On Fatness and Poverty: It's Complicated
Or, an answer to one of my most frequently asked questions from people on the left
In my new book, Unshrinking, I open with a disturbing observation: Fatphobia, or anti-fatness, is one of the few forms of bigotry that is actually on the rise, according to some measures. And disturbingly, liberals and progressives often remain complacent about it. One common line of argument that I’ve heard rehearsed by many such people on this topic is that fatness is typically due to poverty, and poverty is of course a terrible thing—with income inequality being a scourge in this country, among many others. If we addressed poverty, then fatness would largely go by the wayside. So goes the argument.
The trouble is, this argument traffics in a kind of guilt by association: fatness is bad because it is correlated with something undeniably bad (namely, poverty). But even more importantly, for my purposes here, the argument rests on a faulty premise: the relationship between poverty and fatness is complicated and far less linear than many assume without data.
You don’t have to dig for these data. According to the CDC’s website, poverty and so-called obesity (a pathologizing word I only use when reporting the result of scientific and epidemiological studies) exist in a complex relationship, with different patterns existing in different demographics. Among men, for example, the prevalence of obesity is actually lowest in the lowest-income group (31.5%), is similar for the highest-income group (32.6%), and is substantially higher in middle-income Americans (38.5%). This pattern held for (non-Hispanic) white and Hispanic men, although the discrepancy between the middle- and high-income groups wasn’t statistically significant for the white men. For (non-Hispanic) Black men, the rates of obesity among the highest-income group were actually highest (42.7%). For (again, non-Hispanic) Asian men, there was no statistically significant difference between these three income groups in terms of obesity prevalence.
So, by and large, men don’t tend to be fatter in lower-income demographics.
For women, the picture is somewhat different—but, again, complicated. Obesity prevalence is higher in the lowest- and middle-income groups (45.2% and 42.9%, respectively) compared with the highest-income group (29.7%). But this pattern was only statistically significant for white women. Among (non-Hispanic) Black women, obesity prevalence did not differ based on income group.
To summarize: there’s really only one group of people that reliably gets fatter as they get poorer—white women.
And it’s worth noting that, while it’s certainly possible that poverty is driving fatness for the white women studied, some scholars believe that the causation may run partly in the other direction. After all, we have strong evidence of rampant discrimination against fat women in particular. One study compared a thin man, a thin woman, a fat man, and a fat woman for a range of employment opportunities—a salesperson, an administrative assistant, a manual laborer, and a university lecturer. Despite the fact that their CVs were identical, on average, being rotated amongst the participants, the fat woman was judged the least suitable candidate—and the thin man the best candidate—for each and every job opening. And with huge income gaps existing between very thin and very fat women (to the tune of over $40 0000 on average annually), when other factors were controlled for, it’s worth raising the question: are white women fat because they’re poor? Or poor because they’re fat? Quite likely, as The Washington Post food columnist, Tamar Haspel, argues, in a piece entitled “The True Connection between Poverty and Obesity isn’t what you Probably Think,” the causal relationship runs in both directions.
Some caveats are important here: the above figures, while the most recent CDC analyses available, are based on NHANES data from 2011–2014, which is usually collected every two years, but which was suspended during the pandemic. It’s possible the next analysis will be somewhat different (though a previous one, co-authored by the groundbreaking researcher Katherine Flegal, was similar). But right now, that remains a mere possibility with no hard evidence behind it.
In the meantime, one has to wonder: if publicly available, ready-to-hand evidence belies the simple assumption that poverty and fatness are in lock-step with each other, with the former causing the latter, why are so many people convinced otherwise?
I suspect the answer has to do as much with stereotypes and the resulting cultural narratives as anything. Thinness is a powerful marker of class as well as racial privilege—and fatness a powerful marker of low socioeconomic status. In particular, when we see someone who is very fat, as I once was, we attribute to them low status—assuming they are poor, or at least working class, regardless of the evidence. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been assumed to be a server when I was a guest at a faculty club, or a staff member at a hotel when I was attending a philosophy conference in my capacity as a professor. (It should go without saying that there is nothing better or worse, in reality, about being a server or a staff member versus a professor; my point is about what assumptions get made according to current, and noxious, hierarchies among these occupations.) And while this happens to virtually all women in philosophy, fatness plausibly contributes: one man I was chatting casually with in the audience before a talk, and introduced myself to as “Kate,” was positively startled to learn that I was the one giving the guest lecture, even though he’d come to hear Kate Manne speak. He was hence presumably expecting a woman. A woman named Kate. But I didn’t fit the image of even a female professor in philosophy—a discipline dominated by lean, white, non-disabled, cis men (and in my view very much the worse because of it).
Me earlier this week, with my beloved PhD advisor, Sally Haslanger, getting to riff about these themes at Harvard bookstore, in a truly fabulous and generative conversation. Photo courtesy of my dear friend, Maura Smyth
The idea that poverty drives fatness may also owe to the idea that poor people live in so-called food deserts—or face what is better termed “food apartheid,” as Karen Washington has argued—and thus only have access to “fattening” convenience foods rather than fresh produce. Ultra-processed foods have been particularly demonized lately, despite the recent evidence that they aren’t even more appealing. And that’s even before we get to the fact that this is more of a catch-all for declassé foods in the public imagination, rather than a scientifically unified category—which includes paradigmatically healthy foods like tofu and almond butter.
The idea that there is grossly inequitable food distribution in the US is absolutely right and clearly important. But it turns out that the idea of food deserts is something of a myth—poor folks shop just as often at supermarkets, on average, but travel long distances to access them, and tend to buy somewhat different foods there. Moreover, as the scholar Marquisele Mercedes has argued, there are far better reasons to care about food injustice than its supposed role in making people fatter. Namely, everyone deserves ready access to the major kinds of foods they want to eat, and for most people in most communities, this will include a wide range of fresh and shelf-stable foods. This is a vital human resource—and a right for all communities. Whether people will be thinner when they get the food justice they deserve remains an open question: and a moot point for anyone concerned about what ultimately matters here. Namely, helping people live the best, healthiest, happiest lives they can, regardless of the bodies they end up with as a result of this.
And that’s part of what’s frustrating about these arguments, and the endless debate about the relationship between weight and health—itself a complicated matter, as I argue in Unshrinking. This debate doesn’t need to be settled before we can make the public policy interventions that would benefit people’s health directly, rather than trying to reduce people’s weight per se—at best an indirect and often unreliable proxy for their health status. We can and must fight for food justice, health care equity, people’s access to leisure spaces, and the time and space to exercise, as well as the means to get enough sleep and manage their stress levels. All of these things would help to make us healthier. It remains unclear that they will necessarily make us thinner.
Just a little reminder that, since my book is still in its infancy, your book orders, Amazon reviews, (which you can leave no matter where you bought it) and goodreads reviews are making all the difference to spread the good word! Please consider doing so too if you haven’t already. Thank you, thank you, thank you for those who’ve supported me in these ways and so many others.
Another quick reminder: you can see me in-person tonight, at 7pm, with the fabulous
at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, and tomorrow at 3pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC, with the wonderful Emily Esfahani Smith. Can’t wait!
Just so beautifully said. The immorality of discrimination and fatphobia is a totally separate issue from the relationship between body size and health. (And the relationship between body size and health is quite complex and poorly understood -- and maybe irrelevant!)
I really appreciate your language of philosophy to think about these issues! Keep on fighting the good fight.
even my left-leaning hot takes are drenched in fatphobia. thank you for continuing to enlighten me, and providing great language to combat the “common” counterarguments.