No - 7 The Fatuous History of Fat Shaming
Guest article by Jessica Matthews, part time medical historian and writer
Tldr
Through out most of our history, a person carrying extra fat was seen as being healthy and prosperous. It is only in the relatively recent past that being fat has become a reason for shame. As a health professional I can not advocate that people should be over-weight, but I agree with Jess that fat shaming is not help and is a modern puritanical phenomenon.
Don’t rile the medical historian!
I recently visited Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, and yes it was as spooky as it sounded and a very good trip. I would highly recommend it if you’re in the Alnwick area. However, I got into an altercation with one of the guides who was on his high horse (ironic, as there was a literal stuffed horse next to him) about ‘things were better in the good old days’.
The particular inciting sentence was after my husband had lifted a medieval mace, and proclaimed it ‘pretty heavy’. The guide went into a decently historically accurate description of medieval weapons, and then proclaimed the hefty sentence ‘of course there weren’t any fat people in the medieval era, unlike nowadays’. I had to hand my novelty bat umbrella from the gift shop to my husband, so I could unleash the full force of my smart arsery. You’re messing with a medical historian bab, strap in.
The pervading idea that people were healthier in the past is, frankly, so stupid that it bears examination. I think these people must imagine the medieval era as similar to one of Disney’s princess films, where every woman has a Barbie doll waist, every man isn’t covered in smallpox scars, and everypiece of abundant fruit is rosy and delicious. The truth is that, much like Disney, there’s a lot more poison than apple in this idea.
As a peasant farmer (which you would have been in that era, let’s not pretend we’d all have been Lords and Ladies), you would have been limited to what you could grow and swap with your neighbours. During a good harvest you would probably have a decent range of vegetables, and some meat if you were lucky enough to have animals. You might have had milk and cheese, and the water was unpurified so you’d probably have been drinking very weak beer all the time. This means you’re fairly stocky if you’re lucky. Both men and women manually worked, so you’d have been reasonably strong but also have pretty serious joint and back issues if you lived long enough. The fact that women during the World War put on a dress size is key here: even if you’re eating a lot of veg and unprocessed food, you’re usually not thin. You’re probably not obese, but if you’re lucky you have a good layer of fat to power you through long working hours and help you stave off disease. Some people are going to be pretty fat anyway, either because they have plenty of food (looking atyou here monks), or because that’s how their body works. Fatness was neither rare nor remarkable in the past.
“The scarcity of food throughout most of history had led to connotations that being fat was good, and that corpulence and increased “flesh” were desirable as reflected in the arts, literature, and medical opinion of the times.”
Eknoyan, G. ‘A History of Obesity, or How What Was Good Became Ugly and Then Bad’, https://www.ackdjournal.org/article/S1548-5595%2806%2900106-6/fulltext
Now, if the harvest is bad, you’re probably starving, or at the very least living off a small amount of the few crops that have survived. In Baldrick’s fantasy you might be subsisting entirely on turnips for an entire winter, so quickly the health issues and diseases mount up. Disease, even during the good times, is likely to kill you at any moment, and before the absence of modern medicine your odds are not good. Please tell me which part of this is sounding attractive?
Even if we pretend you’re a nobleman, you wouldn’t have been eating vegetables at all until the late 18th century because they were seen as ‘commoners’ food’, and thought to bepoisonous for anyone with a delicate constitution. You’d almost certainly have excruciating gout from the wine, cheese, and game that you ate at most meals. You might get out for a bit of exercise on your horse every now and again, but a lot of your time would have been spent sat down looking through estate papers, eating, or socialising. You might have had the unparalleled delight of being at William the Conqueror’s funeral, where the body was too large to fit into the tomb, and so rancid and filled with putrefying gasses that he exploded. If we move forward a little to the Tudor era you now also have an abundance of sugar, so you’re potentially the size of Henry VIII in his latter years with the teeth of Good Queen Bess (black and rotting, thanks for asking).
So what exactly is my point here? Well I suppose it’s that assuming the past is some bygone beacon of health is ridiculous and potentially harmful. The idea that fat people are unnatural and somehow a modern phenomenon is ridiculous, and leads to prejudice. I’m not denying that many modern foods are bad for us, or that some are nutrient poor, or that being very fat can be damaging to your health. But we live in a society where we have unparalleled access to food and medicine compared to any time in our history, and it’s unsurprising that some of us still have an internal medieval peasant saying ‘eat all the food now before the harsh Winter comes!’.
I could go on and on about why the BMI is an extremely bad measure (it was supposed to be applied to populations, never to individuals, maybe another article for me Jake?), or why both fatness and illness in the past have been held up as something to work towards (a spot of beautiful tuberculosis for the Victorian woman), but that’s quite enough for one article. If you take away anything from this, it’s that fatness in history was common because it’s a reasonably normal state for the human body. Whatever you believe about fatness, it’s not a modern construction. Oh, and I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t have wanted to live in the medieval era Mister Tour Guide, because you’d be dead from disease, or potentially a mace to the face.
Okay so I didn’t actually say this all the guide. It would have been a petty and mean thing to do, he was just a middle agedman who liked battle axes and thought things were better when he was a lad. On that note, he also said ‘children never play outside these days’, which if you’ve ever been outside and had eyes you’ll know to be a load of bollocks. But anyway, I wasn’t going to spoil our nice day out at Chillingham by potentially wrestling him, especially when there were so many weapons to hand.
Thank you very much for reading, and thank you to Jake for having me as a guest writer. I hope I can come back some time!