Christopher Forth on Fat: A Cultural History

Last November, I spoke to Christopher E. Forth about his book, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life (Reaktion Books, 2019), which he describes as a ‘study in the formation of stereotypes’, and in particular the negative stereotypes that have accreted round fat, and fat people, over time.

Those stereotypes may have gone into overdrive in the latter part of the 20th century, but Chris shows that there was already ambivalence about corpulence in the ancient world: the building blocks of later stereotypes were fashioned early.

Rather than the familiar narrative of ‘something good becoming ugly and then bad’, Chris shows how an early ambiguity mutated over time. He also reminds us that ‘fat’ is not just an adjective, it’s also a noun: it’s a substance with properties of its own that played an important, sometimes surprising, part in human history.

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