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Lee Daniels' Precious provides a hellish tableau of petty theft, physical abuse, attempted infanticide, rape, incest (both paternal and maternal), welfare fraud, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, school violence, teen pregnancy, self-hatred, and illiteracy. But the film's most arresting figure of urban poverty is the one that lumbers through nearly every frame: The 300-pound Gabby Sidibe. "Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin," writes New York's David Edelstein, "her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits."
That’s part of the movie’s XXXtreme social realism, no doubt. Obesity rates are higher among poor, black females than among any other major group. (The numbers may shock you: More than half of all black women in the United States are counted as obese, and they’re three times more likely than white women to be “severely obese”—with a body mass index over 40.) The broad-bodied Precious and her overweight mom are shown as the victim and perpetrator of the most outlandish ghetto cruelties, and they’re set off against the slender, gorgeous (and light-skinned) members of the bourgeoisie who try to help them.
So fatness serves as a marker of race and class—no surprise there. But what does the film have to say about the causes of obesity among poor black women? The mainstream liberals who are likely to be the movie's biggest fans tend to argue that poor people get fat because they lack access to fresh produce, health clubs, green spaces, or any of the other luxuries that keep rich white folks thin. According to the movie, though, Precious has grown enormous for reasons that have little to do with her "obesogenic" environment.
How, exactly, did Precious get so fat?
1) Her mother force-feeds her. When Precious confesses the depravity of her home life to a social worker, she makes a point of saying that she's coerced into eating even when she's not hungry. In another scene, the abusive mother makes Precious eat a dish of pig's feet and macaroni and cheese. Neglectful moms are often blamed for childhood obesity, but the idea that a parent might force-feed her kids derives from a rather antiquated theory first posed 60 years ago by the doctor and psychoanalyst Hilda Bruch. According to Bruch, mothers express their own anxiety and disappointment through overfeeding.
2) She wasn't breast-fed. When Mom has her own climactic meeting with the social worker, she tearfully admits to having bottle-fed Precious. Why? Because her man was drinking all of her breast milk. There's at least the implication that some of Precious' problems—including, perhaps, her weight—were the result of lousy postnatal care. A number of studies have suggested that nursing offers some protection against childhood obesity, perhaps because breast-fed infants are better able to gauge when they're satiated. (These claims are hotly disputed.)
3) She's a binge-eater. The film doesn't place all the blame on poor parenting. At one point, Precious consumes a 10-piece bucket of purloined fried chicken in one sitting—and then vomits at the end of her binge. Once she's escaped from her abusive home, she owns up to eating "too much sometimes" and gobbles down a second helping of dinner. The message is clear: This girl knows how to stuff her face, even when Mom's not around.
4) She loves McDonald's. Nor could Precious have been saved by a trip to the farmer's market. While she's at the hospital, having just given birth to her son, a sexy male nurse tries to persuade her to change her diet. But she and her friends have no interest in his "organic fruits and vegetables"; they just want to go to McDonald's.
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A guest post from Slate food writer, Sara Dickerman:
I shed a few raspberry vinegar tears at the passing of the frizzy-haired food maven Sheila Lukins, who, along with her former partner in the Silver Palate franchise, Julie Rosso, was, and is, one of my cooking inspirations. Though the country is obsessed with Julia Child this summer, in the 1980s, Rosso and Lukins truly mobilized American home cooks with their Silver Palate cookbooks, which combined then-adventurous ingredients, and French-y techniques with American whimsy. First, as the owners of an Upper West Side Deli/catering mecca, they glamorized brunch and high-end deli fare. With their line of fancy mustards, chutneys, and vinegars, they goosed the specialty food market with a dash of French country chic, and with their cookbook, they got an entire country eating brie and Chicken Marbella. I’ve always argued that because of the logistical demands of feeding hundreds of people at a time, caterers make the most usable cookbooks—think Ina Garten and Martha Stewart—and Lukins and Rosso set the standard. The three cookbooks they worked on together The Silver Palate Cookbook, The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, and The New Basics were extremely approachable in technique, but never plain. In fact it was their inclination toward frivolous ornamentation that may have made food-lovers get a little tired of the silver palate aesthetic in the mid-nineties—the sun-dried tomato that broke the camel’s back. Lukins’ work after she split with Rosso—her populist Parade columns and her ever more eclectic cookbooks—didn’t quite capture the zeitgeist the way her earlier works did, but she remained a potent, more populist advocate for the pleasures of homemade food in the face of convenience food and casual-dining chains. I’ll miss her voice. - Sara Dickerman
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I'll say this for the excerpt from Frank Bruni's memoir that appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine: Never before has a story of bulimia made me so desperately hungry. "Macaroni and cheese. There was macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it's sort of congealed and stiff at the edges." Yes, yes—me, too!
It's a wonderful piece, but I'm a little bothered by what it says, or implies, about our relationship with food. Bruni makes it sound as if he's been endlessly skirting between the Scylla of overeating and the Charybdis of bulimia. (According to Michael Pollan's blurb for the book, he's "plumbing the depths of our personal and collective eating disorders.") Yet there's no real evidence that the author was ever fat to begin with. Sure, he may have been chubby as a kid, but according to the memoir, he was 5-foot-10 in high school, and about 180 pounds. That translates to a body mass index of 25.8, or just barely "overweight," according to the standard cutoffs.
If anything, Bruni seems to have been much healthier than most Americans. Studies have repeatedly found that those who register as slightly overweight (on body mass index) live longer than people in the "normal" range. Bruni's a clear example of why that might be the case: As the star of his high-school swim team, he spent hours in the pool every day—a practice that surely contributed more muscle mass, and an inflated BMI. (At the time, writes Bruni, his doctor recommended that he lose "5 to 10 pounds." That was bad advice.)
Another clue emerges when Bruni shows up for his freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. He signs up for a fitness class, but at the first meeting "the teacher talked about something called a body-fat index, then produced a contraption with pinchers to grab and measure any folds of fat around our waists ... I registered a higher body fat index than half of the other students. And dropped the class later that same day." But if he was fatter that half of the other students, that means he was thinner than half of them, too. Young Bruni was exactly average.
It's fine with me if Frank Bruni wants to be skinny for aesthetic reasons. (In the Times piece, at least, he never claims another motivation for his diets and purges.) But let's be careful about what we call overeating. If he wasn't putting his body at risk, then why make it sound like a problem?
Crusty Mac 'n Cheese photograph courtesy of Spike Mafford/Getty Images.
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Top Chef has deteriorated season after season—elimination challenges have gotten predictable, product placement ever more obtrusive, the contestants more highbrow. Much of what I enjoyed about the earlier seasons was the amateurism of the professionals—few were so accomplished you couldn't critique their creations without thinking, however unrealistically, that you could do better. That feeling has slowly dissipated as more talented contestants have competed, and it certainly completely disappeared tonight, with the premiere of Top Chef: Masters—a competition for already established top chefs.
Given this, I was highly skeptical of the show. But Masters redeemed the franchise. Four professionals are pitted against one another in a chance to win a spot in the final competition. These masters have less at stake than their Top Chef predecessors—they're competing for charities, not for their careers—and they're more experienced, so it's understandable they'd be more relaxed and able to partake in some repartee, which works to the show's advantage. Other highlights: The most cocky of the chefs, Michael Schlow, went down in the quickfire challenge. We saw some great improvisation from cowboy chef Tim Love.
What really won me over, though, was the humble and talented Hubert Keller. He sweetly admitted how disconcerting it is to win a "lifetime achievement" award when his career is going strong. Despite his haute French background, he tickled junior Girl Scouts with his whimsical whipped cream shaped like a mouse (and was genuinely ecstatic when they loved it).
We'll see how the show is the next several weeks when it can't ride on Keller's charm and genius. It has its definite flaws—it lacks a clear Tom Colicchio-type head judge. (James Oseland of Saveur was clearly trying to play that role, but hasn't pulled it off.) Host Kelly Choi hasn't found her groove. Just when you're starting to get to know the contestants, they get kicked off the show. The challenges are as gimmicky as ever. But there was something incredibly gratifying about watching (spoiler alert) Hubert, the traditional old man beat out the hearty young players. Hubert has me hooked, and I plan to cheer him on in the finale.