Rumbles, page 20
Today advocates of diets like the Paleo (consume only what would have been available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors), the Atkins (eat as much protein as you like) and the Keto (reduce intake of starchy foods to such a degree that the body enters a state of ‘ketosis’ and begins burning fat for fuel) cite Letter on Corpulence as the foundational text for the low-carb movement and claim its author as an early pioneer in the battle against bread. Yet while it is possible to see this account as a triumphal tale of slimming success, a more ambiguous reading is also possible. From his characterisation of obesity as the most ‘distressing’ of ‘all the parasites that afflict humanity’ to the anxious insistence that his ‘corpulence and subsequent obesity was not through neglect of necessary bodily activity, nor from excessive eating, drinking, or self-indulgence of any kind’, it is clear that Banting was made to feel deeply ashamed of his body.257 In one particularly moving passage he recalled the experience of negotiating the city as a fat person:
I am confident no man labouring under obesity can be quite insensible to the sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious in public assemblies, public vehicles, or the ordinary street traffic; nor to the annoyance of finding no adequate space in a public assembly if he should seek amusement or need refreshment, and therefore he naturally keeps away as much as possible from places where he is likely to be made the object of the taunts and remarks of others.258
Rather than read Letter on Corpulence as a record of marvellous dietary innovation, it might be better understood as a moving personal account of what it is like to inhabit a body that the society around you holds in contempt. What disturbs the hardworking Banting most, that his fleshiness might be interpreted as evidence of laziness, speaks to the way that fatness and morality seem to be fatally entangled with one another. This association has a long history. From Galen’s assertion that ‘it is truest of all that a full stomach does not beget a fine mind’ to the early Christians who condemned corpulence as an impediment to spirituality, from the eighteenth-century moralists who worried at the impact of excess weight on the capacity for rational thought to the twentieth-century military recruiters who condemned modern man as too soft of both mind and of belly, body size has long been interpreted as a negative outward reflection of a person’s character.259 Weight gain was a dreaded ‘calamity’ for Banting not only because of the physical difficulties it might present, but also because ‘one so afflicted is often subject to public remark’.260 And conversely, losing weight meant reclaiming his place as a respected and valued member of society.
Which raises the question: what exactly are diets for? Borrowing the term ‘gastropolitics’ from the American food historian Frederick Kaufman, who uses it to describe how ‘our understanding of virtue and vice, success and failure, has long been expressed in the language of appetite, consumption, and digestion’, this chapter examines the complicated politics of dietary advice.261 From the medieval physicians who prescribed foods based on their patients’ humoral composition, to the seventeenth century where Roger Crab was advocating raw food as a path to God, to the Victorian vegetarians who touted the meat-free lunch as a cure for indigestion, the subject of diet has recurred throughout this curious history of the gut. Picking up some of these dropped threads, this chapter will examine the political resonances of the diet to better understand the muddying of corpulence with character that so tortured Banting. The first meaning of the word ‘diet’ given in the Oxford English Dictionary has nothing to do with food. Derived from the Middle English dyete and the Latin dieta, up until the early seventeenth century the term was often used to describe a way of thinking or a mode of life.262 So in ‘The Tale of Beryn’, one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s last Canterbury Tales published at the end of the fourteenth century, the merchant pilgrim optimistically imagines that ‘Ech day our diete Shall be mery & solase’, and John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century poem The Dietary – which urged that ‘Moderate fode gyffes to man hys helthe/ And all surfytys do fro hym remeve’ – offered advice that was more moral than medical.263 Though this particular usage eventually fell out of favour, today the word retains some of its original meaning: when we diet we are transforming our lives as well as our bodies, elevating control at the kitchen table as a supreme act of will capable of revolutionising every aspect of our existence, and imagining that by taming the belly we might become better people. At stake here is what Michel Foucault described as ‘technologies of the self’, namely the advocacy of individual responsibility and bodily discipline as essential to personal hygiene, civic virtue and the maintenance of the national body.264 Along similar lines, this chapter examines dietary advice as not only a means of disciplining the body, but also a way to control or reform society. Determining what we should eat is also about articulating what kind of society we want to live in, what we want it to look like, on whom we bestow citizenship and who we wish to exclude.
Until now Rumbles has mainly thought about ‘the gut’ as an interior confederacy of liver, stomach, oesophagus, gallbladder, pancreas, small and large intestine, but the term is just as commonly used to describe an exterior feature of the body: the fleshy middle, the tummy, the paunch, the belly, the breadbasket, the bay window, the feed box, kyte (Scots), bedaine (French) and bol’shoy zhivot (Russian). Whatever you call it, today the abdomen is the target of a booming industry dedicated to firming and flattening it. Alongside books like Flat Belly Diet! (2008), The Lose Your Belly Diet (2016), Zero Belly Diet (2014) and 21-Day Tummy Diet Cookbook (2014), it is now possible to buy supplements that are ‘specially formulated’ to reduce bloating, detoxifying teas that supposedly target belly fat and cold-pressed vegetable juices to take the place of stomach-expanding solid foods. Many of the most recent weight-loss plans call on cutting-edge research into the microbiome for scientific support. As we have seen, today scientists working in several different fields – endocrinology, metabolomics, physiology – are exploring the role that microbial cells in the intestinal tract might play in governing appetite, setting metabolic pace and regulating blood sugar levels.265 Most attention has been paid, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the possible connection between the presence of certain bacteria and an individual propensity to obesity. Several studies have raised the tantalising possibility that the gut might hold the secret to easy and sustainable weight loss. In one experiment, undertaken by endocrinologists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a small group of patients classified as medically ‘obese’ were given capsules to swallow that contained the faeces of slim volunteers, to test whether transplanted gut bacteria from their skinnier compatriots had any impact on the metabolism of the test subjects.266 These ‘faecal microbiota transplants’, a version of which we came across in Letchworth Garden City, were administered with the hope of increasing insulin sensitivity and creating a more diverse gut flora in the recipient. That the results of this study and others like it proved largely inconclusive did not prevent a flurry of wild speculation as to the miraculous possibilities of bacteriotherapy: the Daily Mail predicted that soon we will all be following ‘personalised diet plans […] tailored to the microbiome’, the Guardian featured articles on ‘Seven Ways to Boost Your Gut Health’ and the rise of ‘Super Poo’, while the Independent reported that the secret to weight loss lay with ‘testing your gut bacteria’.267 Long maligned as the source of unwanted fat, the belly is now imagined as the key to achieving a slimmer physique.
At first glance it appears that the dissemination of research into the microbiome and the popularisation of ideas about microbial health may have helped to institute an approach to dieting far removed from the punitive regimes of the past. Out with tasteless sugar-free snacks, calorie counting and portion control, in with nurturing your biome, cultivating good bacteria and eating in harmony with the needs of the digestive system. However, on closer inspection this new health orthodoxy is underpinned by a familiar set of assumptions concerning the ideal body and the moral qualities required to achieve it. For one, a ‘gut healthy’ diet – like any other diet – involves closely monitoring and restricting consumption, exercising self-control and resisting indulgence. Most pressingly, the fat body must still be avoided at all costs. In 2016 newspapers reported with horror on a study which suggested that obesity might be contagious.268 Biologists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute discovered that spores produced by bacteria in the gut could survive outside of the body and might be passed to those around us.269 While the researchers responsible emphasised the benefits of their discovery – how it would make genome sequencing easier and deepen our understanding of gastric illnesses – what made headlines was the terrifying prospect that, as one article put it, ‘spores of bacteria from the guts of fat people could spread to healthy individuals’.270 Not only is the soft belly apparently an offence to the eye, it is also a storehouse of chubby bacteria that threaten to undermine the hard-won svelteness of others. The spectre of contagion raised here reveals how, even in seemingly neutral discussions of diet-induced bacteria like Clostridium, Faecalibacterium and Eubacterium, the fat body emerges as an object of disease and disgust.
This perception is, as cultural theorists Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco have argued, ‘not natural’, but rather a ‘function of our historical and cultural positioning in a society that benefits from the marginalization of fat people’.271 One of the sites where this marginalisation is felt most acutely is, according to many activists and theorists, in therapeutic settings.272 Today to be overweight is to be subject to intense clinical scrutiny and even tacit disapproval, but fatness has not always been thought of as a medical problem or even as a problem at all. According to the doctrine of the four humours, body weight was dictated by an individual’s peculiar balance of yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. Those of a phlegmatic temperament, in whom the colder, wetter elements predominated, were thought to be generally plumper than those of, say, a more choleric nature who, being dominated by hot, dry forces, were more likely to be thin. Either way, at least until the late sixteenth century an individual’s physique was most commonly viewed as an expression of the same interior forces that dictated everything from hair colour and face shape to their emotional style and dominant personality traits. Fat was, in other words, not in itself necessarily always a problem. In some it might indicate a humoral imbalance, but in others it might be taken as evidence of good health; physicians were as likely to warn against eating too little as they were to inveigh against eating too much.
This began to change, as food historian Ken Albala has argued, around the middle of the seventeenth century when the medical profession first began to establish ‘fat’ as a distinct pathology. The reasons for this shift were complex: new chemical and mechanical discoveries in the field may have had a part to play, or perhaps, as Albala conjectures, it was simply the ‘first time that enough people in one area had enough expendable income to seek a cure, making obesity a lucrative medical specialty and the object of medical controversy’.273 Whether the result of deepening knowledge of the body or evidence of blatant profiteering, by the end of the eighteenth century corpulence had been successfully rebranded as not only a problem, but more importantly as a problem that could only be solved by the intervention of a knowledgeable physician. Where the belly had once been open to multiple conflicting interpretations – evidence of sinful gluttony or a fantastic display of wealth, an object of erotic fascination or a freakish spectacle – increasingly it came to be seen solely through the eyes of medical men.
Such was the medical community’s growing obsession with portliness that by the publication of Cursory Remarks on Corpulence; or, Obesity Considered as a Disease in 1816, its author William Wadd was able to fill over a hundred pages with the proliferation of theories as to its ‘causes and cure’ as advocated by his fellow doctors. The advice gathered by Wadd, who was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and one of George IV’s personal physicians, begins with the commonplace injunction to eat less and exercise more, but quickly moves out into less familiar territory.274 One doctor prescribes drinking Castile soap mixed with lime water, another recommends consuming only over-salted meat and water to ‘render fat more fluid’, while another holds resolutely to the ancient practice of bloodletting.275 Horse-riding, hot baths, sleeping less and talking faster are also posited as potential aids to weight loss. Not only does there appear to be little consensus as to the best method for removing fat, but the experts canvassed in Cursory Remarks on Corpulence also seem at odds as to what kind of substance fat is and why it seems to build up in certain areas of the body. We learn from a ‘celebrated’ anatomist that, at the cellular level, fat is the ‘connecting medium’ holding the body together;276 others point to the omentum – the fleshy abdominal area in front of the intestines – as the ‘common root’ of all fat; the Italian biologist Marcello Malpighi277 thought its spread was aided by some kind of ‘glandular apparatus’; the famous Dutch physicians Herman Boerhaave278 and Gerard van Swieten279 ‘were of the opinion that fat is deposited from the blood by its slower circulation’; while according to popular opinion it was obvious that the stomach was the sole ‘manufacturer of fat’.280 Though no coherent clinical picture emerges in his book and very little is said of exactly how ‘excess’ fat might impact the functioning of different parts of the body, Wadd is clear on the moral implications of corpulency. Drawing a line between physiology and character, he observes that because of ‘the general pressure on the large blood vessels, the circulation through them is obstructed’ and hence ‘we find the pulse of fat people weaker than in others, and from these circumstances also, we may easily understand how the corpulent grow dull, sleepy, and indolent’.281 The rate at which blood is being pumped around the body can, it would appear, sometimes reveal a great deal about a person’s character.
The problem with attempting to cure obesity, according to Wadd, is that the afflicted cannot be counted upon to follow the sound advice issued by their knowledgeable physicians. Though the simplest solution to excess weight is to adopt a plain and moderate diet, accompanied by regular exercise, it often proves impossible for the patient who has cultivated habits ‘connected with great inactivity of body and indecision of mind’ to muster the ‘continued perseverance’ required.282 Corpulence was, then, perceived as not only a symptom of immoderation or gluttony, but it could also be interpreted as a sign of mental inferiority. Early modern physicians attributed this to the way that clots of fat impeded the flow of animal spirits through the body, dulling the senses and sapping vitality.283 In the eighteenth century, doctors were more likely to describe the obese body as prone to laxity – loose skin, inelastic tissue and distended vessels – but the conclusion drawn was the same. Namely, that it constituted an outward expression of inner traits, primarily laziness, slow wits and lack of willpower.
By the time Wadd met an untimely and dramatic end in 1829 – killed jumping from a runaway carriage while on a family holiday touring the south of Ireland – the concept of the ‘will’ as a key measure of character was well established. Though this idea has deep roots in Western culture – think of the importance of free will in Christian theology – it was not until the nineteenth century that it emerged as the dominant way of thinking about everything from morality and civic duty to race, gender and sexuality. This powerful cultural narrative was popularised by bestselling books like Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859), which celebrated the virtues of hard work, thrift and perseverance. The secret to success in life lay, according to Smiles, with the vigorous cultivation of ‘self-culture’; the lesson being that moral character is shaped not by ‘riches and rank’, but by qualities like self-sufficiency and self-discipline. Autonomy was essential, he insisted, because where ‘help from within invariably invigorates’, the help proffered by others is ‘often enfeebling in its effects’ and in fact ‘everything depends upon how he governs himself from within’.284 This call for greater self-governance was very much in tune with the values of industrial capitalism, which was similarly invested in the promotion of a kind of atomistic individualism grounded in ideals of responsibility and self-resilience. With the result that where a rounded figure might have once signalled wealth and success, in nineteenth-century Britain it signified only one’s failure to live up to the exemplar of the productive, disciplined citizen.
Diet literature from the period, books like Banting’s Letter on Corpulence as well as countless magazine articles and instructional pamphlets, emphasised the need to establish proper governance so that, as the historian Sander Gilman put it, the ‘will becomes that which is healed by the dieting process and enables the rational mind to control the body’.285 This advice was grounded in what might be described as a juridical model of the self. Following the Cartesian separation of mind and body, this charged the logical, reasoning higher facilities with bringing order to the irrational demands and pleasure-seeking desires of the hungry belly. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the image of what constituted a well-managed body and what did not became the subject of an emerging scientific discipline. In 1884 attendees of the International Health Exhibition (IHE) in South Kensington – which we visited briefly in Chapter Seven – were encouraged to try out the world’s first Anthropometric Laboratory. Stationed alongside promotional displays of Pears Soap, model sanitation systems and a hydrotherapeutic clinic, this temporary laboratory was the work of Francis Galton, a psychologist, psychometrician and cousin of Charles Darwin, who pioneered the application of statistical methods to the study of human development and difference. Visitors to the pop-up test centre were introduced to new methods of measuring and tabulating their physical characteristics, then encouraged to submit information such as arm span, visual acuity and head size to the growing bank of data. Hugely popular with the thousands that frequented the exhibition, it employed techniques that had been developed over the course of a large-scale comparative study of the nation’s physical features, undertaken by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) between 1875 and 1883.286 Information gathered by the BAAS found practical application in eugenics, a science developed by Galton that identified and propagated traits deemed useful to the further evolution of the species. Man’s abilities are, he argued, derived from his inheritance, and as such each generation has ‘enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow’.287 Endorsed by the medical community and popularised through events like the IHE, the survey also helped to create the first statistically ‘normal’ body, defined by measurements like height, weight and waist size, that was swiftly instituted as the acceptable median to which all must aspire.
