CVK
That’s the question posed by U.K. paper The Observer. Basically, the article ponders whether we demonise the obese purely on health grounds, or whether it’s a gut reaction based on prejudice. (Thanks to T for this tip!) I’m not crazy about fact that the reporter decided to go undercover in a fatsuit, a la Tyra Banks, but the rest of the article is very interesting. Here are some excerpts:

The first person I heard make a direct comparison between fat and race was Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling The Tipping Point and Blink. At an event in London, a member of the audience asked him what subjects he thought were hot. Gladwell, off the top of his head, wondered aloud whether fat wasn’t the new race. The comment stuck in my mind - it sounded incendiary, and possibly mad - but I didn’t act on it until later, after I saw a programme on More4 presented by the journalist Giles Coren. This was a piece of polemic entitled Tax the Fat: Coren argued that, because treatment of obesity-related illnesses now costs the health service so much money - some 1bn GBP - there was a case for the fat, just like smokers, to be taxed. His argument wasn’t especially subtle, but it was - at the time - funny and energetic. It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that it was also unkind. So, I started digging. Gladwell is certainly right that this subject is hot - it’s hot as Hades. It’s also complex and fraught; you meet lots of fine minds on the way, but you also encounter those whose position is so extreme, the experience is a bit like trying to talk to a creationist about Darwin…

More after the jump…

…Campos believes that there are indeed striking parallels between what he calls ‘identity movements’- those who campaigned for equal rights for black and gay people - and those who are working for fat or body-shape acceptance. ‘There is an increasing level of consciousness in the media and the scientific community about the extent to which weight should be the focus of public health. There is more scepticism about the claims made for the connection between weight and disease, and about the idea that fat is a chosen state. People do not choose to be fat in any meaningful way; most of those who try to change their body mass fail.’…

…So how long will it take for attitudes like mine to become socially unacceptable? How long before more anti-discrimination laws are added to the statute books? Campos draws a comparison with the phrenologists of the 19th century, who regarded bumps on the head as evidence of personality traits. ‘Weight has been pathologised in the same way. Phrenology was a respectable movement even though it was based on a phoney notion. It, too, had an ideological bent. The bumps on the heads of those of European extraction were supposed to prove that they had superior skills.’ He thinks that the obesity industry could disappear as fast as phrenology, in the right circumstances. What would the right circumstances be? ‘There will be a tipping point,’ he says. ‘A famous person will have weight-loss surgery and die. Or … girls of 13 are now having weight-loss surgery. One of them will die. What happens then?’…