The Age of Fitness. Jürgen Martschukat

showed the emaciated bodies of African American children in the South, particularly Mississippi. Half the population was evidently starving in the country’s poorest and blackest state. In 1967, a TV documentary called Hunger in America (CBS) shocked the nation.³⁵

      In reality, then, the good news that Americans were the “best-fed people in world history” applied only to part of the population. In addition, since the 1950s, doubts had been raised as to whether these allegedly well-nourished people were also the fittest. Some questioned whether consumption, and if so, how much consumption, makes one sick and thus impedes one’s performance. The consequences of too much fatty and sweet food, too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, and too little exercise were subject to medical research and public debate. The main focus was on the heart attack, and soon experts had identified a correlation between weight or body fat and mortality. By the early 1950s, the press was already asserting that obesity was probably the greatest threat to human life in America. In a photo essay, LIFE magazine described excess weight as a plague.

      Slowly but surely, corpulence was interpreted as dangerous, and ever less as a sign of success and wellbeing. The endangerment of middle-aged, white, middle-class men emerged as the dominant trope: men who worked too much, neglected themselves and, as it was expressed at the time, put their health and their lives on the line as they strove to provide for their families and contribute to society.³⁶

Given the fear of body fat, it seemed plausible to blame fat as a substance. Although a distinction was soon being made between bad animal and good vegetable fats, American cuisine, like its Central European counterpart, was full of the bad variety. In contrast, Mediterranean cuisine, dominated by olive oil, was soon being praised on both sides of the Atlantic as the great role model. In any event, to continue eating in the same old way was compared to suicide and mass murder.³⁷ Public discourse made it abundantly clear that fat was the chief culprit, not least due to massive lobbying by the sugar industry. Yet sugar too was subject to similarly dramatic rhetoric and compared with heroin. In America, from the mid-1950s and the days of Dwight D. Eisenhower onward, the White House has been concerned with the fitness of Americans. Eventually, in 1969, the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health urged Americans to consume less fat, cholesterol, sugar, and salt. A trend known in 1970s Germany as the “health wave” now kicked off on both sides of the Atlantic.³⁸

      For Western consumer societies, the 1970s were a time of both consolidation and change, and the tensions between the achievement-oriented society and consumer society continued to grow. Nutrition and food played a central role here, and they carried an array of economic, social, and political meanings: from so-called countercuisine, which emerged along with alternative lifestyles in the 1960s and articulated an ecological and economic critique, to mass-produced industrial goods on an unprecedented scale. Chicken nuggets, to take one example, have nothing to do with chicken. From a somewhat longer-term perspective, the ensuing years and decades have shown that countercuisine and mass production are not necessarily antagonistic. Alternative health food stores, which sprang up in both West Germany and the United States in the early 1970s, developed into supermarket chains. The success of organic food as a mass-produced commodity demonstrates capitalism’s ability to co-opt critical forces.³⁹

To better understand the changes that occurred in the 1970s, we first need to scrutinize the economic and social crisis of that era. The United States was struggling with the high social, political, and financial costs of the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, a massive trade deficit and spiraling inflation, leading to stagnant and even falling real wages from 1973 onward. For many Americans, declining incomes were to persist over the following decades. The initial political and economic response was “less”: less government, less regulation, less welfare, fewer unions, less pay, less collective thinking, less redistribution. Conversely, there was an emphasis on more individual responsibility, more individual debt, and more individual profit. In the United States and in the capitalist world more generally, the 1970s marked the end of the long New Deal era, with a shift away from the welfare state and Fordism. This is the decade that ushered in the neoliberal restructuring of economy and society. Historian Bryant Simon describes this new era as the “age of cheap.” From now on, everything had to be cheap: production, wages, goods, food. European countries in general also entered the “post-boom” era, though changes occurred at a slower pace than in the United States. But the West German social market economy could not hold out against neoliberal pressures for ever, and finally succumbed in the 1990s.⁴⁰

Soya, and above all corn, emerged as crucial food products in the “age of cheap.” Particularly in the United States, the area under cultivation and the agricultural corporations (it would be wrong to speak of farms here) grew massively, productivity rose, and prices fell. Most of the harvest went to the meat industry as feed, while the remainder – often in the form of “high fructose corn syrup” – was used in all kinds of food products or was exported. Michael Pollan, one of the most vociferous and prolific critics of the food industry in the United States, refers to a “dilemma” facing the average American eater. Although consumers can choose from an abundance of different foods, almost all industrially processed products are based on corn in one way or another. Corn (like soy) is subsidized by the state, and is mechanically cultivated and harvested on huge industrialized “farms.” Other agricultural products such as peaches, strawberries, and lettuce still require a great deal of manual labor, though their production has also been industrialized and rationalized. At the same time, the food industry and the food trade have been among the leading sectors responsible for wage dumping since the 1970s. They have made a significant contribution to the overall decline in real wages, thus creating demand for their own low-cost products. Pollan even surmises that only cheap food has averted an even greater systemic crisis, namely widespread hunger, and thus a mass uprising.⁴¹ In the United States, however, most writers and activists no longer refer to hunger but to “food insecurity.” Around a fifth of households are now affected by or at risk of this condition. Food insecurity means that while one may feel a sense of satiety, one lacks access to food that satisfies the body’s nutritional needs. In much of the country, such food is simply not available to the poorer sections of the population. In contrast to hunger, food insecurity is not, or is only negligibly, associated with an emaciated body. Today, in other words, being fat is often seen as a sign of poverty and food insecurity, that is, an inadequate food supply.⁴²

      One might ask why all of this matters to a history of fitness. Social geographer Julie Guthman is one of the most astute analysts of the relationship between capitalism, consumption, and bodies in recent history and the present day. She characterizes the neoliberal political economy as “bulimic.” On the one hand, Guthman contends, this system calls for slim, seemingly high-performance bodies, while on the other it steers us toward maximum consumption of industrially produced, highly calorific foods. Their production has become so absurdly cheap, she goes on, that within the capitalist logic of retail and consumption it makes perfect sense to offer, or consume, larger packs and portions at an only slightly higher price. Hence, according to this analysis, the seller ensures customer loyalty (at almost the same labor costs, given that even a “supersize meal” only has to be passed across the counter once), and the buyer gets more for their money. In capitalism, maximum consumption at minimum prices is a very rational behavior. In addition, many consumers are desperate to save money due to falling wages and increasing job insecurity. And those compelled to do several jobs at once to make ends meet are more likely to opt for the fast (and cheap) consumption of snacks and ready meals than for the slow food option. Many poorer neighborhoods are so-called “food deserts,” in which it is simply impossible or very difficult to find healthy food. In such a scenario, the much-vaunted freedom of choice and decision – so highly valued as the core of liberalism, and in the United States more than anywhere else – boils down to income, price, and living conditions. Guthman underscores that the correlation between body shape and class, fatness and poverty is fueled by this dynamic blend of neoliberal politics, a growing wealth gap, and cheap, industrially produced food.⁴³

The 1970s brought a shift toward less state regulation. Citizens were expected to take greater responsibility for themselves, including their bodies, fitness, and performance. In lockstep with the “age of cheap,” a discourse gained