Dear Ms. Kipnis,

I have been reading and greatly enjoying your book Against Love. I was especially reveling in the discreet wickedness of agreeing with the delightfully acerbic proclamations on the dullness of marriage while sharing a subway seat with my own blissfully unaware husband. What stopped me short this afternoon, near the end of the book, was this little phrase, first uttered on page 194 and spilling over onto 195:

“Let’s not even get into American fatness!”

Since we do not, as you say, get into it, I can only assume your thoughts on the subject. I imagine they go something like this: due to some form of alienation, probably work-related as well as relational, Americans are driven to seek pleasure by stuffing their faces (more than other nationalities), elegantly explaining the trend toward American girthiness.

If this is indeed your line of thinking (though much simplified by my translation, I’m sure) I would like to warn you, as a friendly adviser, of making such bald assertions. It seems to me that overconsumption is not simply an American problem, first, and second: overconsumption of food is not the sole coil of the fat.

It seems that when I go to fast food places, there are invariably more thin than fat people eagerly crowding the counter, renaming the days of the week by the sandwich on sale. Grocery stores in rich, primarily white (and slender) neighbourhoods are roughly five times larger than the store in my poor, primarily Mediterranean (and stout) neighbourhood, with an array of food (not all low-fat, low-cal, low-carb, mind you) that would astound the waddling contessas who I see buying cabbage, parsley, and potatoes at No Frills.

What I would like to enunciate to you in no uncertain terms is this: fat people, as a whole, are no more guilty of overconsumption than thin people. Fat people are simply unlucky enough to have the biological predisposition of publicly displaying any indiscretions (sometimes displaying even in the absence of indiscretion), whereas thin people get off scot-free, regardless of their habits. Did you ever see a stranger scrutinize the contents of a slender person’s grocery cart?

I found it amusing that you included the following disclaimer, after hinting at the sinfulness of fat Americans, at the bottom of page 195: “It must be added that in raising questions about the compensatory aspects of commodity culture we must also be careful to avoid the annoying moralizing asceticism and false rectitude sometimes associated with this line of thinking. The anti-wrinkle cycle on my automatic dryer is an authentic pleasure, and shoe shopping is clearly preferable as a leisure activity to gathering around a campfire playing homemade musical instruments and singing labor anthems.” [Emphasis mine.]

I sincerely hope you extend this privilege of “avoid[ing] annoying moralizing asceticism” to the fat as well as the thin, since they may both be guilty of similar indulgences, and cannot be divided nicely into two camps (those who indulge in shoe shopping vs. those who indulge in Big Macs.) As a fat person working on a degree in nutrition who takes nutritional concepts very seriously, and who also takes seriously the marginalization of any group based on whatever characteristic has been selected to represent the evil-of-the-month (corpulence or, perhaps, religious headdress, or maybe a fondness for tattoos), I can only warn you to tread lightly in this place. The ice is thin, and fat people have the advantage of buoyancy.

I would like to thank you for your book, and compliment the amount of sheer knowledge it displays, as well as the mental complexity required to sculpt this mass of knowledge into something engaging, witty, and thought-provoking.

Yours fleshily, unapologetically,

Michelle

She later responded, but unfortunately, my email account was deleted out from under me, and all the messages with it, so I cannot post her response here. I only remember that it had something to do with her conflating fat acceptance and feederism. Agh.