Book Review : America and Its Years of Lean and Fat

Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat by Hillel Schwartz (Free Press: $19.95)

“It would be interesting if some student of manners would trace with precision the process whereby what finicking people called ‘en bon point’ came into general discredit. Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion, and almost as a crime.”

This epigraph, taken from an American periodical of 1914, points the way to the task Hillel Schwartz has set himself. The almost incredible fact, Schwartz reminds us about American fat, was that until the turn of the century, fat was not a problem, lean was a problem. . . .

Focuses on America

Although Schwartz reaches back into antiquity for a couple of examples in his history of “Diets, Fantasies and Fat,” the bulk (so to say) of this history concerns America. Our attitude toward food--how we eat it, how we store it, how we attempt to reduce that storage--is part and parcel of how, and with what suspicions, we view the fabled abundance of America.

Here is a country, a society, blessed with a huge surplus, but because human beings are imaginative enough to get anxious about almost anything, we’ve made these huge food surpluses into an insurmountable problem.

In the 19th Century, Schwartz reminds us, our eating neuroses were not cast into some loose formula like: “Everything that tastes good is either fattening or will give you a heart attack, and nobody loves a fat man, and nobody wants to die, therefore we’d better stick to lettuce.” No, at first the most dreaded physical manifestation in America was to be thin. Readers may find this hard to believe, but dredging their own minds for fictional examples in Alcott and Dickens, they will be forced to admit it must be true. Leanness or thinness implied gluttony(!) The lean person who ate too much was unable to digest correctly, and suffered dyspepsia or indigestion--still, judging from American television commercials, the great American disease. If you didn’t digest correctly, leanness implied--get ready for this!--heaviness, dullness, an unattractive body.

During those years before the 20th Century began, “fatness” implied bounciness, lightness, the quality of floating, just as oil floats at the top of French dressing. And--all this seems demented as I write this, but Schwartz backs it up with dozens of printed examples and illustrations--nobody thought about weight at all, because nobody owned scales.

Food Fads

Not that people were sanguine about food, or their bodies, or their bodies’ shapes or the ever-increasing problems of American abundance. Authorities sneered at rich foods (which led to dyspepsia). Graham invented the graham cracker, which he recommended be taken with just a little water. Harriett Beecher Stowe took water cures, which, she said, made her feel incredibly light. A Mr. Fletcher invented Fletcherization, the practice of chewing every bite of food (even milk) 50 times, so that when it hit your stomach, the food would already be digested. (Novelist Henry James fletcherized and declared himself a “fanatic.”) Dyspepsia was cured by visualization techniques, electric massage, polarity massage.

The Scale Arrives

When the scale became an American cultural artifact, the ways of defining our bodies changed. The reader may begin to recognize certain double binds that pertain even today. Babies were weighed and weighed and weighed. Their mothers were encouraged to fret if the baby didn’t gain and gain and gain. (Except for those few physicians who exhorted their patients to keep from overnourishing babies.) But the gaining baby soon turned into a plump tot--an object of horror and a lifetime-worry to his parents and himself. Nobody loves a fat boy! (Why, then, did they stoke his baby furnace with so much caloric fuel? Just because.)

By mid-century, “diet foods” began to flood the market. The older reader may recall with a nostalgic twinge Metrecal and Sego, recall the pounds lost and gained on cans of that unappetizing glop. Machines came in to jiggle the fat away: where are the Slenderella Salons of yesteryear? Or those Stauffer platforms that jiggled and buzzed, and if you lay on one for just 40 minutes a day, you were sure to lose--well, something, anyway?

Encyclopedic Listings

Schwartz is encyclopedic in his listings of devices, diets, methods, gadgets. (He does, however, overlook the Moxley Massage Pillow of the middle ‘50s, which you could take with you to the office.) And except for reporting a few deaths--from drugs by which you could lose 13 pounds a week until your body just keeled over), Schwartz never denounces anything--pills, hormones, exercise regimens--any of it. You keep reading to discover if anything works.

Finally you begin to get the point. Yes, you can control abundance. Anorexics do it every day. Jane Fonda does it. But why? In 1979 the Society of Actuaries issued new “ideal weights” revising those “ideal weights” upward. Weight Watchers, Diet Work Shop and the American Heart Assn. repudiated these new figures, which implied that it might be more healthy not to be thin. Again, why? A neurotic terror of abundance, Schwartz insists, and labels Fonda’s fitness preoccupations especially as an expiation of the American role in Vietnam.

All this is written in a laconic, slow-burn style until the last few pages, where Schartz finally lashes out at diets that are “subtle forms of sadism, calling for a grim, dour self-punishment.” What if this were a fat society, he queries, with scrumptious dinners, where “abundance would be a quality of life rather than a test of appetite?” Now that the thin culture has--Schwartz postulates--almost literally run itself into a blank wall, we may have a chance to find out.