One Man's Motto: The Family That Eats Together Stays Slim Together

The Age

Saturday February 16, 2008

Daniella Miletic

WHEN health journalist Greg Critser wrote a book about how Americans became the fattest people on the planet, he braced himself for a backlash.

He was proved right when fat-rights groups said he was prejudiced and dubbed him the "Hitler of Chub". One person even threatened to sit on him.

"One of them wrote to me and said, 'I know where you live and if I see you, I am 300 pounds (136 kilograms) and I am going to sit on you,"' he recalls.

Critser, who has been writing about the obesity epidemic for a decade, says there is an assumption that talking about being fat stigmatises people.

In his book, Fat Land, he writes that as well as genes and environment, obesity also results from personal choices and behaviour.

"Behaviour is really the way that we mitigate environmental risk, but no one likes to talk about that because it throws responsibility back on the individual and that makes everybody uncomfortable."

Critser says he realised it was time for him to lose weight when his doctor called to offer a weight-loss drug unprompted and when a passing cyclist called him a "fatty".

Shortly after those incidents, he saw an obese man in hospital recovering from heart surgery. "It was really in that moment, in the glaring white light of the medical system, that I realised the subject I was pursuing light-heartedly and personally was really a public health and safety issue."

In his past work, Critser has explored the relationship between weight and class, arguing that obesity disproportionately affects the lower classes, while public issues and polices are mainly driven by the upper classes.

"For a long time the weight problem that people focused on was anorexia, and the reason for that is because anorexia inhabits a specific social address - and that is rich, upper-class women."

He says Americans and Australians have erratic lifestyles that encourage eating out and pull people away from the family table.

Critser will be giving a free talk about the importance of returning to the dining table when he comes to Melbourne next week as part of the city's Taste of Slow food festival.

"You must find a way to return the family to the dinner table," he said from Texas yesterday. "And that may mean that your kids are not going to be these super-performing kids that go to soccer one night and ballet the next. It's more important for the family to eat together. We know that the dinner table is a fundamentally important social institution, and that with its decline comes all kinds of problems. Eating together is one thing in this whole stew of problems that the individual can do."

The food festival will include a series of free talks at BMW Edge, Federation Square. It runs from Friday to March 8.

LINK

? www.atasteofslow.com.au