Writing in the Times this week, Daniel Finkelstein argued the libertarian case on obesity: his right to scoff as many muffins as he likes without being harassed by the state into feeling guilty about his resulting, er, muffin tops. And because, pound for pound, Mr Finkelstein is probably the brightest chap in Fleet Street, he does it very well.
I could quibble with him on the limits of libertarianism, which I always understood to be the freedom to pursue one's own desires provided that nobody else is harmed in the process. So he may ask what business it is of anyone else if he chooses to make a staged withdrawal from, rather than fight, the relentless enemy of middle-aged spread, but if everyone adopts the same position and defends their "right" to get fat, then the aggregate social consequences are, well, huge. Diabetes, heart disease, all kinds of obesity-related morbidity and premature mortality will not only overwhelm health and social services, but cost us dear with working days lost to sickness and disability. If we keep growing, ultimately our economy will shrink.
But that's not actually what bothers me about Daniel's piece. It's his phrase that "the freedom to be fat is a fundamental liberty". The proposition seems self-evidently preposterous to me, but it also chimes with a disturbing trend of "fat liberationism". Daniel would be on the intellectual wing of the movement, but for an egregious example of the more populist "big is beautiful" tendency, see the movie Hairspray (the film version of the Broadway adaptation of the John Waters original). In Hairspray Mk I, the main theme was racial exclusion in civil rights era Baltimore; in this remake, a substantially larger Tracy Turnblad and Mom, in the form of John Travolta crossdressing in a truly mighty fat suit, give equal billing to the idea that you can be big and proud. In other words, a moral equivalence is implied between racism and sizeism.
Obviously, our relationship with food is a delicate issue. Girls and young women already face huge pressure to conform to supermodel-style physiques that are simply unattainable and probably unhealthy for the majority of the population. But the answer to eating disorders and body dismorphia is not the message that it's fine to be as big as you like. It's definitely not for you, nor, in fact, for the rest of us.
We might not like hearing it, but obesity is shaping up to be a colossal health crisis, already costing Britain £1bn a year. Yet, for the vast majority of people, weight management is a simple matter of balancing calories in with calories out. It's not rocket science: eat a bit less, exercise a little more, and you're going in the right direction.
Merely to say any of this, of course, is to invite catcalls of "health fascist" etc (hint: I've already done it so you don't need to bother), which just shows how far we've already bought into the "fat is fine" propaganda. But would we now accept (as other than a crank) anyone proposing that activities like smoking or misusing alcohol or speeding or drink-driving are "fundamental liberties", and that people who do them should be liberated to feel good about their self-harming and/or antisocial behaviour? No, because, for all the fulminating against the "health police", there is a broad consensus that the public good is served by regulating and reducing what's bad for us.
The challenge is to find ways of doing this without increasing the stigma of obesity. For the defiant gestures of fat liberationism are the flipside of the self-consciousness forced on the overweight: stick this identity on me and I'll take it and throw it back in your face. Bullying or guilt-tripping people are about the least effective ways of getting change. But one thing we are entitled to be intolerant of - a flaky rhetoric of rights, liberty and identity based on being overweight.
