Abstract
-
Fat bodies are not, fait accompli, bad. Yet in our international research, we found
overwhelmingly that fat functioned as a marker to indicate health or lack of
health. A body with fat was simply and conclusively unhealthy. This article
reports on how this unbalanced view of fat was tied to assessments of healthy
bodies that were achieved by the act of looking. Despite the efforts of health
education in each of the three countries in our study, children and young people
cited the act of looking at bodies to assess health and when did they arrived at the
conclusion that fat on bodies is unmistakably bad. The article uses a Foucauldian
analysis of medical perception together with material from Conrad Gessner’s
sixteenth century Historia Animalium to outline how the children in our study
placed great reliance on information about fat to make almost exclusively visual
assessments of health. The article makes the case that, despite a great deal of
health education in schools, these judgments reveal a tendency for children to
make incorrect assessments of health.