Supersized portions Vs Superskinny Images

I saw the actor, Alex Kingston, on the Nigel Slater programme ‘Taste of my Life’, the other day. This is where food writer and chef, Slater, cooks for a celeb and talks to them about their favourite foods and childhood memories of food.  Alex Kingston had lived in the United States for a number of years and starred in the American T.V drama, E.R. She talked about going for a part in the series Desperate Housewives; she auditioned for the part that eventually went to Felicity Huffman. She, Kingston, then went on to say that she wouldn’t have fitted in on the programme as the actresses were all so thin. I paid closer attention to this - but Alex Kingston IS thin! I thought. Actress thin. How could she think that she wasn’t thin enough to appear in an American T.V programme (she’d already done E.R after all). But when you look at the poster for Desperate Housewives, you can see what she means; the actors are all tiny. The thing is that you kind of forget how skinny they are after a while because they are all very slender, they look the same; they look regular, no one stands out. Alex Kingston didn’t want to stand out. Funnily enough, I read something recently where they said that a lot of people don’t realise that they are overweight because so many people are overweight these days that when you stand next to another heavy person, you just look and feel normal. It’s all about comparisons. And some commentators are against using plus-sized models and even mannequins because they say that it is normalising of even encouraging obesity. But the thing about so-called ‘plus’ sized models is they probably aren’t obese - they are actually a healthy, ‘normal’ size.

It struck me that America, the most obese nation in the world, is responsible for drenching our culture with images of ultra-thinness. Why do we have this paradox? Why does American media, American culture present us with such an unrealistic, difficult-to-attain body ideal when America is the fattest nation in the world? Why is there such a yawning gap between the reality and the ideal?

Is this lean physique is a status symbol?  The Old Masters gave us images of plump, fleshy women as the ideal of beauty in an age when it was only rich women (and men) who could afford to be plump, and now, when obesity is predominantly a problem among the poorer sector of society (in the West, at least) beauty is represented as a starved-looking body. Who was the rich idiot who said; “You can never be too rich or too thin.”? (Was she a permanently hungry, chain-smoking, old crone with a face like a slapped arse?) I wonder why richness and thinness go hand in hand these days? Is it to separate them from the rest of us poor, flabby, plebs?

Now, I’m not saying that it is healthier to be fat, but I just find it bizarre that the Nation that has brought us the culture of Supersized fast food is also telling us (insidiously) through their visual culture, that we should be super thin.

I just did a Google search to find out the percentage of Americans who were obese. The first thing I came across was this NBC News article from this year, 2014:

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/diet-fitness/whole-world-getting-fatter-new-survey-finds-n115811

The first line reads;

“The whole world is steadily becoming more obese, a new study shows, but not surprisingly, the U.S. is No. 1.”

The U.K have got no reason to be smug about this as we are closely following on America’s coattails - in this as in everything else (see what I did there?) but at least a sizeable chunk of our U.K television reflects people as they actually are. When thinking about British television programmes with female, ensemble casts, the first thing that springs to mind is the BBC1 programme In the Club.  The actors were certainly attractive but they did not have the highly polished gleam of ‘perfection’ that you get in something like Desperate Housewives. I suppose you could argue that because Desperate Housewives was about middle class women, then they, the women, would be uber skinny, perhaps just as middle class women in America are (you only have to look at one of those raft of ‘Real Housewives of ...’ to see that. But why did the cast of Friends have to look like models? Ok, they lived in Manhattan and everyone on New York is thin, so let’s think, the most recent American comedy I’ve watched is The Mindy Project, written by and starring Mindy Kaling. I really like this show - the main character is likably fallible but she has a good job. It’s quite quirky and it has heart but isn’t overly sentimental (most of the time). The main character isn’t skeletal, neither is she huge but her weight is constantly referred to by everyone around her; she is constantly referred to as ‘chunky’ or ‘hefty’, much to the character’s disgust. It’s great to see more ‘normal’-sized women on American T.V but perhaps it would be more groundbreaking if her weight wasn’t mentioned at all.

I really don’t know the answer to this but I’m sure that far sharper minds than mine have pondered it. But why are we being force fed these bizarre, unnatural images of woman kind with a side order of jumbo fries?