Why people hate fat Americans
Today's attacks on obese Yanks are motivated by a broader unease with affluence.
by Daniel Ben-Ami
If Americans had to be described with one word, there’s a good chance it would be ‘fat’. Americans, we are constantly told, are the fattest people on the planet. Obesity is rife. Compared with other nations the Americans are not just big, but super-size.
Yet this obsession with obese Americans is about more than body fat. Certainly there is a debate to be had about the extent to which obesity is a problem in America - a discussion best left to medical experts. But a close examination of the popular genre on obesity reveals it is about more than consumption in the most literal sense of eating food. Obesity has become a metaphor for ‘over-consumption’ more generally. Affluence is blamed not just for bloated bodies, but for a society which is seen as more generally too big for its own good.
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The reason for this story, is that I just found it interesting and never thought about America's obesity problem and the world's reaction to it as somehow being linked with the world view about how America and American's as "over-consumers"...
Read it, it is interesting...
Pertinent Links:
1) Why people hate fat Americans
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