all right

Occasionally adding corroborative details to add verisimilitude to otherwise bald and unconvincing,
but veridicous accounts
with careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination.

07 June, 2012

People Are Too Fat, So Let’s Ban Cheap Food & Drinks!


By way of Fat Head; see also the trailer for “Fat Head”:


UPDATE (20 June):  see Frank Furedi, “The moralistic, Malthusian war against fat people”:
[A] professor from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, holding forth on the danger that human beings’ weight gain presents to the survival of the planet.  ‘Having a heavy body is like driving a Range Rover’, he argues, with passion and conviction.  Before you can even catch your breath, he is warning of the catastrophic things that will occur when ‘we are all as fat’ as people in America.  After lecturing listeners about the need to factor people’s ‘body mass’ into all debates about the environment, he pauses and then reminds us again that fatness is an ‘ecological not just a health concern’.  […]
This degraded depiction of human beings is really about morally indicting people for the original sins of eating and breeding.  These days we are told that eating too much is as bad as having too many children.  So the professor’s report on global gluttony claims that increasing levels of fatness around the world have the same impact on global resources as an extra billion people would.  […]
Sadly, it isn’t only small groups of scaremongers who have a tendency to present people’s eating and breeding habits as the cause of catastrophes to come.  The current targeting of people’s allegedly immoral body mass coincides with the Rio+20 conference, the latest UN gathering to discuss sustainability, where the key argument doing the rounds is that human salvation will require a significant restraint of the breeding and consumption behaviour of human beings.  This is a very fashionable prejudice these days. Indeed, on the eve of the Rio+20 conference, 105 science academies issued a statement warning that a failure to tackle population growth and overconsumption would have ‘potentially catastrophic implications for human wellbeing’.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The fat people in the video seem pretty thin compared the usual lot around here.