The Rise of Obesity in Europe: A Twentieth Century Food History

Abstract

Oddy, Derek J., Atkins, Peter J. and Amilien, Virginia ( eds ) The Rise of Obesity in Europe: A Twentieth Century Food History , Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate Publishing , 2009 £60 xv+246 pp . ISBN 9780754676966 ( hbk) ISBN 9780754693956 (pbk ) Obesity has been referred to as the climate change of public health, because it is big, complicated and difficult to turn around. A recent study of obesity in the USA suggests that, by 2030, over 50% of its population will be obese. Similarly alarming projections have been made for the UK. Although the methodologies underlying these projections appear robust, there are some good reasons why society might never reach this parlous state. The most unpleasant is the post-peak oil situation, which might leave tractors without fuel. The food industry would become more tightly regulated than today, although that would engender a major political fight. And finally, cultural acceptance of fatness may radically shift, although it must be said that mass obesity has occurred in spite of prevailing norms of thinness. When ‘unknowns’ outnumber the ‘knowns’ it’s precisely the time to check any future speculations against the past. While mass overweight and obesity are undoubtedly new, some concerns have been present across Europe for over a century. This is a topic which this book claims to be first ever to address. Divided into three sections, the book derives from a symposium in 2007 supported by SIFO, the Norwegian state consumer organisation, and thus gives a necessarily scatter-gun account of both food insufficiency – not implied by the title – and food abundance in a number of European countries, including Austria. Russia, Slovenia, Britain, Germany (East and West), Spain, Norway, France, Czechoslovakia. Obviously this is hardly a comprehensive list (while the presence of Russia is moot), but it is a solid start. Actually the title is a bit of a tease. Seventy-odd pages into the book obesity hardly features. What we are given instead are some fascinating chapters on matters such as the dietary circumstances facing populations in the Austrian Tyrol in the early twentieth century – a story more of survival rather than getting by; food provision in Russia since the first world war, culminating in a few sparse words on overweight today; diet and nutrition in tiny Slovenia, apparently a story of progressively improving choice and diversity of supply; and the situation in Britain, already before World War II, in contrast to these others, a far more developed, partly Americanised, food economy, although still by the mid-1950s dominated by the standard diet of meat, potatoes, and vegetables, which progressively gave way to the ready meal and sedentary lifestyle. Part 2 looks at industrial and commercial influences in food production and consumption, and begins with food trademarks and advertising in Germany, a process of branding that began before 1900. The author takes issue with Vance Packard’s old notion that marketers are ‘hidden persuaders’ but rather that they were responding to ‘consumer desire’ (which might not explain expanding use of food additives, salts, sugars and fats, processing technologies, etc., behind the obesity epidemic today). A chapter covers food labelling in Spain for roughly a half century until 1975 and the theme of labelling continues with an examination of Norway. This suggests that food labelling is a conflict point between public health and individualistic health perspectives and the respective positions of state, industry and consumer. A chapter on sugar in France takes a much longer historical view, examining the sugar beet industry (strangely failing to mention that sugar beet production was prompted by the British blockage during the Napoleonic wars). Sugar’s popularity has now come into conflict with dietary recommendations, giving rise to the rumbling dispute, hardly confined to France, between commercial and public health goals. The following chapter, returning again to Norway, examines the tension between national, commercial and nutritional policy, focusing on the symbolic role of the ‘matpakke’, the Norwegian packed lunch, with its origins in the hard years of the 1920s, and current debates around the role of fat and sugar in the diet. Part 3 focuses on social and medical influences, with a chapter on Germany examining media narratives around nutrition from the 1930s until modern times, and a chapter on French medical discourse in the period 1850-1930. The account is fascinating for the heterogeneity of medical opinion. (One Dr Feuillade declaring in 1935 that only people who became fat in absence of overeating should be declared obese.) A similarly medical theme is found in a chapter on depression-era Britain. Here medical viewpoints highlighted undernutrition of the working class, the slimness of the sporty upper class and the podginess of the nouveau riche. While the cupboards of the poor were bare, the BMJ lamented the slimming craze of the daughters of the well-to-do. Post war Communist Czechoslovakia provides an interesting contrast. Anti-obesity campaigns began in 1960, some taking up the failings of the traditional diet while also attempting to combat the growing popularity (akin perhaps to jeans-wearing) of Hollywood-style diets. As in the West, aesthetic considerations trumped public health ones. A chapter on Germany, East and West, presents not dissimilar dilemmas through the prism of this divided society, with occupational-era West Germany being directly influenced by the American nutritional model and the East by more communal approaches. The book is concluded by a chapter by two of the book’s editors. This tries to develop an overall view based upon these diverse contents and all-too-briefly raises matters appertaining to today, such as the Common Agricultural Policy, population weight trends, and the question of the regulation of health claims. In my view, there is insufficient attention given to the development of an overall conceptual model, such as suggested by the UK Chief Scientist’s Foresight obesity study. Thus the editors fail to address the systematic character of the nutrition transition and propose, rather erroneously, that obesity is “ultimately” about the energy equation (i.e. energy balance). As Foresight showed, the energy equation may be at the centre of things, but there are no ‘ultimate causes’. The history of diet in the context of changes in the production and consumption system, much of which is discussed very effectively in this book, is a corrective to current simplistic explanations (i.e. “it’s their own fat fault”).