"The Food Artist" by Kristen McDermott
Fat? No, not fat. Not totally obese. She'd known obese people, back before the Great Reduction. She had never been really fat, not an "obee," and they were by now either slimmed down or dead. Most of them were dead. She was not fat. But she was clever. It took a special kind of mind to make something fattening out of a week's exchanges, and she had that kind of mind: creative, subtle. Hungry. Helen was a food artist.
She was well paid for her talent. Housewives would trade a week's allowance of tofu for a small bowl of Helen's marshmallow creme. Where do you get sugar! they would moan. Where do you get butter! And then would flee to avoid knowing. She wouldn't have told. If they knew how many apples or cherries it took to make a pint of simple syrup...how many fish she rendered, how many skinless chickens, to get precious oil...how many godforsaken hours it took to churn skimmed milk! No one could begin to pay that kind of price. Helen made no profit at all - and so her crime was worse than Aggravated Gluttony, far worse than Passing Contraband. It was, in fact, nearly Treason. Helen loved food. With a passion.
It was enough for her just to create felonious dishes. She didn't have to eat them - though, of course, sometimes she did. Helen was plump, perhaps - a bit pudgy, you might say - but in no way obese. And in her Spandies, those constrictive, totally illegal undergarments, she escaped detection.One day the madness would end, must end. TV stars would allow their cheeks to fill out, ever so slightly. Breasts would again become fashionable, not to say functional. Small children, watching their grandparents pause in mid-toe-touch to reminisce about ice cream, would demand to hear the beloved summer truck bell once more! Something would happen, someday, and she would have to be there to teach the new generation about cream, about cocoa, about fried clams. About the very word "fry," which had been stricken from every American dictionary.
When the National Diet was finally broken, Helen would be there, ready to cook. But it had been twenty-three years already and even Helen was beginning to forget what prosciutto tasted like. There had been people who were born and who died without ever knowing a Dove Bar. She had no heirs. She carried on alone.
Until at last a guilt-crazed customer led the Fat Police to the odor of vanilla wafting from Helen's kitchen vent. They were not gentle. Continue reading here.
http://www.fatso.com/fiction.htmlThe story above is about a fat hating culture..
Culture and obesity.Many different ways of seeing.Our cultural attitudes about fat are destructive.read about less destructive cultures views on obesity.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=193257§ioncode=26
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