elfs | Death by smoking is a moral failure. Death by obesity, a moral virtue.

Three articles caught my attention this week, only one of them from the news itself. The first, from Joseph Epstien, is entitled The Perpetual Adolescent. I read it because the blurb on Arts & Letters Daily read:

Sooner or later, either a man grows up or he pulls his gray hair back into a pony tail. Fewer Americans now seem able to see the pleasures of adulthood.

Actually, Epstien's essay is a little more direct. Either a man grows up, or he

... goes with the flow and adapts some variant of pulling one's long gray hair back into a ponytail, struggling into the spandex shorts, working on those abs, and ending one's days among the Rip Van With-Its.

I took the bit about the ponytail personally, having just whacked mine. In some respects, I could understand what he was saying about the duty of taking on adulthood. It's a rather elitist, conservative, and fatalistic essay about how life has, as Epstein put it, "A beginning, a middle, and an end," but nowadays people seem to want only the beginning. There's a certain capitulation to Epstein's words, a sense that it's not merely okay but morally virtuous to surrender one's well-being to the ravages of time.

I do recommend you read it. His reasons for why Bill Clinton's encounters with Monica was not an affair are worth the price of admission alone.

The second article came straight from the news. The Personal Responsibility In Food Consumption bill passed by a wide margin, meaning that one can no longer say that "It's Ronald McDonald's fault that I'm fat." The calories passed from hand to mouth, and if the brain didn't intervene that's not the producer's problem.

Now, the FDA wrung its hands and announced that it would be revamping labels again in the hopes that Americans would understand what was at stake when they bought a bag of Doritos. I believe most Americans do understand. They just don't care, or don't see the long-term detriments to overeating because it's not occurring to them as they eat; they don't see the immediate bloating effect. It's over the horizon until they are too fat, and most of us just don't want to fight the habit of access to food.

The third article is Roger Scruton's Eating The World, in which Scruton writes about food from a philosophical point of view. And one of the things he wrote echoed Epstein strongly enough that it deserves quoting:

"There is no respectable reason for wishing not to be fat," wrote Evelyn Waugh... Almost nobody now would agree with Waugh: and yet there is an important truth lurking in his words. There are people who dedicate their lives to dieting. But we do not admire them for it: on the contrary, we regard them as medical cases, candidates for help... dieting is a way of living with the body on intimate and obsessional terms. It is a kind of negative greed.

To those who reply that fat people die younger, Waugh would have replied, "well done them."

Dying young, according to Roger Scruton and Joseph Epstein, can be a moral virtue if you die young for the right reasons. It is self-destructive to smoke or drink yourself to death; but eating to obese proportions is simply the way things should be.

Scruton and Epstien make one crucial, fatal mistake when it comes to food, and it is the Immigration and Naturalization office that points it out. The Immigration and Naturalization service this year printed up thousands of pamphlets for incoming citizens and visitors, advising them about eating. "You may have come from a nation of scarcity, but in America the tastiest, fattiest, most calorie-laden foods are everywhere virtually free, and you have to learn to live in that environment," as the man in charge of putting the pamphlets together said.

Scruton says that "Animals feed; humans eat." And it is that distinction between wolfing down food and civilized dining that makes all the difference. But there is one other difference: animals forage; humans choose. More importantly, humans cook. Scruton also writes,

Of course you should avoid excess. But temperance (as it was traditionally known) is not the same as dieting. Temperance is a way of keeping the body at a distance.

But neither the dieter nor the temperate really appreciate having a body; neither actually takes the body and turns it into sacred space. Traditional "dieting" misunderstands the body and miswants both too much food and the appearance of thinness. Temperance may understand the body all to well-- and seeks to isolate it and reject it. Scruton's paeon to the benefits of "eating well" fail to appreciate just how easy it is to "eat poorly" and still get fat. In a civilization where the average adult needs 2200 calories per day, our agricultural system produces 3800 and must find a way to sell that to make its economics balance in the end.

For the individual, there is a third way and, sadly, it is frightfully boring; so much so most nutritionists have given up repeating it. Have one scoop of ice cream, not three. Drink water, not Coke. Have an orange, not an Egg McMuffin with the syrup sandwiched into the bread. Make every food choice a conscious food choice, done with the full awareness that food is something you appreciate, not merely fuel for the body. That's hard when it's not so dear; but it's also the only way to maintain both one's well-being, and one's hard-earned adulthood.

Because the conservatives are gearing up a new meme, and founding it with their first principles. Let's call it the Silverback meme, after the aging, heavyset gorillas that rule their harems because they have the power. Being fat in your maturity is right and appropriate, because that's what the leaders of a powerful civilization have always done. It's natural, and opposing nature is a loser's game. Silverbacks don't need to look good in old age to attract the chicks; that's what power is for.

Well, maybe so. But it's an ugly way to go, ain't it?

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would suspect that the conservatives are looking for an easy way to kill off people before they use up too much of social security. Now that smoking is on the decline, some other self-destructive behavior needs to be rehabilitated into a virtue. Gluttony seems like a safe one.