Obesity & Attenberg's The Middlesteins

From last week's BBC article "Rise in obesity poses dementia time bomb:"

Ever-growing waistlines could result in a big increase in the number of people who develop dementia in the future, researchers have warned...

Nobody knows exactly what causes dementias such as Alzheimer's disease, but body weight appears to be a risk factor. One study of 8,500 Swedish twins showed that those with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30, who are classified as obese, were almost four times as likely to develop dementia as those with a normal BMI.

For a novel about obesity, try Attenberg's The Middlesteins:

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food--thinking about it, eating it--and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live.

When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle-- a whippet thin perfectionist-- is intent on saving her mother-in-law's life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children's spectacular b'nai mitzvah party.

Through it all, they wonder: do Edie's devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone, or are others at fault, too? With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.

If you'd prefer a young-adult novel, you might like Blubber by Judy Blume:

Sometimes a writer will make a character fat as a political tool, in order to convey their own intended message, be it one of size acceptance, tolerance, or other. This seems most prevalent, logically, in children's books - Judy Blume's Blubber is the strongest example that comes to mind.

Written realistically from the point of view of an average-sized, ordinary child named Jill, Blubber tells the story of the merciless, constant taunting of Jill's obese classmate, Linda. Jill struggles to reconcile her own feelings of guilt and her need to not be cruel with her fear of falling victim to the same cruelty as her overweight peer.

This is one of the few children's books I can think of that deals honestly with the kind of bullying fat (and other noticeably 'different') kids are subject to, and its brutality. Blume makes her point, without coming off as preachy or judgmental or bonking the reader over the head with obvious, overblown clearcut endings.

(The review above is from the excellent essay "The Skinny on Fat in Fiction.")

Back in the News: Ag-Gag Laws & Sinclair's The Jungle

In February I posted about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in relation to the British horse-meat scandal. Now questionable food-production methods are back in the news -- this time in the US.

Here's last week's Washington Times editorial "Ag-gag bills: Criminalizing whistleblowing on factory farms:"

“Ag-gag” bills are laws that criminalize whistleblowing on factory farms. Even though ag-gag bills differ from state to state, they share a few common elements including criminalizing the taking of pictures or video at a factory farms without authorization, banning investigators from taking jobs at factory farms, and compelling mandatory reporting within short timelines that would make it impossible to establish punishable patterns of abuse.

Ag-gag bills have been introduced in Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Iowa and Utah have already passed ag-gag laws...

Why do factory farms, slaughterhouses, meatpacking plants, and livestock ranches want to hide abuse? According to Cody Carlson in a recent piece in The Atlantic, footage and pictures of inhumane treatment (like the 2008 video of a California meatpacking plant’s employees prodding and pushing sick cows into the slaughter pit with forklifts) result in public outcry, plant closures, expensive recalls, heavy fines, and even criminal charges for employees of factory farms.

Unlike Europe, where farmers are protected from being undercut by those who would use inhumane practices, in the U.S. there is no such protection. Honest, humane farmers who treat their animals with dignity cannot compete with large companies that cut the beaks off chickens and use gestation crates where pigs cannot turn around for their entire lives to cut a few cents off their products.

British Horsemeat Scandal & Sinclair's The Jungle

From today's CNBC article "First Burgers, Now Lasagna: Horsemeat Scandal Widens:"

Testing has confirmed that beef lasagna produced by food manufacturer Findus contained horsemeat, Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA) said on Thursday... Investigations into suppliers have been launched in recent weeks after revelations that beef products sold at major British supermarkets including Tesco and fast food chain Burger King contained horsemeat.

Perfect book for this issue? Upton Sinclair's meat-packing classic, The Jungle:

1906 bestseller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page.

(This description is from the book's page on Amazon.)


The book's final three chapters are politically preachy and can safely be skipped. Since the book was published in 1906, it is available free online.