TracyFood

About obesity: getting started. 7 October 2009 2:42 pm

Posted by Tracy in : food snobbery,health,health at every size,history,responsibility,school , trackback

I’m thinking about making a little comic called “Obesity: the big picture” (pun most certainly intended, and it will not be the last) because lately school has me reading a lot about how fat we’re all getting (or already are) and it seems like whenever I read more than a paragraph on the subject, it’s only a matter of time before I start trying to graph something. It would seem that this math nerd could graduate herself out of engineering school, but she can’t or won’t stop trying to hyperanalyze data, even if it’s just to say that the data aren’t very good. Anyway.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted:

This semester’s food studies are shaping up to be very fat studies-focused. Should be heck of educational in all sorts of ways. Whee? Eek?

3:47 PM Sep 15th from txt

and my Twitter forwards to Facebook, where I ended up expanding on the topic (the puns, I tell you, they just keep coming):

Fat is delicious. And I am totally talking about body shape-type fat, because I’m taking both policy and sociology this term and anticipate a lot of ranting about how maybe healthy food and exercise are good for everyone, not just fatties, and may or may not have any effect on body shape and/or size, and that’s okay as long as everybody’s happy and healthy, dammit.

Few things make me foaming-at-the-mouth cranky like the use of “fat” or “obese” or “overweight” as a synonym for “unhealthy.” Confusing correlation and causation, however, is on the list, as are issues of personal versus social responsibility, oh yes. So I’ve got a lot to rant about this semester, and maybe illustrate, too. Right now, however, I’m off to campus to work on my application for the New York City Council’s Health and Food Policy Analyst internship. Stay tuned.