Adipose Nation: It's Time to Tax the Fat
You've maybe noticed that many commercial airplanes still have razor blade disposals built into their bathroom modules?a legacy of more innocent days when the most insidious motives of air passengers was assumed to be mile-high coitus or a quick wank. America was not prepared for the terrorists, and airplanes are not prepared for Americans, is what I'm thinking as the passenger beside me on this full flight from Houston to New York shuffles sideways up the aisle to claim his seat.
I am enduring the midget leg room of economy class when I glance up to observe a set of gigantic buttocks backing into my row without even the flashing lights or warning beeps of a wide-load truck, and then descending like a wrecking ball to obliterate the innocent seat cushion. He is in his 40s and wearing bright yellow shorts?pale, heavy legs like beech trunks and what appears to be a good-size honeydew melon smuggled in the general area of his crotch. He is apologetic as he squeezes into his seat, and I try not toshow my dismay when a portion of his quivering belly sneaks amoeba-like beneath our shared armrest. It is not intentional contact, I try to remind myself each time I turn the page of a magazine and my forearm brushes lightly against his pendulous apron of flab. "Damn seats getting smaller and smaller," he grunts, but I sense he knows better?I assume it is his way of apologizing for making my uncomfortable economy class air voyage even less comfortable. I poke my head up, casually searching front and back for a less encumbered seat, but the plane is ram-a-jam full. And so I just smile a tight public-transportation smile of violated boundaries and shrug to indicate what I cannot bring myself to say, which is?Hey, what are you going to do? I cannot bring myself to say that because, if I did, I would feel compelled to answer my own query. Viz: what our fat friend could do is eat less, exercise a bit and try to be more sensitive to the small red flags of warning that life sometimes flies for our benefit?such as barely being able to squeeze your ass into a commercial airplane seat?as an indication that all is not well.
But that would be cruel, would it not? It would surely hurt his feelings. And what purpose would it serve to have an irate fat man beside me for the duration of the voyage, his pseudopods of blubber radiating hot indignation as they probe my personal space? And perhaps corrective action is not as simple as it seems. Maybe he has been prescribed medication?antidepressants or steroids, for example?that have transformed him into a human balloon. Or he could be brain-damaged, a once-lithe marathoner whose hunger-regulating hypothalamus was lost through the windshield of a car in a freak accident. And even if he suffers from a standard case of eating too much, then surely he has always been obese and was taunted cruelly as a child, robbed of self-esteem and the opportunity to develop normal social skills. He likely found solace in the pleasure of food and now must contend on a daily basis with the intolerance of people he inconveniences with his girth, as well as the unveiled disgust of those who are repelled by the sight of so much shivering lard adorning the human frame.
There are people who harbor a strong hatred for the fatties of the world?weightists? body fascists??the way some hate Jews or German tourists. I am not one of them, however. And so I just shrug and smile my tight smile at this Person of Size (Person of High Adiposity?) and focus on my magazine, gyrating as much as possible toward the little oval window so as to avoid unintentionally caressing his expansive gut.
Emergency exits are indicated, headphones distributed, the drink cart goes up and down the aisle?water for me; a coke and a beer for my seatmate. Then the boiled garbage aroma of an elementary school cafeteria announces the arrival of the food trolley. There is beef or pasta?I take the pasta; he takes the beef. The foil cover of the entree is pulled back; molded plastic utensils emerge from their sanitary condom; the salad is revealed in its sterile terrarium. More water for me; another coke with a beer chaser for my friend. He eats quickly?gobbling, scarfing, packing his face. He demolishes his medallion of beef in two bites and then sops up the gravy. His anemic salad is dispatched after being marinated in nuclear-sunset-colored French dressing squeezed from an airtight tube. All that remains is dessert?a three-layer cake with white frosting topped by shavings of dark chocolate. The nasty confection of refined sugar and animal suet is raised a few inches from his lips and suctioned mercilessly from its plastic well, disappearing in a flea's breath down that well-traveled gorge to the soundtrack of a juicy swallow.
Then comes the clatter of meal trays being collected by the zombie army of air stewardesses. I am reading a London paper that a visitor left at my house the day before, and now I sense the fat man's eyes on me. The rattle-stacking approaches and I feel him growing tense with expectation. I think I know what he wants, but I don't look up. The trolley is just behind us now and he can wait no longer?Excuse me, he says, are you going to eat that? He is pointing at my dessert, which still sleeps an innocent chemical sleep inside its tiny transparent sarcophagus. Perhaps it is because I had just moments before read some news that I'm sure you've also heard about?about a morbidly obese man who's hired a lawyer to bring suit against four major fast-food restaurants for negligence (Daily Mail, 7/26: "I'm McSuing You"). Perhaps it is because the older I get the more certain I am that quid pro quo makes the world go round. What I tell the fat man is: "Okay, but only if you agree to answer five questions as truthfully and with as little emotional response as possible."
He seems to know what line of questioning to expect and does not seem keen on it. He hesitates. But our sky waitress has already removed his ravaged food tray and is robotically extending her hand toward mine. "Okay," he says, reaching for his prize. I slap that big old hand away and deposit the cake in escrow on top of the armrest between us. The conversation that follows is more or less this:
Ready?
I could make that your first question, but I won't.
Oh, right. Thanks. Okay, first question?why are you so fat?
I'm big?I've always been big. Even as a baby I was big. My parents were big. My sisters are big.
But you eat a lot and very quickly. I honestly have never seen anyone eat so fast. I bet that doesn't help.
Is that your second question?
No, come on, a bet isn't a question and you haven't really answered my first one.
Okay?I like to eat. I'm always hungry. It's genetic. I guess I don't feel full like other people.
Question number two?do you exercise?
No?it's too hard for me to exercise and I've never been good at sports.
But clearly it's a vicious circle?you don't exercise because you are fat and you are fat because you don't exercise.
Is that your third question?
No, here it comes?what if I kidnapped you and forced you to lose weight through a regime of diet and exercise? Maybe some liposuction.
I would have you arrested. Kidnapping is against the law even if your intentions are good.
But you would lose weight and later you would thank me for it, right? You would be thin and grateful. You'd be too happy to press charges.
Is that your fourth question?
Which?
Whether I would thank you?
No, this is?Are you aware that you are more likely to die an early death because of your obesity?
Yes, but you could die crossing the street. You could get run over by a bus. This plane could crash. Terrorists could hijack it. Think about all the people on diets who were killed on Sept. 11. Deprivation?and for what? You have to enjoy life because you don't know when it will end. I enjoy eating and I don't enjoy exercising and I don't mind being as big as I am and that's all there is to it. I used to feel bad about it, especially when I was younger, but now I realize that it is not my problem?it's other people's problem. If you don't like the way I look then it's your problem.
What if there was a law that made being so fat illegal?what would you do then?
I would move somewhere else?I wouldn't want to live in a country that had laws like that.
You're right?neither would I. Thanks for playing along. Enjoy your cake.
We did not speak again. I thought of some more questions during the in-flight movie, but I didn't have any more food to trade. It was a square deal?he bolted his second piece of cake and I started chewing on this idea.
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Walt Whitman is the poet of the Great America, the one he knew during his lifetime (he was born in 1819), as opposed to the Fat America that has materialized during the 30-odd years of my existence. Whitman sang about the strong and striving America?about himself as an embodiment of a bustling society of hearty, free individuals. If Whitman were alive today, I doubt he would be as thrilled to embody the soft and complacent nation that the U.S. has become just over a century after his death?this adipose nation where immense mothers of giant toddlers defend their infants' obscene girth on scream-to-win television talk shows whose studio audience is similarly bloated and porcine; where the question in that old Special K cereal advertisement that chimed "can't pinch an inch on you" has become dissonant when applied to most Americans (a more relevant slogan today might be: "Can you not reach around to clean your own fundament?"); where men exist who eat so much so rapidly for so long that it takes half a dozen firemen to remove them by crane through the window of a bedroom they have not left in years.
I moved to Mexico City from Manhattan five years ago, but I travel frequently to the States and have watched with astonishment as my countrymen have grown larger and larger, year after year, as if preparing for some prolonged voluntary hibernation that has nothing to do with winter, scarce resources or insulation against the cold. In "A Supermarket in California," Allen Ginsberg imagined Walt Whitman "poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys," but if Whitman were alive today he'd be shocked and dismayed at the sight of supersized families pushing overflowing shopping carts down endless aisles of jumbo-pack comestibles. Whitman's biographers put him at approximately six feet tall as a young adult and weighing approximately 180 pounds. That would give him a body mass index?a ratio calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by the square of your height in meters?of 20 or so. A healthy BMI is in the range of 18.5 to 24.9; someone with a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight. Score 30 or higher and you are officially obese as far as the Surgeon General is concerned.
Anyone who watches daytime television or has wandered through a suburban mall or into a rural bar or through a white-collar business convention or visited the less affluent neighborhoods of a big city will not be surprised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey conducted in 1999 that found 61 percent of all U.S. adults to be overweight or obese. More recent studies indicate that the weight gain trend continues unabated and is accelerating with regard to American children and adolescents. Anyone who loves the United States, whether for the real opportunities that it has afforded them or for the best intentions of its founding principles, cannot help but be preoccupied by the idea of so many millions of obese Americans.
In a nation of child-raping priests, child-murdering pedophiles, insane jihadi terrorists and kleptomaniac capitalists, this domestic fat crisis might seem on first inspection to be a relatively benign problem. The fat lady mouthbreathing next to you on the subway may occupy two rush-hour seats with her impossibly huge, double-barrel buttocks, but she probably cannot move quickly enough to abduct your child. Unrecovered health care costs from uninsured fatsos?who tend to suffer from long, lingering and expensive-to-treat ailments?may appear inconsequential compared to the trillions of shareholder value recently erased by the felonious greed of businessmen. But I would suggest that the bloating of our nation is more insidious than any of these other threats to our health and well-being, both because it reflects the behavior of most Americans rather than a relatively small number of deviant criminals and because this behavior inspires so little condemnation.
Not since the decadent times of ancient Rome has gluttony (and it is essential to recognize that what we are talking about is old-fashioned gluttony) been so acceptable, the great difference being that American gluttony is not limited to a decadent elite stumbling off to the vomitorium between feast courses. Despite all the attention that bulimia and anorexia receive, I would argue that that the average American does not feel sufficient shame and concern about his body image. When the obese rapper Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, sang I love it when they call me Big Poppa, he was crooning our new unrepentant national anthem?"La Gourmandise." Modern gluttony is a moral failing that has become ubiquitous on all levels of U.S. society. Say the word?gluttony. Speak it out loud. It is too-seldom used. Take note of the second syllable?the word does not rhyme with chutney. We've got to use the condition's proper name, but in a clinical way, shedding all biblical connotations. We need to learn to say it without sounding like some redneck preaching hellfire and damnation on the Southern cracker radio. You can practice with this little ditty I wrote, titled "Requiem for a Waist":
Describing the gluttony in America as an epidemic of obesity shrouds the individual decisions that are its root cause. It is as unhelpful as speaking of an epidemic of cooked corporate books or a plague of sexually molested children. Because getting fat is not like getting polio or leukemia or elephantiasis. It is a lot like getting drunk?a conscious decision to choose a sensory pleasure despite known negative consequences. It is a choice that goes to the great moral question of civilized man?shall we indulge our desires or restrain them? Whether a hand reaches for that third chocolate eclair or a choir boy or the money from the company pension fund, the answer is the same.
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The math on weight gain is easy to understand. It is simple addition and subtraction?every 3500 calories you eat above what you burn through physical activity will be stored as one pound of fat. You don't need Richard Simmons' Deal-A-Meal kit to figure out when you are exceeding the approximately 2000 calories a day that most people require to maintain a healthy BMI. Weight gain is not only a simple concept, but is also well-known?modern American culture is saturated with diet books, health gurus and gym routines. It would be interesting to understand the intersection that exists between the set of people whose purchases have created a multibillion-dollar health industry and the set that helps the fast-food chains post record sales year after year ($110 billion in 2001 as estimates www.restaurant.org). There are exorexics who have never set foot in a McDonald's, and morbidly obese people who have never set foot on a stairmaster. Most Americans fall in between, but you can sense them reaching with less and less guilt for that second piece of cake, hanging towels on the treadmill they got for Christmas a few years back, loosening the belt another notch with a shrug, easing back at the local multiplex with a huge bag of buttery popcorn.
When food is cheap and plentiful and physical activity is no longer a requisite for survival, it is not at all surprising that people will consume more calories than they burn. What is surprising is how many people continue to overeat even after their love handles merge to form a spare tire, slowly to expand until they cannot easily observe their genitalia without a mirror. It happens with men and women. It happens every day. This sort of repeated disregard for the negative consequences of one's actions calls to mind lab animals shocking their pleasure centers until they collapse from dehydration. In human society, this sort of destructive behavior is typically associated with the poor and uneducated classes?it is the short-term, pleasure-zealotry-at-any-price logic of the crackhead. That's the most disturbing aspect for a country that has long prided itself on its giant middle class, vast hatching ground of the American dream?all the surveys and statistics (as well as a visit to any suburb or university campus) indicate that increasingly educated and wealthy Americans have become unabashed gluttons. Among college graduates, the incidence of obesity has doubled over the past decade. You don't have to be M. Night Shyamalan to imagine some hungry higher intelligence observing this rampant plumping of America, waiting patiently on the harvest.
What we have in America is a self-perpetuating and accelerating cycle of gluttony unfettered by the historic brakes of scarce resources and moral indignation. We are a nation where even our indigents can and do overeat, where gorging at a restaurant is more socially acceptable than picking your nose in public. The result is overweight parents raising overweight children who never learn the simple calculus of dietary restraint and go on to become even more overweight adults. According to a 1997 New England Journal of Medicine study, children with an obese parent have a 44 percent likelihood of becoming obese young adults themselves. One hears a lot about the body-image crises among young men and women that lead them to eating disorders, but only 1 percent or so of U.S. adolescents are thought to suffer from anorexia and 4 percent from bulimia, whereas more than 14 percent (and growing) are overweight. President Bush should make this a priority. He may not be a very adept public speaker, but his old cocaine habit, combined with his healthy BMI, gilds him with credibility to speak to both sides of the gluttony issue?the siren song of temptation and the rewards of self-restraint. He can begin in his home state of Texas, where the El Paso Times reports that a whopping 40 percent of children are overweight and 20 percent are obese.
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W here will it end? Standing behind that fat man in the aisle waiting to disembark after our plane had landed, it occurred to me that he would have to be hung like John Holmes to do the grisly deed with a woman of healthy dimensions?there was just too much fleshy overhang to get the job done with your average tool. If a woman of similar bulk was to be his amorous partner, I imagine the tab and slot genital arrangement would be fat-buffered from both sides to the point of dysfunction no matter how well-equipped he was. If trends of the past three decades continue, you might surmise that eventually most Americans will find reproduction equally difficult. There are those who posit that human beings have stopped evolving; that our technology and the complex societies that produce it have exempted us from the laws of natural selection. Nonetheless, one can imagine a future world where only thin people procreate, passing their good eating habits and exercise routines on to their children. Slowly the population would regain the complexion it had when Whitman was inspired to write:
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear'd it would not astonish me.
But that could take centuries.
Any near-term solution will require government action. Before you start calling me names, allow me to state for the record that I start from the premise that the cure is almost always worse than the disease when the government expands its role in our lives. However, for want of a little intervention today, we can expect to require immense state action in the future. That is because the health costs of obesity in America are likely to exceed their 2000 pricetag of $117 billion in 2002 and are projected to explode as baby boomers settle into a lard-riddled late middle age. And this figure does not include the health costs associated with the millions of Americans who are merely overweight and will soon, if unchecked, cross the line into obesity. As many people with unhealthy BMIs still come from the less affluent strata of society, it is a safe bet that most of those gluttony-related health care costs will be passed on to local, state and federal government. I don't have a problem with fat people?I certainly don't despise anyone for being fat?but I do object to my taxes being used to support some glutton's daily rampage at Krispy Kreme. I suspect that most people feel the same.
One solution that jumps to mind would be to raise the prices of foods favored by gluttons in order to discourage their consumption, applying the same sin-tax logic that has driven the price of cigarettes up to eight bucks a pack in New York City. But choosing which foods to tax would be a difficult and politically fraught affair?imagine the beef lobby's objection alone. In addition, such a tax would unfairly penalize people who have the common sense and restraint to include high-caloric food in their diets without ill-effect (i.e., only occasionally or offset by increased exercise). Also the analogy to cigarettes falters, because even light smoking has been proven to drastically increase your chance of contracting a dire illness, while you can eat a plate of french fries once in a while and still sport a perfectly healthy BMI.
A better solution is to target the red badge of gluttony that so many Americans carry around these days on their bellies, hips and buttocks, which is to say the adipose tissue itself. This Glutton Tax would be simple to implement and enforce. As part of the policy-writing process, health insurers would be required to certify the BMI of their clients, as well as their clients' dependents. This BMI certification would be filed each spring as part of your income tax statement?the higher your BMI, the higher your taxes. The Glutton Tax bracket would jump when an individual passed from merely overweight into the range of obesity. Any tax deductions associated with dependents would be eliminated if said dependents were certified as being overweight.
The Glutton Tax would be effective in two ways. It would reinstate a sense of opprobrium with regard to gluttony, while at the same time producing an economic impetus for healthy behavior. The elimination of deductions for dependents would motivate the transfer of good habits from parent to child. All that exercise equipment gathering dust in people's houses would be put to use and more would be purchased. Fast-food restaurants would suffer a decline in sales, but gym memberships would soar. Parents would stop using the television and high-starch snacks to tranquilize their children. Health insurance companies would be happy to comply because the certification process would allow them to offer lower-cost policies to clients with healthy BMIs, while charging more to overweight or obese clients. Problem solved.
But wait?I sense Hillary Clinton primed to jump up in the back row. The Glutton Tax would be ineffectual with regard to less affluent Americans who can't afford to pay $300 per month for health insurance and whose low income levels usually exempt them from paying federal taxes. This is where my No Fat Drivers Campaign (NFDC) comes into play?a simple federally mandated part of each state's motor vehicle licensing procedure. If you want to get your driver's license in America, you have to pass an exam that tests your knowledge on health and nutrition, as well as the rules of the road. A BMI certification would be part of the licensing process too, just after the vision test. No obese individuals (whether insured or not) would be licensed to drive and the requirement could be made stricter over time so as to eventually eliminate overweight drivers as well. License renewals would require an additional BMI certification at your local DMV or, in the case of those who can afford it, a copy of a recent one from your health insurer. Federal road-building funds would only be made available to states that implement the NFDC requirements. Americans love to drive and they love to overeat?now they will have to make a choice. My bet is that most Americans will lose weight rather than abandon their beloved automobiles.
But wait?Al Sharpton raises a greasy cheeseburger in protest?your proposal is just another racist program that ignores the plight of the urban poor, especially blacks and Latinos who suffer the most from obesity. These people, so long neglected by an uncaring and prejudiced government, don't pay income tax; they can't afford insurance; and they don't have cars. Okay, Al?we'll earmark proceeds from the Glutton Tax to fund health-education and fitness programs in poor areas throughout the U.S?both inner city and rural. I doubt such programs will be as effective as the sticks and carrots provided by the Glutton Tax and the NFDC, but it's worth a shot. If you believe the old Latin adage mens sana in corpore sano, we might even see some windfalls from the program in the form of reduced crime, drug abuse and violence among the lower classes should these programs prove effective. Who ever knew that legislating social problems away could be so easy!
But wait?a ton-o'-fun mama from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance struggles to her feet. The NAAFA recently received some press for protesting airline policies that require Persons of High Adiposity to purchase two tickets instead of one. She's got a Rosa Parks-style we-shall-not-be-moved expression on her face as she makes her point. The Glutton Tax and NFDC are unjust and discriminatory?a new segregation in America based on subcutaneous deposits of fat rather than melanin. Okay, we'll include a dispensation to be fair to individuals with a certified genetic condition?for those few people whose bodies do not produce the hormone that triggers a sense of satiety, for example. All current research indicates that the condition is a rare one. Note to militant NAAFA members: there is no genetic disposition for the enjoyment of ice cream and deep-fried food; that stuff tastes remarkably good to everybody.
The goal of my proposed legislation, ladies and gentlemen, is not to demonize fat people, but rather to rescue our proud nation from a blubbery fate. Whitman has a line that goes: I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. And that's all fine and good, as long as there is not too much of it.