Echoes in Eternity

Dalrymple wrote a great piece for the Wall Street Journal this past Saturday, focusing his attention on the increasingly immense (no pun intended) problem of obesity around the globe.

In the West, the march (or waddle) of obesity is in step with other social (or antisocial) developments. Obesity in Britain, for example, has increased pari passu with the splintering of families: and now it is never too early to teach children lack of self-control.

The connection between the fragmentation of the family and obesity is easy to understand. Of course, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two phenomena—in human affairs there never is such a close fit—but there is nevertheless a strong and comprehensible correspondence.

For much of the population, family meals are a ritual of the past: Thirty-six percent of British children never eat a meal at a table with another member of their family or household (we have now passed the milestone long desired by radical social reformers, more children being born illegitimate than legitimate). In the homes of the poor, the unemployed and the single parents that I used to visit as a doctor, I would find no evidence of cooking ever having been done there. Fatty take-away meals and ready-prepared foods heated in the microwave were the diet, together with almost constant snacks. There was not even a table to eat at: an absence that was not the consequence of raw poverty, since the flat-screen television would have been large enough, turned horizontal, to serve as a dining table.

In these circumstances, children graze or forage; but unlike previous hunter gatherers, they do not come up against a scarcity of food, but rather a surfeit of it. Nothing is easier for them than to overindulge, and the appetite grows with the feeding. Their tastes never develop beyond the most instantly gratifying types of food, sugary and fatty, and they eat like children for the rest of their lives; they never learn the discipline of subordinating their appetite to the exigencies of family life and social convention. They are like Pooh Bear, for whom it is always time for a little something. It is hardly surprising if, like Pooh Bear's, their waistlines expand until they can't fit into a normal seat.

Family and social meals are among the most powerful teachers of self-control in the human repertoire. They teach that the appetite of the moment is not, or rather ought not to be, the sole determinant of one's behavior. The pattern of grazing or foraging independently of everyone else teaches precisely the opposite lesson. It is hardly surprising that those who do not experience family or social meals early in life exhibit the lack of self-control that underlies so much modern social pathology in the midst of plenty.

On a lighter, related note, here is a classic discussion of family mealtime.