Original article: https://andrewperlot.substack.com/p/the-injustice-of-being-obese
“Luxury in food is not only unnecessary but harmful to the body, the soul, and society.”— Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Sayings, Fragment 18
No one wants to be the bad guy.
So justice — one of the four parts of virtue — is a beloved topic on the political right and left, though the sides conceptualize justice and just actions very differently.
People who make a show of justice-alignment often deviate from it in their actions. Sometimes they’re more interested in virtue signaling than virtue, but often they just haven’t thought through the negative downstream ramifications of actions or realized how adherence to virtuous standards can more than compensate for the pain/pleasure loss of forgoing pleasure.
Most don’t see that their diet and lifestyle choices are actual injustices, not theoretical ones. It’s tricky to bring this to their attention in ways that empower rather than offend and alienate. Socratic-style questioning and bringing up topics for discussion is often wiser than critique or stating opinions. Let them come around to it so it’s their idea, and their standard to adhere to.
Previously we’ve:
* Determined that most of the things talking heads claim drive our obesity epidemic miss the mark.
* Identified a group of Christians who place moral aspersions on food choice and end up dramatically thinner.
* Talked about a non-religious approach to making every decision (including food decisions) freighted with similar but nondogmatic meaning and morality — virtue.
* Begun diving into ways virtue can be used to replace the lost pleasure.
Now we’ll look at justice-adjacent approaches.
I’m no longer a diet/health coach, but I used these techniques for more than a decade to improve client adherence.
The Patriot:
Former military, very patriotic. Catholic. Saw no problem letting himself become borderline obese. Suffered from several chronic diseases.
He was a bit prickly to start with, but his wife wanted me to talk with him. Since she told me that lack of patriotism and service to the country was one of his perennial favorite topics, I started in that direction and he came alive, more than willing to talk. I mentioned the ideas of Cicero, and that since we’re products of and embedded in society, we can’t act morally without considering the good of the whole.
"Not for us alone are we born; our country, our friends, have a share in us," — Cicero, On Duties, 1:22
“Oh, I like that!” he said.
I also mentioned After Virtue and Dependent Rational Animals by Alasdair MacIntyre, and asked if he thought the loss of shared moral frames was causing our society’s fractures (as MacIntyre suggests).
Eventually, he started asking how I thought about justice/patriotism in current times, and I explained one fragment of the topic involving health, weight, and physical ability. I was obese growing up, and now consider it morally right to keep myself fit, though it takes work and temptations are legion. I explained that I kept to this standard not just for myself, but for everyone, since I’m embedded in a society.
It’s not just that I’d like to be physically capable of helping others on scales large and small, but I’m also delaying the day when I slip into the liability category, since society has a limited capacity to offset the incapacitated. If I’m eighty when a natural disaster hits and I have the physical and mental wherewithal to evacuate myself rather than needing rescue, I’d consider that a great victory for justice. I’ll have created a net good for society. I have no guarantee of success, but it’s a just goal to shoot for.
We talked several more times. He was interested in workout ideas and fasting, and the mindset behind why I did what I did. These sorts of questions are always a good sign — perhaps the most promising trait to notice in a client. It’s easy to give commandments for healthy eating, but if someone can find ways to attach moral salience to them through background ideology, actions take on a virtuous glow that compensates for the pain of adhering to them.
But he had it easy. His wife was already making healthy meals. He just had to eat them instead of fast food.
Six months later I spoke to his wife and he’d lost 30 pounds and his blood pressure was almost normal. He’d also joined a volunteer firefighting company.
Another Justice-Adjacent View that Might Resonate:
“I’d rather eat what I want and die young than eat healthy and live till old age. Besides, it’s better for everyone if I’m not one of those people in nursing homes, bankrupting my family.”
Truth: A mix of bad luck and modern medicine will likely keep dietary hedonists alive far longer than they’d like, trapped in increasingly degraded bodies, thinking with clouded minds. The average person spends 10 years with chronic ailments like diabetes, cancer, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and osteoporosis — roughly double the 1960s span. In other words, lifespan increased, but healthspan shrank.
America’s insolvent social welfare programs are a bone of contention, but the healthcare ones wouldn’t be in trouble if Americans ate and moved virtuously. Half of Medicare spending can be traced to modifiable risk factors — unhealthy things people choose to do. In fact, a quarter of all the country’s medical spending goes to address the downstream effects of these unjust choices. Our idiocy and lack of virtue is hurting our people and sucking resources away from better goals.
An individual’s choice to not be healthy may seem like a drop in the bucket, but they’re collectively causing these societal goods to collapse under the burden of caring for them. Eating poorly echoes into society and causes dysfunction. And families are burdened — or more burdened — caring for people who don’t care about what they eat.
So do you want to contribute to tearing down society with every meal? Or do you want to actually be just.
A Wider Scope of Food Justice:
There are a million ways we could connect justice and diet. But a fact’s impact often has more to do with individual receptivity and background assumptions (morality, economics) than the rightness of the argument or the skill of its presenter.
Some justice-based food arguments might have impact for some people, but will fall flat for others:
* Factory farms are pretty atrocious on any vector beyond making meat cheap, and most animal products come from factory farms.
* The overlap between diet and environmental issues.
* The overlap between what you eat and regional economics.
It’s only though conversation and obliquely probing through questions that you might find out what a person values. And if you’re looking to be more just yourself? You already know.
The Bottom Line On Health Justice:
People sometimes throw around grandiose statements — I’d die for my country. I’d die for my kids.
They proudly tag themselves as patriots and good people who care about those around them. But dying is easy. It’s harder to live for your country, your community, and your family by adhering to virtue and maintaining your physical form.
But if you can frame every meal — and how you engage with it — within a meaning-giving context, it will make the particular pleasures of the meal look small in comparison. It can fill the vacuums ripped open by healthier eating.
These questions are in many ways perennial. We can see Plato and Socrates wrestling with them 2,400 years ago. You can read more about that here:
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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