At a conference in Wellington over the past two days academics have anguished over the plight of fat people. They called their subject "Fat Studies" They regarded fat people as victims not of their own appetite nor, for once, of corporate fast food chains, but of the public health campaigns that are supposed to help them.
The campaigns portrayed such people as "enemies of the state", according to one speaker. The anti-obesity message, she said, was a form of "class war" against the poorest in society. "From government policy to media reports, fat is everywhere figured as a threat to individual, national, global health in physical, moral and economic terms."
She said fatness had featured as a concern to medicine for centuries but it was only quite recently that obesity had been defined as a disease in itself, though that status was contested. Research consistently found obesity most prevalent among the poor and disadvantaged yet the resulting campaigns concentrated on changing the habits of those at risk and did nothing to address their poverty.
The anti-obesity drive was blamed on "neoliberal ideologies" of the 1980s, which makes a change. Free market thinking is normally accused of contributing to obesity since it generally resists the restrictions that health regulators would like to place on fatty food and its promotion.
But it is coincidentally true that public health became a strident political project - expressed in new measures against smoking and for screening against some forms of cancer - at the same time that the economy was being rapidly exposed to competitive markets. That era also brought a new sensitivity in language that came to be called political correctness.
