Fat is a Historian's Issue

Obesity is our obsession. Most societies, for most of history, esteemed fat bodies and fat diets. The fat were rich, the thin, poor. Now – for the first time ever – it is the other way round: you can never, said the Duchess of Windsor, ‘be too rich or too thin’. But why, in the late nineteenth century, did opinion-makers start overvaluing thinness and excoriating fat?

 

Long-term hostility to fatness built up gradually in the Western tradition; but why did it cross a critical threshold in the late nineteenth century? Dietetics and couture created demand for thinness; but the capitalists who promoted it were following, not creating, demand. As men lost their ability to force women into corsets, they encouraged them in diets; but what made men want thin women? Physicians increasingly saw fat as a threat to health; but on the whole, medical opinion followed aesthetic trends, rather than leading them.
 
The real explanation, I suggest, lies in the history of the global environment in the nineteenth century: in particular in two revolutions of the time: a fat revolution, and a food revolution.