh may not have access to these things. And and as nutrition for disadvantaged groups is not necess is not definitely not getting any better. Um I I can see this becoming even more of a problem. Yeah. Where once again, uh class lines will be synonymous with bodily difference. I I see that as a as something that will probably happen. But that's why you need to ask a more of an optimistic person these kinds of questions. No, I I think I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:05 I I think it it makes a lot of sense your view on it. And you know, I think it's always really surprised me that as we've created this obesogenic environment with the foods that we have uh available to us, the fast foods, the junk foods, the microwaveable foods, that we haven't become more accepting of fatness uh as time's gone on and as the obesity epidemic has increased or become a thing even in the modern time, but instead we've almost grown uh more averted to it. There's become a greater polarization between those who morally stand by thinness and actually, you know, more recently morally stand by fatness and and body confidence and body positivity. Um why do you think it is that all of these, you know, perhaps in antiquity you could imagine that a fat body may have been seen negatively because there were, as you say, very few of them. But now, with so many people uh uh uh being obese, why we haven't become why hasn't become more favorable or at least accepted?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:11 It's a good question. And in in some places there is, I think there does seem to be, if not actually more acceptance, an attempt to generate more acceptance. I I know uh these weren't really things that I I uh I got into, but I know that there are a lot of uh situation comedies coming out of the US some years ago that really emphasized this and took these this as a theme, which I think was not necessarily a bad idea, if only from a human perspective in terms of how we how we treat each other. I think that um a lot of people talk about neoliberalism as a factor. I think it does play a role. I mean, we have been uh all of us encouraged to take ourselves in our own hands to lift ourselves up. I'm all I mean, neoliberalism is just like old liberalism, just you know, with I guess computer screens in a lot of respects. It's it's the same idea, uh, and that if you fail, it's your fault. It's a failure of will, uh, or you don't have access to the resources, which in the U.S. is not an excuse, unfortunately. That's how unfortunately moralizing we have become about health. Uh sick people are culpable very often, depends who you talk to. So I think that there are a lot of factors contributing to this. But neoliberalism, the insistence upon the individual as being the sole cause and the sole solution to personal problems, I can generate a world like that. And that's why I'm thinking that it'll be um like I'm the movie Gattaca comes to mind, um, but it does it does make me think of this kind of two-tier society, which we in some respects already have, but I see this uh really sharpening those divisions on on a on an even more intimate bodily level.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:04 Yeah, and you and you say that all the while we are wrestling with the some materiality of our body and the fact that we have these material bodies because they are not within our control. And yet we're telling people that everything that they do in life is within their control, and anything that goes wrong or that they do is morally seen as bad, is their fault, when actually we know that most of what we do, you know, some uh philosophers like Robert Sapolsky, for instance, argue that free will doesn't even exist. And so we, you know, we see that um there are genetic elements to weight gain, there are cultural, there are also the abusogenic environment, which I uh spoke about. And it's just so interesting that we don't um we can't compartmentalize, you know, the fact that we're viewing sort of um, yeah, this kind of soul responsibility, you're you're the agent of your life and everything is your responsibility from the fact that actually life is chaotic and random.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:00 Absolutely. But the thing is, this this way of thinking is uh actually it's precisely because life is chaotic and random that you could argue that this obsessive focus on the body is there. Um I I when I when I talk and I teach and write about these things, I often go back to about a hundred years ago, uh a little bit more than that in the U.S. context, there's some interesting cultural historians writing about that period. And one of my favorite ones ones, he writes about how, you know, during this period where the experience of modern life is becoming really accelerated, where a lot of ideas about community and meaning and what's acceptable in terms of fashion or body size are accelerating and changing. Um, and as the world increasingly becomes one where it's actually kind of well, hard to locate oneself, and certainly um a world where one's ability to have much of an impact seems really quite slim. A lot of people, maybe most of us, feeling that sense of disorder, will turn to that which we have closest at hand that we think we can control. And the body happens to be it. The thing that we both at once have and the thing that we are at the same time. Already there we've got a profound ambiguity, you know? Because we're the animal that rejects animality. That's we're that's exactly what we are. We're the mortals who say no to mortality.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:38 I guess what's really important to note is, you know, we I mentioned, I touched on the fact that there may be pushback that you get, you said you don't get that much pushback, but and and that's quite intriguing to me because I see it as quite a complex and quite a controversial, decisive, uh divisive topic. But you know, here you're saying you yourself are not making a moral judgment, but rather sort of assessing historical views of fatness. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I I sort of want to uh get from you why you feel it is important that we do take this historical look at it and what looking back through antiquity can tell us about how we should perhaps try to shape our views of uh fatness and obesity in the modern age and in the future as things are only set to, you know, become it's only set to become more prevalent.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:32 I think that if we are trying to think of ways of being more empathetic with one another, I I'm I'm a firm believer that shared acknowledgement of vulnerability is is a kind of essential precondition for any kind of communication, by which I mean if you're going into an in into an interaction where one size one side has fantasies of of immortality, which of course, you know, you know what I mean? They've already defined themselves as a separate species, defined partly in terms of what about the animal they've transcended. That is a group of people who are out of touch with reality as I see it, or at least reality as it is now. I don't know what technological changes and transhumanism will make possible, but for the moment, it it's not really we're not really there. But I I do think that any way of uh creating dialogue uh has to begin with the idea that we're all vulnerable, we're all quite weak, we are all we wish to be other things, and we sometimes we can be these things, but we all are stuck with the same predicament, basically. And I say this, and it's such an old thing. You know, it's nothing new about that kind of observation there. But it does seem to be something that we need to be reminded of um again and again and again.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50 Well, Chris, it's been amazing talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Um, I didn't realize this topic would be so rich with history and context and morality um and philosophy, but it really has been astounding to me. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:06 Thank you, and thank you, by the way, for inviting me and for the opportunity to do this in a long form because uh it really did allow us to get into the weeds with some of this stuff. But I I think I I hope it was useful and uh and I certainly enjoyed the experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:21 Definitely, likewise. Thank you very much. A massive thank you to Chris for joining us on the podcast. This is what we did before.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:29 I'm Matt. And I'm Ollie. Do subscribe if you enjoyed the episode, it really does help us out a lot, and we will see you next time. Bye.