Bear-Faced in Bombay

Seán Moran philosophically ponders plumptiousness.

- Sean Moran

The fussy bear in my photograph will only attack once it has confirmed you’re worth eating, it seems. If I stepped onto the weighing machine, I would surely pass his test: at the moment I’m trying to lose the ‘covid stone’ that many of us put on during lockdown. (A stone is an archaic measure of weight equal to fourteen imperial pounds, or just over six kilos.) Unlike the fabled ‘philosopher’s stone’ that transmuted base metal into gold, the covid stone was caused by our bodies transmuting weeks of overeating and underactivity into flab.

This is only the latest rise in a long-term global trend: more and more of the human race are becoming overweight or obese. The number of people living with obesity has tripled over the last forty years, according to the World Economic Forum in 2018. It has been largely a first-world problem until now, with almost two-thirds of the planet’s obese folks living in developed countries such as the USA and the UK, but it’s inching up the problem scale in the rest of the world too.

For most of history, this global weight gain would have been a cause for celebration. Until around the twentieth century, only the rich could afford to eat enough to be fat, so obesity was a signifier of prosperity. In fact, the stylish gentleman’s tradition of leaving the last button on a waistcoat undone started with Britain’s King Edward VII (18411910), who adopted the practice to accommodate his expanding royal frontage.