A new veterans’ cemetery is being built about 20 miles from where I live. The entire periphery of the enormous landscape will be reserved for bodies that are too large to fit in the normal vaults. It’s just one small example of something we all know: Americans are hideously fat.

Obesity in America is not simply the result of environmental forces, as is so often argued. It also comes from an immoral approach to food, to the body and to daily living. The eating habits of vast numbers of Americans are a dangerous and costly rebellion against nature itself. It’s as if a third of America is killing itself slowly and as if our most valuable natural resource is being willfully trashed.

Commonly referred to as the “obesity epidemic,” as if weight gain is comparable to the bubonic plague, obesity in adults has increased by 60 percent in the last 20 years and tripled in children in the last 30 years. About two-thirds of Americans are overweight and about 30 percent are officially obese. These statistics, however, do not capture the full horror of the phenomenon.

I was in a large supermarket about an hour from my home the other day and could barely believe the extent of the physical disability I saw. Most of the shoppers were middle or lower-middle class. Many had that look of salt-of-the-earth decency that is common outside the city. About a fifth of the people were so hobbled by their weight they could barely walk. I saw at least seven obese women riding motorized carts, several others with walkers and relatively young women carrying canes. Many people in the store wore enormous inner tubes of flesh –  flowing, molten layers and pouches that could not be concealed by any fabric except possibly pup tents. They had that characteristic walk of the obese, where the feet do not seem to move forward, but sideways. One could only glimpse their bodies to know that obesity is a systemic disorder, affecting almost everything: the respiratory system, the heart, the metabolism, the bones.

Obesity is clearly more prevalent among the middle class and the poor. In very affluent suburbs and parts of the city, there is relatively little of it. There is probably a lower incidence of the genetic predisposition to weight gain among the well-off in the first place. They are partly well-off  because they are attractive, but clearly their eating habits involve far less convenience food and more fruits and vegetables. They also exercise more and can afford fancy running shoes and health club memberships.

I know a woman who is about ten pounds over her ideal weight.She claims she is the fattest person in her suburban town of about 30,000. Her statement shows another factor that is prevalent among the affluent: There is shame attached to being fat.  It’s generally considered déclassé.

Those sophisticated suburbanites are thin with relative ease though it does require some discipline for most. They benefit from a pervasive anti-fat ethic; expensive and wholesome convenience foods; and a climate of healthy habits. It’s not that they deserve no credit for staying in shape, but generally it’s not a moral triumph. Many people in these places suffer from another form of gluttony: the glorification of healthy food and of the body in general. They have their own form of dietary excesses; they just look a lot better.

Are these people, with their intelligence and easier living conditions, morally superior to their fat brethren? No, they are not. But that does not mean that the less affluent are absolved from responsibility for their condition. Not at all. Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.

The less affluent are surrounded by temptation. Convenience foods are abundant and cheap and stimulating. Many children live on pizza, pasta and soda. It’s all been said a million times. What is less often said is this. The greatest temptation these foods provide is the opportunity to have very little to do with food. The middle class and poor in America have something they didn’t have in the past: They can eat without work. They can eat without thinking about food in advance. They can live a disembodied life.

This separation from their own corporeal state, as much as the caloric content of convenience foods, and a life of watching television dooms many of them to becoming human whales. It’s a progressive phenomenon. After a while, many obese people seem to lose all connection between mind and body. They just keep on eating what makes them sick and don’t even feel it. The decision to embrace ease dehumanizes them.

My husband grew up in a working-class community where almost no one was obese and those who were overweight were rare enough to face frequent ridicule. That was years go, but these people did not possess exceptional self-control or intelligence. Today, Americans are removed from food preparation like never before. The departure of women from the home sealed this trend. This factor is mysteriously almost never mentioned in the press reports about the “obesity epidemic.” Americans had convenience foods fifty years ago, but they still ate most of their food at home.

Feminism is a very significant factor in the trashing of the American body. Whether you think women have to work or believe more could drop out of the workforce if they wanted, it doesn’t matter. Leave your ideology aside. The fact is, the absence of women from the home is making themselves and their families ill. The belief that healthy convenience food or healthy restaurants may someday take the place of home cooking and keep weight down is a pipe dream. It’s the convenience itself that is the problem, regardless of what is served.

Study after study shows that dieting alone does not work for most people. That’s because dieting often simply encourages this passivity toward food preparation. People give themselves over to low-fat convenience foods or gimmicks, rather than taking control of their food. I was in a doctor’s office last week when I overheard the very heavy receptionist deciding what she would order from the local deli. She wanted something in keeping with her diet. She chose a broccoli cream soup. Couldn’t she have brought a couple of hard-boiled eggs from home?

The single most important way for people to control their weight is to make everything they eat – and that means everything – in their own homes and to eschew every form of convenience food except bread. If they want a potato chip, they should make a potato chip – from scratch. The cook James Beard was plump, but most fat people today do not live this way.

It’s interesting that the experts so overwhelmingly favor public policy changes that do not involve this emphasis on home cooking when the figures so clearly show that weight has increased as people, and especially women, make food less.

Americans are also constantly fed the lie that our fatness is the inevitable outcome of evolutionary forces. This Time magazine article is a good example. We cannot restrain our weight because we hunger for high-fat food as much as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, or so the argument goes. We are the victims of sedentary living.

But restraint is as much a part of human nature as appetite. If that were not so, many prosperous societies would have succumbed from sheer weight gain. We are not the only people in history to live with abundance. We are not the only ones who could sit all day if we chose. Yes, only the rich could do so in previous times, but almost all people are born with the capacity to restrain themselves, train their habits and adjust the way they live. It can be very difficult, similar to taking control of alcoholism for some. Some people may only find restraint through divine assistance. That makes sense. Over-eating is a spiritual problem, sometimes a frenzied, nihilistic avoidance of mortality. Gluttony is one of the seven capital sins. If we had more wide-bodied confessionals, would we need those wide-bodied graves? There is a reason fasting is a spiritual exercise.

The obese should pay higher health insurance premiums; it’s only fair. Higher taxes on convenience foods make sense too, as do restrictions on television commercials, which are to eating what pornography is to sex. These things may happen as the astronomical costs mount, but don’t hold your breath. There is a vast constituency that benefits off America’s unrestrained appetite.

Even though personal responsibility is decisive, people could be educated. They could learn that the dream of ease is an illusion. There is no escape from the demands nature imposes. Only the wealthy can eat well without spending a good portion of their days shopping for food and standing at cutting boards, chopping and mincing. Many people have lost the immense pleasure to be had in these activities and the sense of mastery obtained from making and growing food.

This lethargy shows on their faces. They open up jars of spaghetti and boil pasta. They are unfamiliar with the liberation that comes with losing all dependence on prepared food and with saying good bye to restaurants. The rewards are physical and spiritual. If people believe feminism and economics have forced women to abandon this essential job of food preparation and all the rewards that go with it, they should say so.

 The supermarket I visited recently was surrounded by Amish farms, though relatively few of the customers were Amish. Although many Amish women are slightly plump (they have many children), I have never seen a fat Amish child or a grotesquely obese Amish adult. Most of the children are stringy. Farm work and their rejection of modern transportation obviously are major factors, but I don’t believe they are all. The Amish eat almost all of their food at home or from home. They don’t do this to consciously keep thin. It’s a way of life.

One also suspects they have a more spiritual view of the body and don’t see it as a vehicle that propels them from here to there. Their way of life honors the body in the same way their farming honors the soil. It is a sin to deface nature.  The body is a temple. To despoil the habitat that houses our souls is in a real way a civic violation. It creates a pervasive atmosphere of contempt for one central and sacred aspect of human nature.

[See responses from readers to this article here, here and here.]                                                                                                       

Rose writes:

Bravo on this post. I am just wondering what you happen to think of Screwtape’s view that gluttony is connected to sexual indulgence:

“Mere excess in food is much less valuable than delicacy. Its chief use is as a kind of artillery preparation for attacks on chastity. On that, as on every other subject, keep your man in a condition of false spirituality. Never let him notice the medical aspect. Keep him wondering what pride or lack of faith has delivered him into your hands when a simple enquiry into what he has been eating or drinking for the last twenty-four hours would show him whence your ammunition comes and thus enable him by a very little abstinence to imperil your lines of communication.”

Laura writes:

Please follow and like us: