Diet as a demarcation of class
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Fat end the wedge between classes, talks about how diet is one of the ways that class can be demarcated. Said differently, the more you earn the more you can spend on your healthy lifestyle.
A survey released in Britain yesterday found the fatter you were, the less you earned, with lower-paid clerical workers nine times more likely to be overweight (75 per cent) than those at upper-management level (8 per cent).
Lack of money can lead to poor diet since the fat underclass work night shift, or double shifts in low-wage jobs, or they don’t work at all. They buy frozen or takeaway food, they do not know how to cook and their children are fussy eaters. They line up under the fluorescent lights of McDonald’s unable to resist the offer of an upsize. They buy the wrong cuts of meat in the supermarket and they load trolleys with processed food such as chips and frozen pizzas that not only contain an environmentally unsound surplus of packaging, but enough additives to give their children attention deficit disorder.
The middle classes, meanwhile, have developed an almost religious fervour around exercise and nutrition, none of which comes cheap. Look in their shopping trolley: artisan bread ($10) that weighs a tonne, soups in cartons from chilled shelves instead of in tins on shelves, anything labelled “organic” or “free range”, freshly squeezed juices and anything marketed as fresh, from pasta to seafood to sauces. It costs a lot to follow this lifestyle.
I’m not sure I like the tone of the writing, but I agree there’s something there. Part of it is education, and part of it is the economic power to make certain choices, something I often think about when I’m buying organic veggies and suffer sticker shock.
