Sometimes, I hear something
on a news programme that catches me unaware and makes me think: ‘Surely this is
an Ali G spoof?’
It is early Monday morning and 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’.
I look across the breakfast table, and my wife affirms
my suspicion that this must indeed be an Ali G moment. But alas, a few minutes
later, the twenty-first-century equivalent of a Trollope-like, worldly cleric,
the weight-conscious priest Giles Fraser, is on the air to give his ‘thought
for the day’. He, too, is morally weighed down by the problem of body mass. His
little homily on sustainability is on-message in this Ali G world of ours. When
I hear him say that ‘bigger is not always better’, it becomes clear why
theology is in trouble. But when he finishes by saying ‘economic growth is like
getting fat’, I slowly start to realise that this is more than just a bad joke…
There is something deeply troubling about having a professor, followed by a cleric, casually turning the size of the human body into a marker of moral evil. And they weren’t only talking about the weight of humanity in metaphorical terms. The professor and his London-based team have apparently quantified fatness around the globe. According to their calculations, the weight of the global human population stands at 287million tonnes. Of this mass of human fat, 15million tonnes of it is a result of people being overweight and 3.5 million tonnes is a consequence of full-on obesity. Apparently, American fatties bear greatest responsibility for weighing down the planet: the professor’s team says that although Americans only make up six per cent of the global population, they’re responsible for more than a third of the obesity.
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. In other words, if people, especially American
people, hung out at their local Weight Watchers a bit more, then the planet
could be spared the misery and horrors that an extra billion people would bring
it.
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’.
‘Less body mass’ and ‘smaller human footprint’ – those
are the mottos of today’s morally disoriented scaremongers, whose philosophical
and theological outlook continually reduces human life to physical quantities
of biological material and carbon footprints. Those who wish to make us feel
guilty about our bodies should follow through the logic of their depraved
misanthropy, and go whip themselves.
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