Go to America. Get Fat. ??? Profit.
I feel as though my life is all over the place now, but I’m glad to be posting even if I am a little late. Haha!
I usually post about myself and personal experience, but today I saw an article on immigrants and fatness. Because everyone should know it’s not okay to be fat, guize!
*sigh*
Let’s get this big, fat party rolling… (Get it? Because fatties are round! So they roll!)
This article is actually pretty interesting. It’s title, “Does this Green Card Make Me Look Fat,” is a little off-putting, though.
The article starts off by mentioning that people who immigrate to the United States tend to become fat like those fatty fat fat Americans. It totally ignores the fact that many immigrants don’t live in areas where fresh, healthy options are readily available to them at decent prices, but did you really expect them to?
Honestly, even though the title seems to suggest that the article is all about fatness, fatness is actually just a glancing subject; the article is more about people eating certain foods in order to feel that they belong. That’s a really odd and confusing notion to me, but I was born and raised in California and have never left, save for a day or two in Mexico, and I’m white.
The article describes experiments on food choices with Asian-American college students. Some of the college students’ American-ness (I guess) was questioned before they were allowed to pick or write down their favorite foods.
The article reads,
“To measure the effect of identity threat on food preferences, a white interviewer asked half the participants if they spoke English before starting the first experiment. Afterward, the students were asked to write down their favourite foods.
Fully three-quarters of the Asian Americans questioned about their English wrote down a typical American dish as their favourite, compared with just one-quarter of Asian Americans not asked about their language. White participants’ favourite foods were consistent, regardless of whether they were asked if they spoke English. “
That’s something I’ve never thought about, and, to me, is pretty interesting. Does anyone have any experience with this? Have you ever felt this way about foods that you or your family traditionally eat? Share with me! I’m interested!
Anyway, the article goes on to link the fat-talk promised in the title to a really interesting study on society by mentioning that when a person was questioned about their American-ness and chose the more “stereotypically American foods,” they consumed “on average, an extra 182 calories, 12 grams of fat, and seven grams of saturated fat than participants whose identities weren’t questioned.”
To me it seemed like they had this really interesting study and were trying to find a way to get people to read it so they slapped the ever-controversial fat label on it so people would stop and be mad at the fatties (because fatties are so deserving of hate) and they happened to catch a few fat activists too.
Always happy to be a trigger word.
Big Smiles!
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Seems to me that by asking if Asian-Americans if they speak English, you’re questioning their “American-ness”, so of course they’re going to write down more traditional American dishes as their favorites, thus skewing your results. Do those who were asked about speaking English before being asked what their favorite foods are really prefer traditional American dishes over Asian dishes? There’s no way to tell from this study, they’ve skewed the results by asking about language before asking about food preferences. If they really wanted to know about Asian-American food preferences and caloric intake, they should have asked about food preferences first, and then asked if they spoke primarily English later.
I completely agree with vesta44. This seems like a really poorly designed study. It’s also worth noting that asking an Asian-looking person in America if they speak English is rude as fuck :O
I think this was the point of the study; that is, the question was asked intentionally to see what effect it would have on the answers of the survey:
“To measure the effect of identity threat on food preferences, a white interviewer asked half the participants if they spoke English before starting the first experiment. “
I think that people might be misreading what they were doing in the study. I think the study was designed to see whether feeling pressure to ‘belong’ to American society would change the answers people gave when listing their favourite foods. Half the survey participants were pressured by asking them the question about speaking English. 3/4 of those people listed more Western foods as their preference. The other half of the participants in the study, the control group, were NOT asked the speaking English question, and only 1/4 of of them listed a Western food as the favourite. The results suggest that if people feel questioned about whether they’re ‘really’ Americans, they will change their behaviour, or at least their stated behaviour.
It didn’t test whether they actually changed what they eat, just whether they changed what they said they like to eat. So I agree with lexidi’s conclusion that this was an interesting study about pressure to conform that got tied to OMGebsity to try to sell it to readers.
I suppose “stop being racist fucks” wouldn’t sell as well as “American culture will infect the azns with OMGbesity!”
I don’t have any better thoughts than the above so I’ll just chip in the boring but accurate “y’all are right!”
I’m not sure if this is particularly applicable…but w.t.heck, it’s Mother’s Day and I’m feeling a bit entitled…”Because I’m the Mommy, That’s Why!” When I was listening to Susan Koppelman read at the recent PCA conference she read about Jewish Immigrants back in the 30′s and how when they came to America from Europe where they had been starving, a symbol of success was to come to America, and have enough to eat so they could get fat. As those original immigrants began to have kids and the memories of the past scarcity of food dwindled, part of their assimilation into American culture was their embarrassment of being fat. Having the food available and not eating it became a new measure of their Americanization. In my opinion, very sad.
Yeah, I think that this study doesn’t reveal much except how sensitive people can be to the state of their assimilation. It says nothing about what these people would actually eat. The article you found this study in was simply participating in some good ol’ fashioned fatsploitation by suggesting an obesity link where there’s only a sociological link at best. But interesting find.
Peace,
Shannon