Obesity Warriors Show Their Puritanical Colors
From this morning's Hartford Courant opinion page.
Late one night at a convenience store in Hartford's South End, I found myself standing behind an obese young mother and her overweight son. She was buying cigarettes, Pepsi, candy and potato chips — and nothing else.
I may be a liberal, but I had to wrestle down a visceral urge to rip those things from her hands and admonish her sternly for the terrible things she was doing to her body and that of her child's.
To be fair, the author of the piece ends by saying he'd prefer to empower that obese young mother with knowledge, but that in and of itself is pretty damn condescending, as if no one would be obese unless they were just too stupid to know better.
With health care an ever present topic in the public discourse, obesity has become the social problem du jour. What's truly frightening is the attitude .. how many out there see us fat folks and just want to knock the food from our hands and tell us to live healthy, damn it. I'm becoming more and more convinced that food warriors are the new Puritans and fat people are the sinners in need of saving. It's just funny that the same generation that gave us the sexual revolution are returning to our puritanical roots where it comes to food.
Late one night at a convenience store in Hartford's South End, I found myself standing behind an obese young mother and her overweight son. She was buying cigarettes, Pepsi, candy and potato chips — and nothing else.
I may be a liberal, but I had to wrestle down a visceral urge to rip those things from her hands and admonish her sternly for the terrible things she was doing to her body and that of her child's.
To be fair, the author of the piece ends by saying he'd prefer to empower that obese young mother with knowledge, but that in and of itself is pretty damn condescending, as if no one would be obese unless they were just too stupid to know better.
With health care an ever present topic in the public discourse, obesity has become the social problem du jour. What's truly frightening is the attitude .. how many out there see us fat folks and just want to knock the food from our hands and tell us to live healthy, damn it. I'm becoming more and more convinced that food warriors are the new Puritans and fat people are the sinners in need of saving. It's just funny that the same generation that gave us the sexual revolution are returning to our puritanical roots where it comes to food.
posted by lonely libertarian at 9:30 AM
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