Fat Is Phat, or, In Defense of Lard-Ass Americans

From the always-interestin' Spiked, a piece by Daniel Ben-Ami that chews over why so many people hate fat Americans:

Overweight Americans represent, in caricatured form, the affluence of US society. They are the personification of a society in which scarcity, if not eliminated, has become marginalised. Yet we live in a world in which consumption is seen as a problem and the possibility of creating a better society is seen as unrealistic.

By focusing on fat Americans the critics of consumption are saying, implicitly at least, that people should consume less. They are arguing for a world in which Americans become more like those who live in the poorer countries of the world. From such a perspective equality means levelling everyone down rather than raising the living standards of the poor. It means giving up on the battle to resist hurricanes or to reclaim land from the sea.

Yet implementing such a viewpoint is a super-size mistake. Our aspiration for the world should be to give the poor the advantages of affluence enjoyed by those in the West. Living standards in countries such as Ethiopia and Niger should be, at the very least, as high as those in America today. In that sense we should all aim to be fat Americans.

Whole thing here.

Reason grokked chubsy-ubsyism here, here, and here.