Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World
By Greg Critser
Allen Lane, London, 2003
232 pages, $29.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
In a gruesome passage in chapter 10 of the first volume of Capital, Marx wrote of the "incredible adulteration of bread" in Victorian London, and used a report of a Royal Commission of Inquiry to reveal that the London worker "had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients".
In today's free-trade world, the nightmare of food continues (for those lucky enough to get any). In the world's wealthiest country — the US — 61% of the population is sufficiently overweight to suffer health problems as a direct consequence, 20% are medically obese, and 5 million people are morbidly obese (so overweight that they are candidates for stomach-altering surgery). As a result, rates of obesity-related diseases are soaring. These include coronary heart disease, hypertension, gall bladder disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and endometrial cancer.
Obesity is also responsible for gestational diabetes and hypertension during pregnancy (pre-eclampsia), and increases the risk of having a stillborn baby, or a baby with birth defects, spina bifida, or heart malformations. Although it is not a new phenomenon, rates of obesity have risen dramatically since the 1970s. In this highly informative and reader-friendly book, Greg Critser explains the origins of the modern American obesity epidemic, and outlines the role played by corporate America in accelerating and sustaining the country's descent into what he calls "the first circle of fat hell".
In the early 1970s US President Richard Nixon's administration faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the traditional Republican "farm vote" threatened to defect to the Democrats as a result of a nose-dive in farm income. On the other hand, American consumers fumed against soaring food prices and the threat of food shortages. Nixon's secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, had the job of steering the administration through the horns of this dilemma. In order to give the farmers more pricing flexibility, Butz deregulated the farm industry, and in particular exhorted corn growers to plant from "fencerow to fencerow".
This led to corn production soaring to an all-time high, just at the time that Japanese scientists discovered a way to produce a cheaper sweetener than sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. HFCS is not only an inexpensive sweetener: it is used as a preservative in frozen foods and other long-shelf-life products. Butz's deregulatory regime also led to the US being flooded with palm oil, an extremely cheap fat from Malaysia that is more highly saturated than cow fat and also serves as an excellent preservative. The farmers were happy, the American consumer — who could choose from a range of inexpensive convenience foods — was happy, and the scene was set for the great American obesity epidemic.
Critser does a fine job of explaining how the fast-food and soft-drink industries sustain the acceleration of the epidemic. I'll cite just two examples from Critser's painstaking investigation. He gives a detailed account of the profit-driven phenomenon of "supersizing", where the fast-food giants constantly increase the caloric intake of consumers, and their own profits, by continually increasing portion sizes. Critser also explains how HFCS, the main ingredient in soft drinks, plays a pivotal role in causing type 2 diabetes, especially among children. The soft-drink companies exploit cash-strapped public schools via "pouring contracts", deals that give Coca Cola and Pepsi unlimited access to the school population in return for cash payments to the beleaguered schools. The results of this are tangible: fructose consumption today accounts for 20% of the average American child's diet.
Who suffers most? "Poverty. Class. Income. Over and over, these emerge as the key determinants of obesity and weight-related disease," Critser says. He is no socialist though, and Marx doesn't get so much as a mention in the book (Critser actually has a swipe at what he calls the "self-proclaimed 'progressive left'"). His final chapter, on combating the epidemic, is the weakest in the book, and doesn't go far beyond advocating better education and stronger parental control over diet and exercise. Still, despite its limitations, Critser's book could very usefully be read by all socialists and all parents: he does us a great service in painting a vivid picture of the lurid world of McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Coca Cola, and their partners in corporate crimes against human well-being.
From Green Left Weekly, June 2, 2004.
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