A Salute to Fat, Something We Can All Get Behind

By Jody Worsham
All rights reserved for Crestor

Continuing with my “Salute To” series, I have chosen to salute fat, that most maligned of all body products. Info-commercials and regular commercials abound with FAT reducing pills, rubs, drinks, and wraps. Exercise contraptions of torture, recently released by the CIA and, FBI from Quantico, are now offered for sale with an eighteen year easy finance program available. Cables, pulleys, inclined pains, and rotating saucers are touted to give you washboard abs, a stronger core, firmly toned upper arms, and reduced body fat not to mention weekly visits to your chiropractor. Provided you have very good eyes and an 8x 12 foot TV screen, you can just make out “coupled with a 200 calorie starvation diet and your personal on-site former wrestling champion consultant”.

Fat makes the taste buds happy. Fat is necessary. Whales would freeze in the Arctic waters without it. Early man would have found himself in the dark without bowls of fat to burn. Potatoes would be used for library paste without a sufficient amount of butter. Fat is to humans what a fur coat is to people in Florida. It makes a statement. It says “I have this and I’m going to keep it whether it’s needed or not.”

Fat has been the bad guy; number one on the most unwanted list. The truth is fat has kept many a person from receiving debilitating injuries from a fall. Without that ample seat cushion of fat, many adults would find themselves in the emergency room with something other than a very large bruise. People with insufficient padding suffer more broken bones.

Statistics show that an abundance of body fat has enabled pirates marooned on a desert island to survive longer than their low fat counterparts. It also offers more protection to vital organs and bones when being attacked by a man or woman eating tiger. If you are worth your weight in gold, wouldn’t extra fat be preferable?

Fat has enriched our vocabulary and writing. Who can forget “Fat cat. Fat lip? Fat chance! Fat bank account.” Or their cousins “Padded expense account, padded cell, and padded seat.”
Fat has been honored by the great artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Cherubs are always pictured as chubby and happy. Nudes are portrayed has having been well fed over the years with that ample figure type highly valued. Twiggy, Barbie and Brook Shields would never have made it as models in those days. No stick figures for the world’s greatest artists.

So here is to Fat! May it keep us warm in winter, protect us when falling, and provide food for us when marooned with pirates. Thank you for flavoring our food, our literature, our language, and our art. Oh, and for inspiring this piece!