((Not sure in which forum this would have to go... I considered the "Food Talk" one, but it's not really about sharing food recipes and ideas, so it didn't feel 100% appropriate either.))
A few months ago, I read a book about what "being English" means, and recently got to think about it again. While this book wasn't about dieting nor losing weight, it included a part about food & drinking habits, and at some point, the author mentioned something along the lines of English people being caught in a culture of "all or nothing" thinking when it comes to those (for instance, teetotalling vs. binge drinking). She linked it to England's Reform-related past (same with other, mostly "Northern" countries, related historically to that phenomenon: Puritan influence, Germany, the USA...), i.e. "work", "austerity" and "moderation" ethics. She seemed to pitch those against countries that didn't live so much through that historical change (like France, Spain, and other "Mediterranean" countries, cf. those that remained mostly Catholic). Those supposedly had a different approach to food in general, more centred on the positive aspects of meals as gatherings and on food as something pleasurable that has nothing to do with "sin" or whatever.
What does this have to do on a weight loss-related forum, you may ask?
Consider, among other things:
- The amount of threads/posts about "I've been bad today", "I overate and now I'm feeling guilty", "bad foods", "I've been naughty b/c I ate a cookie", and so on.
- The media and society's public displays in general, enforcing a culture focused on "thin is in", "you can never be too thin", vs. "fat people" labelled as "slobs", "lazy", "useless".
- Weight loss books with titles such as "French women don't get fat" (or Japanese women, or...).
I've been on this forum (which seems to me still has a largely US base) for years, and on similar blogs/websites that are often written by people in the USA. Actually, I used to be on such sites more often, yet I had to take a break (still regularly have) precisely because after a while, talks about "guilt" and such just felt too negative. That said, not every, let's say, "anglo-saxon" dieter talks that way.
And since I'm French and live in France, I've also tried to discretly check around me to see if people behaved differently in terms of their relationship with food. I mean, after all, French gastronomy is not a myth, we do enjoy our 365+ sorts of cheese, preferably smelly, and my country is indeed renowned for good meals (we also do have McDonald's joints, but shhhh, you can't say it out loud ). Well, I can't say the experience has been really conclusive. Some people here do have a naturally healthy approach to food; and just as many, it seems, think in terms of "bad" and "guilt".
What do YOU think? Not only you who are in the USA or the UK, of course. But do you feel that historically speaking, the influence mentioned by the author of the book I read is real? That everybody around you is caught into a mentality of "all or nothing" and/or of "guilt, bad, must be repressed, if you can't be moderate then you're a bad person"... when food is concerned? Do you feel that this would have anything to do with religion at its root? Are you under the impression that countries like France or Italy are some kind of paradise where almost everybody's thin and has no problem with food? Or, on the contrary, did you have the opportunity to compare, and feel that it has nothing to do with culture, that it's the same everywhere? That it's just bulls**t? That it might have played a part, but not an important one? That the influence is from Christian culture overall, not only Protestant ethics? Anything else?
I'm just curious about what other people think about such ideas and arguments. I'm not so convinced myself, but it's also true that there is A LOT of negative thinking around in general, and a tendency to lay the blame on the person him/herself, as if our relation to food defined who we were as human beings altogether. (I hope I'm still making sense, it's late here.) So yeah. Just curious.
The book sounds fascinating. Since I started researching my family history, I have gotten interested in what was going on while my ancestors were in a particular place. My own background is mostly Scottish, although I had a great grandfather who was from the Nancy,France area.
I have been to Europe a few times, and I sure didn't see as many overweight people as I see here in the US. That includes northern Europe.
I particularly remember seeing senior aged women riding bicycles in Holland and Germany. Certainly we here in the States are always hearing that the French, the Germans or whoever get much more exercise in their daily lives than we do.
It could be the fun and wonder of exploring a new culture, but I thought, in general, that casual food was better than ours. I know there are Mc Donalds, but there are also non chain or franchise eating establishments that cater to the natives that have really good and interesting things to eat.
My son and his family [wife and two small children] lived in Torino, Italy, for a couple of years when his job sent him there. My grandson went to a preschool where the children had a nice lunch menu and where they spent some time over the lunch meal, and had multiple courses of food! It appeared that they ate "real food" and enjoyed it. This was not a fancy or elite place - everyone seemed pretty middle class.
We ate at what I think you might call Bistros several times. The food was inexpensive and wonderful. The Italian restaurants seem to have a handle on some of the quirks of American tourists. They served a dish that involved a lightly poached egg on top of Asparagus. I guess some of us won't eat lightly cooked eggs.
Anyway, I didn't mean this to be a travelogue about me...Does Catholicism or Protestantism have anything to do with this? It might, but I think it may have more to do with the availability of good things to eat, and a culture that respects food, perhaps because they have known more deprivation than we have, at least lately. I think as a group, Europeans are more active than we are, and they don't necessarily have the attitude that bigger, more, and meatier is always better like we do. This more is better thing does kind of speak to the all or nothing idea which also seems to me to be related to perfectionism. My stereotype is that Protestants are expected to try for perfection maybe more than Catholics, because we protestants have the idea, which may be incorrect, that Catholics can repair their religious or moral imperfections by going to confession.
Given that religion has had such an important role over the course of history, I guess I will go with influences of the Christian culture overall as being important along with other things - like climate, availability of food and other economic influences. Perhaps Europe was slower to develop technologies which discourage physical activity.
Being overweight is not a good thing here in the US. As a society, we are incredibly mean to and about overweight women, especially. I think the guilt comes from the way they have been treated rather than any philosophical influences.
I haven't been fat all my life like some of the folks on here, so I haven't suffered so much, but just imagine what it is like to have strangers comment on what you are eating in a restaurant...this kind of behavior makes people feel like they are guilty, hence the I'm bad, I ate bad food stuff. It seems to me that only in the wilds of America would anyone dare comment to a perfect stranger about their weight.
We have the attitude that bigger is better as far as our food is concerned, but that being fat is some sort of moral problem. What is a person to do?
Such an interesting post! Is the book you read available in English? If so, what's the title?
Yep, the book's available in English: "Watching the English", by Kate Fox (who's a British anthropologist). Come to think about it, I may have been a little mistaken about the 'religious/puritanical' aspect in it—I read a couple of other books and articles of the same kind at roughly the same period, so I probably accidentally mixed data here, and Fox actually brushes more rapidly than I remembered about the potential 'religious' influence (but I still remember this bit, and I'm positive I must have read it *somewhere*).
Anyway. Reading my original post again, I wanted to take a sneak peek into the book. The "food" part is only one chapter, not its contents as a whole. Here's a short excerpt (where she considers English people's reaction to expressing interest in food):
In most other cultures, people who care about food, and enjoy cooking and talking about it, are not singled out, either sneeringly or admiringly, as 'foodies'. Keen interest in food is the norm, not the exception: what the English call a 'foodie' would just be a normal person, exhibiting a standard, healthy, appropriate degree of focus on food. What we see as foodie obsession is in other cultures the default mode, not something unusual or even noticeable.
Among th English, such an intense interest in food is regarded by the majority as at best rather odd, an at worst somehow morally suspect—not quite proper, not quite right.
Regarding the catholic vs. protestant aspect, you're not mistaken, we (I was raised a Catholic) do have that confession bit—confess your sins to the priest, and he will intercess to God for your sins to be forgiven. Religion doesn't hold that much importance in life nowadays, with its gradual loss of sway compared to secular power (separation of Church and State and all that), but before the last 100-150 years, it was just such a normal part of everyday life that such ways of thinking probably permeated a lot of things nonetheless. I.e. usury and working with 'money' in general used to be considered historically as degrading jobs in France and in a lot of mostly Catholic-influenced countries (partly due to biblical examples), while if I remember well banking and such similar jobs weren't so badly considered after a while in England and more 'northern' countries where the Reform had had more influence. And I think I'm about to digress here, so I'd better stop. ^^;
Speaking of bicycles—this too may be a cultural thing. I know I have a very hard time pedalling on a bike in a gym because I'm wired to think that biking is a means of transportation, and so if it doesn't take me from place A to place B, something is wrong. A lot of cities here make efforts to integrate special lanes for bicycles, so that people can bike in town without always being in the middle of heavy, dangerous traffic. Perhaps also the difference comes from our countries' sizes: France or England are like handkerchiefs, compared to the USA, often you only have to bike for 5 km before finding a village... There are a lot of places you can reach fast and easily without necessarily having to resort to driving. Of course a lot of people use their cars for all and everything, it's the same everywhere now, but I still think that as a society, we have kept in part this habit of walking/biking.
Re: "bigger is better", it's starting to invade us too, alas. I tend to ***** to my friends about how I'd like restaurants to offer the option of paying less to have a smaller portion, since I can't finish my plate with 'normal' portions that have gotten bigger and bigger in many places. I've already ordered stuff like kebabs on plates, and brought back the equivalent of two more meals at home as 'doggy bags', because the plate was so full I could never have eaten that in one sitting. (I try to force myself not to get into the thinking of "I'll eat everything because I want my money's worth"... instead, I just look silly, asking for doggy bags in public places. )
As for strangers commenting on what you eat in public: you may be interested to know that Kate Fox also mentions something similar in her book, about the difference in behaviours between English and US people. According to her, for instance, US tourists will quite easily talk about their divorces, weight, salaries, etc. even to almost complete strangers, whereas an English person will only mention those things to close friends or relatives (and even that's not for sure). I can't really compare myself, since the contacts I have with both English and American people are mostly on internet, where being anonymous can greatly help in talking about stuff we would never mention IRL. But it was an interesting part to read.
Very nice set of observations, Kery - very thoughtful.
I am not particularly knowledgeable about British culture but I can tell you that in the US, where I am from and live, the Puritan threads are woven into our cultural fabric so tightly that many people do not even realize they are there. Even people not raised as Christians or as part of the mainstream Christian culture in the US imbibe those Puritan values in the air we breathe.
And because of that I think you are quite right that those values drive a lot of the moral force that people give to their food choices. Gluttony is a sin, indulgence is deserving of punishment - these are unquestionably Puritan-driven value statements.
I often advise people here at 3FC to work on removing the language of morality from their thinking about their eating plans. Eating off-plan isn't naughty or sinful. It isn't a crime or a sin. And it doesn't require punishment or penance.
The other element that drives people's strong emotions about food in the US is the consistently unreachable expectations placed on women by our society. We imbibe the notion that our value as women is tightly bound to our appearance; if we slip up and "let ourselves go", we have not only become ugly but we have lost our value and failed as women. If we find it challenging to whip up healthy delicious meals that our families cheerfully, uncomplainingly eat, then we have failed as women.
When you consider these combined pressures (and many others I don't have time to get into right now, such as the way the food industry manipulates consumers and the lack of access to nutritious food that plagues many poorer folks) it is no wonder that the average US diet is horrible and the nation has a severe and growing problem with obesity.
"Mediterranean" eating vs. "Northern" eating?
). Well, I can't say the experience has been really conclusive. Some people here do have a naturally healthy approach to food; and just as many, it seems, think in terms of "bad" and "guilt".
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