Ask the Food Fairy!

A follow-up on last post’s G. K. Chesterton quote about the beauty of the pig:

After marveling at it, I read on to find that he goes even further. Chesterton writes,

“You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart. You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an airship, and as long as he is visible, he will be beautiful… In short he has that fuller, subtler and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking… mistake for a mere absence of shape. For fatness itself is a valuable quality.”

Doesn’t that just terrify you? Doesn’t it bring up all the mumbling, grumbling, ad-supported ideas about what a terrible world we would live in if more people were fat, and what a horrible state of affairs it is if more people are fat? How it is all going to lead to early death, disease, and dysfunction? How could he have said such a thing?!

Well, I don’t know the context. I came across the quote in a lovely book, “The Good Good Pig“, about an actual pig and “the valuable, life-changing lessons [author Sy Montgomery] and others learned from Christopher Hogwood, a generous soul who just so happened to be a pig.” It notes that Chesterton was musing on his childhood dream of owning a pet pig, but that is all I know.

Of course, what the fatphobic wailing in the media fails to note is that there is nothing wrong with being fat.

Fat is something of a mirage in the first place. There is no dividing line between thin and fat, no point at which we can say we have crossed over. Like money, it is associated with worth – except that with fat, the less of it we have, the more worthy we think we are.

And as with money, there is no satisfactory endpoint – there is either the spacious territory of having a healthy relationship to money or our bodies, and living abundant lives, or there is the driving worry, whether quiet or loud, that we will never have (or lose) enough.

Fat is sometimes a symptom of an unhealthy lifestyle – compulsive overeating, or eating enough but very unhealthy things, or eating unhealthily and never, ever getting any physical exercise – but it is the unhealthy lifestyle that is the problem in these examples. There are people who are considered fat who eat healthily, exercise joyfully, and were born with a larger build. There are, of course, some folks with glandular imbalances too. But there are many people without a psychological or physical care in the world who are considered, by dressmakers or photographers or their anorexic-thinking neighbors, to be fat. The fat is not the problem.

This pig strikes me as laughing at us, and all our ridiculous obsessions with losing weight. What do you think? Is fatness ever a valuable quality? How can and should we associate worth with fat?

I just came across a quote from G. K. Chesterton which is about pigs, but which unintentionally summarizes so much of the way anorexic thinking warps my view of reality!

“…Pigs are very beautiful animals. Those who do not think so do not look at anything with their own eyes but through other people’s eyeglasses.”

And how long have I spent looking at everything through other people’s eyeglasses (by shaming myself, listening to crazy ideas, and projecting them onto everyone else, imagining that that’s what THEY think and say about me) and ignoring the natural beauty of everyone and everything on this planet?

It had especial resonance for me because of the pig thing, too – associating pigs with being fat and being fat with being ugly and worthless, in a huge avalanche of unreasonable, illogical, insane thinking. What about you – what is your gut reaction when you look at these lovely pigs? And how do you feel about it?

My engagement ring is twig-shaped, a narrow little circle. My fiancee’s is a broader, flatter band. At first they were both size 6; her flat band fit me just fine when I tried it on, but my narrower ring is too loose on me. (Actually I think mine was 6.5 at first and I had to get it sized way, way down! And I had said 6.5 because I was afraid a smaller size wouldn’t fit!)

We were talking about this as we prepared to order engagement bands, and I realized something. Rings fit differently based on how wide they are, how curved they are, the texture, how thick they are, stuff like that. Which I never knew before this: I thought my fingers were just a SIZE. In fact, I thought they should all be the same size!

Well, if that’s true about rings, it seems like it MUST be true about clothes. I mean, I already know that clothing sizes are pretty much arbitrary – they change what numbers are for what sizes of clothes all the time, not to mention different brands size things differently, not to mention that some garments get small/med/large instead of
numbers…! But I bet that besides that, the kind of fabric something is made out of, and the style it is cut in, make a huge difference, just like shape and thickness and narrowness of that little metal band. Maybe even more so, since clothes are bigger than rings so there is more there to make a difference!

And yet I’ve never heard anyone talk about that. I hear a LOT of people talk about what size they are as if it’s a static thing and a part of their identity, something that actually has any kind of meaning – and a LOT of people talk about how hard it is to find clothes that fit them because they’re tall/short/etc. – but that’s all.

I don’t know about anyone else here but I spent a whole lot of time thinking that those little numbers on the clothes were supposed to mean something, both about me and about what clothes I could wear – and now I know more about why that never worked! I just wanted to share that here in case it helps someone else let go of all those
ideas about sizing.