DoF Classic: Great Moments in Fat History, Vol. 1

Originally Published: 9/8/08

By Merton Sussex, Regional Vice President of Snark Allocation

Beginning today, the Diary of Fools will be running periodic salutes to the hallmarks of fat acceptance in America. Great Moments in Fat History will take regular looks at the great lengths we go to in order to rationalize the growing obesity epidemic; and to make things easier for the morbidly obese to feel normal and streamlined in a society that is repulsed by them. We'll examine in depth the incredible attitudes that enable persons of great girth to keep on shoving Twinkie after Twinkie after Twinkie down their gaping, grease-slicked gullets in a pathetic, empty attempt to fill the voids in their souls where normal people are able to put love.

Great Moments in Fat History Vol. 1: The Obesity Scooter

There comes a certain benchmark in the life of every unbelievable train-wreck tub of shit; a crossroads, if you will. A point of no return of sorts where the revolting fatty has a choice to make. Maybe it's after the third or fourth heart attack, or after the doctor's visit that informs them that even their Diabetes has Diabetes...Whatever the impetus, the fork in the road is the same: The corpulent sod must choose either the path of "Wake-Up Call", or the road of "Fuck It, It's Too Late."

If it's the former, Tons 'o Fun may chose to hop on the treadmill, and not get off until he can see his shoes again. Maybe he'll try all sorts of fad crash diets, or even opt for invasive Bariatric surgical procedures. Of course, these measures enjoy varying degrees of success dependent upon everything from genetics to tenacity, but at least Tubby is taking an active role, and may squeeze a few more years out of his portly meat-shell.

But if it's the latter, Two-Ton Tessie really only has one choice: Self-Delusion. "I'm just fine the way I am," she'll tell herself. "I'm perfectly comfortable and happy at 578 pounds. Sure, I can't reach my genitals anymore, I smell like warm brie, and and when I die they'll have to cut a hole in my house and forklift me out, then dump me in a shipping crate, the previous tenant of which was a Steinway Baby Grand, before shoving me into a hole they had to spend two days excavating with a backhoe...But there's nothing wrong with ME. It's the REST of the world that has a problem!" At which point she'll nod her porcine melon, the TEMPLES of which are even slick with flop-sweat at the effort, and when the undulating from her seven chins stops perpetuating itself like those chrome balls on strings that your boss has on his desk, she'll pick up her second large, stuffed-crust two-layer pizza of the last ten minutes, and proceed to sink even further into sideshow territory as she gulps it down without hardly chewing.

It is post THAT stage of the great chub charade that one must seek further rationalization for one's decision. "Hey," thinks the bloated sack of protoplasm. "If the world didn't want me to look like Bibendum's glandular-disorder-affected older sibling, there wouldn't be size 9X sweatshirts, all-you-can-eat buffets, and that most ridiculously enabling of all pachy-person accoutrements: The Obesity Scooter."

For the uninitiated, the Obesity Scooter is a most marvelous invention, to be sure. It allows even the chunkiest of Hutt-proportioned piles of lard to still enjoy something approaching independence in the days and months leading up to the inevitable bedridden, rag-on-stick sponge-baths and impromptu drop-ins from Dick Gregory. The Scooter provides even people whose legs have negative-integer muscle tone to experience a reasonable facsimile equivalent of ambulatory motion; allowing them to perform some version of the tasks that those of us whose flatulence does NOT register on the Richter Scale are able to do. Everything from shopping, to attending social events, to...well, going to restaurants.

The Genius of the Scooter resides in its (if you'll pardon the expression) "elephant in the room" status. See...Whenever we notice a person with an assistant medical device...e.g. a colostomy bag, insulin pump, iron lung, crutches, prosthetic limb, glass eye, wheelchair, neck brace, trachea ring, CPAP, pacemaker, or even giant, scrap-metal-looking dental headgear...We're obligated not to mention it under any circumstances. To do so is a faux pas of the highest order. When you go to shake someone's hand, and grab a cold steel hook instead, it's considered terribly bad form to recoil in horror, shrieking like a Girl Scout who's just been told that her St. Bernard got into the Thin Mints. Nope, it's incumbent upon us to shake away, and act like we simply didn't notice. Most normal thing in the world, that. Wouldn't even have seen it if you hadn't mentioned it! Reason being, it's polite to not call attention to the glaring differences of others that may make them feel alienated from other people.

And somewhere along the line, the Obesity Scooter got lumped in with the rest of those things, as though it were a legitimate medical device. Out of a shared sort of mob-mentality social decorum, the American populace was hoodwinked virtually overnight into politely regarding the Obesity Scooter as just another meaty leg up for the disabled, like an eyepatch or a Dr. Stephen Hawking Speak-and-Spell thingy. We were bamboozled into thinking, "These people aren't human Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. They're not Ripley's Believe it or Not footnotes. Why, heavens, no. They're handicapped."

And THIS was perhaps the fat acceptance movement's greatest coup of them all, worth a thousand Mo'Nique-hosted chubby-girl beauty pageants, or a few dozen Emmies for Camryn Manheim. Getting the rest of the world to see these rotund rollabouts not as unrestrained hedonists reaping the consequences of their chosen lifestyles of excess and apathy...But as legitimate victims, plagued by a world that made them the way they are, only to staunchly refuse to accept them that way once they were. There are no notions of entitlement at play, here! When you get right down to it, they're really no different than sufferers of Multiple Sclerosis or Muscular Dystrophy. After all, those, too, are progressive conditions that render their victims increasingly unable to care for themselves, and ever less mobile as the ravages of the disease take their toll.

Except that there are no telethons for the man- and woman-atees who are eating themselves into an early grave. No foundations created to help those who started eating seven meals a day in 1982 and eventually worked up to 12. No fund- and awareness-raising marches designed to assist those who find themselves stricken by the condition. Though, to be fair, you can't cure MD by hanging out with Tony Little or Richard Simmons for a few months, either. In fact, you might CATCH some shit from that. But, I digress.

The point is, when we see someone buzzing around on a scooter, rolls and folds spilling so far over the edges of the seat that we can't even really be sure that there IS one, we're just supposed to let it go. To ignore it. To pretend that the situation somehow DOESN'T embody most of what's wrong with Western culture and it's overindulgent me-first-ism, and treat the plump passenger as if they're just like anyone else. Like they DIDN'T just take the "Fuck It, It's Too Late" path of least resistance when faced with their own crossroads, and use the last thousand dollars they didn't spend on Ho-Ho's to buy electric leg replacements instead of a fucking Bowflex.

So, in the interest of preserving inter-personal propriety, we DO let it go. Rather than look at these planet-proportioned pudge-piles and cluck our tongues, wondering what exactly went so horribly awry in their psyches that things could have gotten to that point, we smile. We treat them like we would anyone else. We ignore the room-elephant.

We shake the hook.

Maybe this is for the best. Because we KNOW if we simply got fed up, and adopted a tone of sneering sanctimony concerning their corpulence, we'd just come off like bigger assholes than they are. Sure, the be-scootered blobs are essentially foisting themselves on the unsuspecting public, forcing us to flatten against the shelving and squeeze our butts into the pickle jars as they hum by at Wal-Mart, parting the people in every aisle right down the center like a goddamned freight-liner trundling down the Panama Canal as they fill their carts with Doritos and Cheez-Wiz, daring someone to say something to them. But the second you decide to drop a pithy bon mot concerning their sheer monolithic mass within their earshot, you can almost guarantee that you've picked on the one person in a few dozen who genuinely has a thyroid that thinks it's in a narwhal, rather than the rest of them who just use that as an excuse.

So, as ever, it's best to keep your mouth shut. Sure, if they'd do the same once in awhile, they wouldn't be in the barge they're in, but that's really not for you to be concerned about. Natural selection will eventually weed these guys out. Or, the other possibility is we'll all wind up like the beefy butter-tubs onboard the Axiom in Pixar/Disney's delightfully thin-veiled attack on consumer culture "Wall-E": Little more than barely-sentient giant amoeba, who live only to ingest and excrete, blissfully bouncing through life without even the merest worry, floating around on the future's version of the Obesity Scooter, the hover-chair. We'll loll about in our own reeking perspiration, never quite cleaning between the folds well enough to completely excise the funk, but not really caring because, after all, that's the norm. We'll eat and shit and eat and shit and then eat some more, eventually winking fatly out, barely noticed by the other slow-witted cattle as they continue to soak up more resources than any organism needs to perpetuate its own useless life-cycle. Evolution does, after all, favor dominant traits that are well-suited to the overall environment of the alpha organism. Which is why I sort of wonder if we WON'T wind up going that route. Because as long as our environment keeps allowing for shit like THIS:



...We're pretty much fucked.

Way to shake the hook, America.

Great Moments in Fat History Vol. 3: Old Country Buffet

By Merton Sussex, Grand Poobah of the Mundane




Man...Who DOESN'T love a buffet, huh?!? It's positively un-American to not want to belly up to a plethora of ready-to-go grub, and eat to your (cholesterol-crippled) heart's content! And such VARIETY!

Of course, the granddaddy of them all is Old Country Buffet. With its headquarters right here in the Twin Cities, Old Country's parent company, the creatively-labeled "Buffets, Inc." operates almost 650 restaurants in 39 states. That's a lot of mashed potatoes.

You'd think with that sort of market penetration, Old Country would be pretty well set, serving up steam table after steam table of bland, mediocre food, and a lot of it, to everyone, everywhere. However, on January 22nd of '08, prior to the most recent round of financial woes to plague businesses large and small all over the country, Buffets, Inc. declared Chapter 11. Seems they had a tough time making ends meet. There are a lot of theories as to why this might be, but I have my own.

See, whereas the normal person sees the buffet as a nice occasional dinner alternative with a lot of choices, no waiting, and a reasonable price structure, there is a large-and-getting-larger contigent among us who sees it as more of a food amusement park: Pay a flat entrance fee, and play until you drop.

Have you ever BEEN to the Old Country? Have you SEEN the sort of people who eat there? Sure, there are plenty of families, looking to get the most out of their food budgets. Single people, maybe striking out on their own, and who don't know how to cook yet. And, depressingly, a lot of single old men, who look lost, and who probably ARE since their wives died, and they never even learned how to boil water. But by far the largest group, and I mean that in every sense of the word, are the ones who are even more depressing than the widowers: The corpulent mounds of barely-human flesh, waddling their way back and forth to the feed troughs, rolls quivering and undulating, plates loaded to critical mass with mounds and mounds of whatever couldn't run away from them.

In and of itself, this really isn't the problem. The Buffet business model is meant to absorb the cost of the gluttons, and make it up on those who DON'T eat their own weight in gravy every time up.

However, that being said...It's NOT calibrated to account for two things that have become rampant: 1) Waste, and 2) Over-consumption of the loss-leading entrées.

You know what I'm talking about. You've seen 'em with the prime rib hanging over the sides of the plate, because they wouldn't budge from the line until the hapless chap working the carving station slapped enough beef on their plate to feed a Guatemalan family for a week. Hell, go to any buffet on seafood night. If you don't see some sumo-sized mass sucking down plateful after plateful of peel-n'-eat shrimp, crab legs, or whatever that stuff is that's passing for "Lobster Thermidor", I'll skip the always-untouched salad bar and eat my hat instead. These assholes view the humble buffet as "Chuck's All-You-Can Inhale Crab Leg Shack," and they're not shy about it. "Well, HELL, Marg'rit. It's cheaper'n Red Lobster. Besides, it ain't even our annivers'ry anyway." So there they go, getting the only exercise they ever do, humping back and forth with boiled crustacean...and leaving half of it on their plate every time they go to get more. Which brings me to point 2...

WASTE. The amount of food these places have to buy in order to keep up with demand is positively obscene. The only thing MORE obscene is the amount they're forced to toss out. Whether it's the fact that the stupid lazy fuck with the crab legs is only eating 10% of the actual meat in the shells because it's not worth the effort to extract the other 90%, or the gaping rectum with the prime rib who eats three little bites of a one-pound slab and throws the "fat" away, the rampant food waste these places put up with is quite literally shameful. The stuff they throw away in just about a month is more than the aforementioned Guatemalans will likely see in a lifetime. And it's all because the spoiled chubsters in their sweatpants and vintage "Coed Naked" t-shirts just cast if off like it's trash, beneath their contempt. THIS is why Buffets, Inc. filed for bankruptcy. Because when they opened in 1983, they simply coundn't DREAM of having to put up signs reading, "Take all you want to eat, but PLEASE eat all you take!" Or, "Please don't waste food!" Having to ask someone, much less GROUPS of someones, not to waste food? This, to me, is the #1 indication that Western society just has too goddamn much. Imagine having to tell someone in Gambia or Ethiopia not to waste food. That'd be like telling them, "try not to punch your children in the throat." It simply would never have occurred to them otherwise.

However, weep not for poor Buffets, Inc. Something tells me they're gonna be just fine. Early reports are that they'll be emerging from Bankruptcy protection sooner rather than later. And besides, it's hardly like they're completely faultless. Remember when I said they opened in 1983? Well, dig these couple of charts I found that plot out the average U.S. obesity rates over the last few decades or so. Pay special attention to the rough year when they start to creep northward:







If you notice anything interesting, please come over to my table and let me know. 'Cuz this fried chicken, bread pudding, pizza, beef vegetable soup, mac and cheese and soft-serve sure as hell ain't gonna eat themselves.