A big fat ugly metaphor

Almost a year ago I wrote a spiked essay called “Why people hate fat Americans” (see bar on left). It argued that that obesity was increasingly being used as a metaphor to attack “over-consumption” more generally. Now a new bestseller seems to have joined the fast-growing genre. Insatiable: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream by Jason Fagone is being widely reviewed (in America it is called Horsemen of the Esophagus). A reviewer in the Scotsman quotes the book as arguing:

“These eating competitions are poetic in their blatancy, their brazen mixture of every American trait that seems to terrify the rest of the planet… if anti-American zealots anywhere in the world wanted to come up with a minstrel show of our culture, this is what they’d come up with.”

I should probably read the book but I do not think I can stomach it.