in praise of full fat

The daughters of Leucippus, Phoebe and Hilaira, were abducted by Castor and Pollux, and it was immortalized by Rubens in life-sized imagery. The modern obsession with thinness runs completely afoul of the natural human form. A Rubenesque woman is not “fat”. Her pulchritude is just right. Note that the brothers here are not thin either. A day at a truly good art museum would be just the place to get the real human picture, the one before our invention ran amok, before photographs of elaborately painted and posed stick figures started undermining all our ideas of how we should look.

Yesterday I stopped for a quadruple espresso to which I planned to add plenty of cream, but had to watch a young girl pouring soy “milk” into a coffee drink before she could get to my order. It almost put me off my mission. When I asked for some cream, and it became apparent that I meant actual cream, the poor kid looked panicked. Luckily, I felt affable and settled for half and half, thinking of those corporate coffee houses with long rows of thermoses containing a dazzling array of choices, but none of them cream. Some do not even have half and half. Some don’t even have regular milk! Living dangerously there means getting yourself some steamed 1% milk with your espresso. They mean 1% fat milk, but call it 1% milk, which is just right: 1% milk and 99% water.

And what about those people pouring cloudy-blue faux milk into their coffee and onto their cereal? Ew! What on earth is the point of ordering a latté with skim milk? They’re watered down enough already. An actual latté is made of espresso and steamed cream. I knew a Frenchman with a deli here in the United States, and he could only bring himself to split the difference. His lattés were made with steamed half and half. I submit that if you’re going to take it down any further than that, you might at least have the decency to call it something else. A skimpé! Tea!

Something called “nonfat half and half” has appeared in the dairy section of my local market. Its label is quite similar to that of regular half and half, and one day, without my glasses and contact lenses, my hand grabbed for the wrong blur. When I poured some into my coffee at home, there was shortly a coffee disaster sprayed all over my kitchen. I flipped. Fumbling around for my glasses, worried I’d just poured some sourdough starter into my coffee or something, I finally took stock of the mimic container and, oh, gross, the list of poisons contained in this concatenation of nonfattitude was as good as just using the word “strychnine” and calling it a day. Great. Have a skinny corpse.

But -- that’s just it -- you won’t! Laboratory food makes you fatter than anything else. Actual food, basic unadulterated ordinary organic matter to put in your mouth and swallow, is not fattening, even when you’ve mixed it with sugar and cream and poured rich toppings on it. If you get enough exercise, you’re jake. If you do not get enough exercise, it will not go any easier for you to cut your fat intake. At best you will be a thinner physical wreck, but probably not even that. It is extremely difficult to reach the feeling of satiation without enough fat in a meal. This is not because one is bourgeois. This is because your body needs these nutrients. So meals with no fat will almost unerringly put you eating exponentially more because you still feel too hungry, and sustaining this goofy behavior will weaken you before too long as well.

Open your mouth in front of a mirror. Note the incisors. These are for cutting meat. You also have teeth for grinding vegetation. You are an omnivore. You need both plant and animal fats, and fiber. Try going out to dinner at a fancy French restaurant one night. They will give you small portions of delicious food from each of the food groups, and all covered with rich sauces. Check out how much better you feel after you have done that. Glory in the complete lack of any snack ideation in the hours after this meal, and do use this feeling of well being toward some good end. Unless you have unwisely ordered too much food, you should feel just right when you are done, ready to go out dancing, or for a nice long walk, even if you’ve had a long, hard day. At a minimum, your attitude will be vastly improved. Fat is the reason.

You are supposed to have it. It is optimal to make sure you get the right kind of fats, that you balance the kinds of fats. I’m not advocating a diet of grease. It seems to me that if Americans were the right kind of well fed, we’d be happy enough to work very hard to make sure everyone on earth was as well fed. The attitude adjustment from proper nutrition over the brute full stomach is outright breathtaking.

Look. Didn’t you read about the guy who ate fast food for a month? His doctors tried to get him to call it off, his health deteriorated so quickly. How many rosy-cheeked vegans have you ever met? How many people do you know with high blood pressure or diabetes from eating basic American laboratory food all their lives? I’d sooner eat six pork chops than one pat of margarine. Look at all the high fructose corn syrup in just about everything for sale at the supermarket. They are finally pulling the hydrogenated vegetable oils out of things, but some companies still try to trick you by listing them as “margarine” or “shortening”. Don’t even get me started on the levels of salt and preservatives, the heinous lists of seriously inedible chemicals. The modern fixation on weight loss, coupled with our perceived need for speed, is closer to killing us than feeding us.

No. There are a million ways to consume delicious food such that your energy and outlook are optimized and you actually lose weight. Or if you do not lose it, you probably needed to gain it. Our lives need to be adjusted to make up for the inactivity of modern conveniences, not our diets turned to nutrient-free poison to compensate for our inactivity. We have to learn to reset our body images back to a truly appropriate form... not by the standards on television, but by the pure standards of basic humanity, before the fashion magazines and automatic dishwashers and fast cars. Refer to Phoebe and Hilaira above, who were brutally snatched from their home by a couple of rowdy hunks one day, ravished and then married to their abductors.

Look at them! Big strong men grappling with perfectly womanly flesh, and all with looks on their faces closer to love than greed or anger or alarm. This is a painting of a human ideal, of perfect fitness, in the transcendent turbulence of entering into marriage. It does not get any better than this, no matter what the billboards are pushing. So the next time you order a glass of milk and the waiter asks if you want 1% or skim, keeping in mind the ideal vitality, energy and spirit, tell him, no, you would like milk. Make such a hairy deal out of it that the manager runs out to get you the real thing. Then go out dancing.