#.....also when you're suffering nutritional deficiencies and can't access foods with the stuff you need

[whetstonefires]

I do get why there's this reaction against that bit of that sentence, but it's also kind of annoying to me because the context of that part of the thread was pretty blatantly 'addressing people who assume the obesity epidemic is a real factual thing' and recontextualizing one of the pieces of data that props that narrative up.

That is, the genuinely very real existence of people--especially kids--who are generally getting enough calories, and yet are still chronically malnourished, and experiencing health problems as a result of that. The malnourishment.

Because there really truly are so many people who need protein and fiber and various micronutrients and other things that are In Food, but can only manage to consistently obtain the macronutrients to satisfy their energy requirements, and thus are not starving, but are also not very well.

The mainstream, fat-as-bad-choice approach to this is 'education,' and the argument being presented is that you can't educate people out of a food desert, the problem is systemic; they are not choosing to be malnourished, they need to be offered actual choices, not useless patronizing advice.

Therefore the (real actual) existence of these people and their real difficulties cannot and should not serve as a weapon to support the narratives of the diet industry about health, and how people need to discipline themselves better to achieve it.

The objective here is to disrupt the conflation of bullshit about fatness and bullshit about poverty, so that it's harder to use each set of prejudice to reinforce the other. The focus is on the poverty because that's the area where a specific policy aim is being sought.

So the reaction against the use of the term in that context starts to look a lot like when people complain that arguments emphasizing that homeless people are often victims of circumstance (and those people clearly don't deserve to be criminalized so maybe anti-homeless laws are bad huh), or defending gay rights with relatable scenarios like not being able to visit one's husband in the hospital, are insufficiently radical, and therefore worse than useless.

Sometimes you gotta meet people where they're at yk?

there's that post going around that's a short twit thread talking about "the obesity epidemic" as a result of economic oppression and everyone's snapping their little fingers for it but like. you guys know that we achieved socialist utopia tomorrow there would still be fat people right. you guys know that genetics play a bigger role in that than anything else and that some people will just be fat regardless of every other factor in their life right. you guys know that's fine right.

like idk I don't think it comes from a purposefully fatphobic place and like yes it sucks a lot that the demands of capitalism deny people a lot of opportunities to cook or learn to cook and be more engaged and intentional about their food. but it has this flavor of "poverty is bad because it makes people fat," which only holds up as an argument if you agree that being fat is a terrible thing that happens to people rather than being a completely neutral reality about some people's bodies.

anyone pulling any fatphobia on this post is getting blocked on sight I'm not playing.