Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West.

By Peter N. Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 1997. xvi plus 294pp. $25.95).

Often, one of the first things French people visiting America remark upon is the large number of fat people they see here. Recently, three months of living in a Paris neighborhood full of stylishly-slim folks made my wife and I feel fatter by the day, even though our weight remained unchanged. Peter Steams' new book says that both of these perceptions are based on reality - Americans are the fattest people in the Western industrial world, while the French are the slimmest - and uses comparative history to try to explain why this is so.

Stearns points out that there is little to choose between the two cultures in terms of weight-consciousness itself. Since the late nineteenth century, urbanization and the rise of sedentary occupations have provided fertile ground in both countries for people urging men and women to lose weight for reasons of fashion and health. In both places a host of commercial interests climbed aboard, although Stearns wisely refuses to endorse one-dimensional indictments of them for the consequent loathing of fat. However, he says, even before World War One, the American path was taking a distinctly moralistic turn, as guilt over rising consumerism and the loosening of sexual strictures created a need for compensatory calls for restraint in eating. In the 1920's, a misogynist aspect emerged, as women became prime objects of the moralizing about fat. He says that the strength of character and will that self-sacrificing dieting was thought to demand thus served as a kind of counterweight to the liberation women were experiencing as child-rearing declined in importance and sexual constraints continued to loosen. The idea that fat people were morally flabby was reinforced after mid-century, as an affluent society and resurgent consumerism renewed the need to rein in over-indulgence. Stearns challenges those who see these slenderness ideals as primarily involving women by emphasizing that they again affected men almost equally.

He then probes the reasons for the striking contrast between these goals and the inability of Americans, who have grown steadily fatter since 1920, to achieve them. While others call the ideals unrealistic and search for nefarious forces propagating them, he points out that the French, whose average weight has fallen, have generally been able to conform to them. Part of the American weight gain, he admits, can be explained on class and ethnic grounds - especially groups such as African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans who, for various reasons, have not bought into dieting. But the rest of the difference, he says, can be accounted for by the histories of the different food cultures. Unlike Americans, the French did not moralize about weight-loss. By remaining committed to slimness solely for beauty and health, they avoided turning weight-control into a monumental struggle of heroic proportions that often ended in abject defeat. The most compelling contrast, though, is in regard to childhood experiences. For much of this century, he says, American parents have been unduly concerned about undernourished children. Regularly succumbing to children's threats not to eat, they have allowed the little tykes to dictate what and when they would eat and have routinely bribed them with fattening snacks. The children have therefore reached adulthood and faced the demands of a society of abundance that they suddenly limit their food intake unequipped to exercise that kind of self-restraint. French children, on the other hand, have been raised to limit eating to meal times and eat the moderate portions set in front of them or go hungry. As adults, then, they have no difficulty moderating their food intake and avoiding fattening snacks. This is reinforced by a food culture that, unlike that in America, has historically linked the pleasures of eating with moderation in doing so.

Stearns' emphasis on factors such as these to explain the American-French differences is convincing. However, his explanation for American moralizing about fat is less so. He provides little solid evidence for his argument that Americans used restraint in food to compensate for the effects of changing gender roles and the rise of consumerism. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what shape historical evidence of this sort might take, for the assertion seems to rest on the assumption that societies are ruled by a kind of zero-sum moral budgeting, with built-in balancing mechanisms to keep them on some presumed even keel. His attempt to explain why the French did not respond to the same changes in gender roles and consumer culture with similar moralizing thus seems rather convoluted. Moreover, it leads him to dismiss the impact America's Protestant heritage on this score rather lightly, even though it is practically impossible to extricate the history of American dietary reform from that of American Protestantism. Finally, on a stylistic note, I am tempted to add that Steams succumbed a bit too readily to the practically-irresistible temptation to use hoary food metaphors in food writing. (One chapter is even entitled "The Fat Is In the Fire.") However, that would inhibit me from saying that there is indeed plenty of food for thought, and a lot to chew on, in this very interesting book.

Harvey Levenstein McMaster University