ABC

ABC

Published in the January 2011 issue

(Obama) Win McNamee/Getty Images; (Biggest Loser) NBC/Photofest

Jamie Oliver cannot get over how fat Americans are. On the first season of his hit ABC show, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which debuted last year just as Michelle Obama was launching her national antiobesity initiative (the Let's Move! campaign) and the ninth season of NBC's cash cow (The Biggest Loser) was getting serious, the British celebrity chef could not believe that nearly half the adults in Huntington, West Virginia, were obese. He could not fathom how much they ate. He was outraged at the quality of the chicken the children were eating at school. And though he literally tried to get the town's residents to eat their vegetables, the West Virginians were back to flavored milk and "processed-food Fridays" the minute he left. Now Oliver is back for a second season and trying his luck in L. A., where he'll take another shot at convincing Americans to choose mushroom pappardelle and seasonal parsnips over a burger with fries. He will fail, of course, not for lack of effort but because he just doesn't get the fact that excessive consumption is woven into our national DNA. Being an American means and has always meant eating too much, even if the likes of Jamie Oliver tell us not to, and even if, as one study predicts, it means the next generation of Americans could be the first to expect a shorter life span than the one before it.

The Granger Collection

Oliver means well, and I admire his guts. The guy has sold twenty-four million cookbooks and starred in a dozen television shows in his native country. His crusade to improve school lunches in Britain was a triumph; it changed how an entire generation of schoolchildren eats lunch. He understood the roots of the bad food they were eating cheap, lazy, shortsighted government administrations mired in bad practices and against that framework he knew what role to take, the firebrand reformer, a traditional role in Britain. With "Food Revolution," he's trying to transfer that approach to the United States, but anyone who has lived in America knows that the government is not the cause of American fat. Americans are. The obesity problem is social historical, even not political. The founding myth of the country, and its most important holiday, Thanksgiving, is a spectacle of overeating. Expansion has always involved feasting. The story of the western frontier is the story of driving immense herds of protein across an empty landscape toward their eventual slaughter. The industrial explosion of the mid-to-late nineteenth century that swelled the population of the country demanded huge amounts of food, and the Greatest Generation didn't create the most powerful country in the history of the world while on a diet. Food was their fuel, and if they worked hard and brought home lots of bacon, why not eat it?

PRNewsFoto/Newscom

That's where we ran into trouble. Our eating habits were formed during times of immensely productive manual labor. If you're working twelve-hour shifts at the car plant, you can eat whatever you want. You can even eat the food celebrated on Guy Fieri's show, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, which drifts from restaurant to restaurant featuring all these delicious extravagances of the industrial age: burgers with skirts of bubbly cheese, fried chicken and waffles with maple syrup and hot sauce. But these foodstuffs are now reminders of better times, like the boarded-up factories in Detroit: We used to be able to eat them without consequence because we used to work a lot harder. With five and a half million manufacturing jobs lost since 2000, unemployment still above 9 percent, and many American workers happy to sit at their desks while underpaid immigrants and overseas workers do the heavy lifting for them, many of us are working less, and working less physically intensive labor, than at any time in recent history, and we've got the extra pounds to show for it. So while America's gut is a medical problem on a massive scale, it is also a clear indicator of industrial, and possibly national, decline.

(Obama) Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images; (Food) Amy Richardson/Pretty Pretty Yum Yum

Which is why having a Brit lecture Americans about obesity is so galling. For one thing, England was recently declared the fattest nation in Europe, meaning Oliver might want to clean up his own house before coming over and criticizing ours. And for another, the English have always seen lecturing Americans as a cherished part of the Special Relationship. And for our part, Americans usually entertain British advice because we know, in some sense, that the Brits have been in our shoes before. It reminds me of how the generals of ancient Rome, riding in victory parades after battle, would always keep a slave holding a crown over their heads and whispering in their ears, "All glory is fleeting. All glory is fleeting." So we've welcomed British commentators in America, living memento mori to remind us that global dominance theirs in the nineteenth century, ours in the twentieth is ultimately fleeting. Oliver has just, and I think it's quite by accident, cut too close to the bone. It's one thing to be told that all glory is fleeting when you're in triumph; it's quite another when you're struggling to pay your mortgage.

Sonja Flemming/CBS

Oliver treats the epidemic of obesity in America as it should be treated as a public-health crisis and his approach only makes our own perverse reactions to the growing emergency seem more ridiculous. The First Lady wants us all to start gardens a loopy suggestion undertaken for a photo op while fat people keep eating deep-fried butter at the state fair and thin people continue to check the daily postings on thisiswhyyourefat.com. But if you're looking for a solution to the weight problem, you won't find it on "Food Revolution" or even "The Biggest Loser." Instead, head over to CBS, where its breakout show, Undercover Boss, has fat-cat CEOs busting their asses doing a hard day's work. Because only when we figure out how to put Americans back to work, and how to rebuild a sagging infrastructure and stanch the flow of jobs overseas, will the pounds start melting off.

EAT LIKE A MAN: Learn How to Do It on Esquire's Blog >>

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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