ABSTRACT
On 27 February 2007 the Daily Mirror, a popular British tabloid newspaper, reported the case of an ‘overweight 8 year old, weighing 218 pounds’, purportedly ‘four times the weight of a “healthy” child of his age’. His mother feared she might lose custody of her son unless he lost weight, though she had been allowed to keep the boy after striking a deal with social workers to safeguard his welfare (Wagner, 2007). The child was in danger of being placed on the childcare register or even in care, measures usually applied to those suffering serious physical or mental abuse, simply, it seemed, for being too fat. Much of the popular media’s accompanying narration of this event carried tropes now familiar in the reporting of ‘obesity’ issues, especially in the UK. Single-parent family, broken home, irresponsible parent, bad diet and lack of exercise were all traded in terms of a striking image of a ‘morbidly obese’ child, the embodied representation of being hopelessly inadequate, irresponsibly working class and all that young people are not supposed to be. That there can even be serious consideration of state intervention and regulation that contemplates removal of children from loving families is in itself deeply disturbing, raising issues of both social justice and personal rights. It also reflects the awesome authority that ‘obesity discourse’ and those who espouse it now possesses in defining how populations should think, act and ‘read’ the aetiology of illness and health. Similarly unencumbered by sufficient sensitivity either for the people concerned or possibly underlying ‘truths’, an earlier instance of such reporting had claimed that ‘Child, 3, Dies from Being Too Fat’ (Daily Express, 2004: 1), apparently echoing the indignation of politicians and members of an official obesity task force. Some weeks later it was severely castigated by the British Medical Journal (2004) and, ironically, the Daily Mirror (2004) for perpetrating nothing short of ‘A BIG FAT LIE – “Obese” Girl, 3, had genetic disorder’.
