The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life

In the winter of 2001, just months after the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson urged all Americans to lose ten pounds “as a patriotic gesture.” ¹ In the following years, the nation would engage in two wars, one against terror and another against what Surgeon General Richard Carmona would come to refer to as “the terror within;” obesity. Interconnections between the war on terror and the war against obesity have gone largely unnoticed by the public, the press, and critics of the obesity epidemic, but they are in fact related in a variety of fascinating and important ways. News reports on high rates of obesity in the U.S. military surfaced in the months immediately following the 9/11 attacks, journalists have referred to American dieters as engaging in a “fatwa against obesity,” weight loss advice is often infused with patriotic language and iconography, and the Surgeon General has warned, “unless we do something about [obesity], the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempts.”² In 2003 an article in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association remarked on the fact that more than one war was underway: “The United States is fighting several wars at the same time. Not only are we fighting a war against terrorism around the world, but we are also fighting a war against obesity here at home.”³ These two wars are, however, not merely simultaneous. Understanding their relationship is essential to a broader accounting of post-9/11 life in the United States.

In a recent issue of American Quarterly, Amy Farrell explained why the field of American Studies should be concerned with obesity: “. . . all biological crisis are also cultural crisis . . . biological and medical problems are also cultural sites, where social power and ideological meanings are played out, contested and transformed.” While the most visible, popular works on the obesity epidemic take its biological significance at face value, she argued that, “as a field that always explores the links between culture and biology, the social and the political, the public and the private,” American Studies should be concerned with the cultural implications of obesity and actively interrogate the definition of the problem itself.⁴ Critics including Eric Oliver, Paul Campos, Kathleen LeBesco and Sander Gilman have argued that the obesity epidemic is better understood as a cultural phenomenon than as a public health crisis.⁵ In The Obesity Myth, Campos describes obesity as a moral panic, while in Fat Politics Oliver argues that obesity is not an epidemic disease, but rather an epidemic of ideas that is the product of prejudice, politics and profit motives.⁶ Oliver explores how obesity came to be defined as a disease through the concerted efforts of those with vested interests, such as the public health establishment, the government, and pharmaceutical and weight loss industries. Along with other critics of the biomedical premise of the obesity epidemic, he points out that the idea that certain weights should be classified as disease is not driven by any clear medical fact and that our willingness to think of fat people as sick is the result of cultural, social, and political factors.⁷ Despite significant controversy about the biomedical premise of the obesity epidemic, the anti-obesity campaign both posits and targets fatness as an irrefutable sign of illness while affirming and promoting thinness as an incontrovertible indicator of health.⁸

Moving away from a biological, empirical interpretation of the causes and costs of what is known as the obesity epidemic, this essay asks what role obesity plays in constituting the post-9/11 social order. Taking the biological significance of obesity at face value, the public health campaign aimed at reducing rates of overweight in the U.S. and the military one aimed at combating international terrorism are interrelated only in so far as obesity might interfere with the ability of soldiers to perform their duties. But just as American Studies interrogates the war on terror as a construct that serves particular...