The history of different peoples, and of humanity as a whole, can be presented in all kinds of ways. But, in the end it comes down to food and hunger. In the final analysis, it\u2019s the stomach that counts.<\/span><\/p>\n I am in possession of a protruding middle. If you don\u2019t look carefully, you might miss it but it\u2019s there: rotund, firmly planted and bulging. I carry it before me as if it were something to be proud of. On the occasions when it looks less prominent, it can be hidden under loose and preferably dark clothing, but if I happen to catch sight of my profile in a full-length mirror the curving protuberance is very much in evidence. It starts just under the ribcage and ends somewhere around the waist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Excess weight cannot be easily concealed: last year, my average was 102 kilos. This was a year in which I committed myself to some serious dieting over a period of several months, and even managed to cross that closely guarded border between obesity and stoutness. I returned from this excursion only recently. Generally, I fall into the category of class 1 obesity, although there have been times when I\u2019ve slipped into class 2. This happened once when I was dumped by a girlfriend (oh, hi there!). She couldn\u2019t endure the fact that I didn\u2019t look after myself properly, or so she told a mutual friend. Personally, I think she was exaggerating \u2013 my pot-belly doesn\u2019t interfere with much. I can run for the tram easily enough and carry heavy luggage up to the 5<\/span>th<\/span> floor if I need to. I have a job in the arts, I make public appearances, I socialize. It\u2019s a regular sort of life. The only issue is that I have a paunch.<\/span><\/p>\n I like to eat, true. You know the guy who wolfs down all the nuts as they get passed around with the beer and then picks out the last bits and the grains of salt? That\u2019s me. Not that I don\u2019t believe in sharing but, given half a chance, I\u2019ll polish off the leftovers. See that last potato pancake which should be left as an offering to the gods of abstinence and self-restraint? Anyone still hungry? No? OK, I\u2019ll have it then. Pity to see good food wasted. I know people notice, of course I do, even though they try hard not to show it. And I truly admire those who leave food on their plates because they\u2019ve had enough, or they don\u2019t like the taste, or because they want to leave room for dessert. Such nobility of spirit!<\/span><\/p>\n Vegetables don\u2019t help either. I\u2019ve been vegan for a full eight years but paunch-wise little has changed. In the beginning, veganism served me well as crowning evidence in those endless silly conversations with family and friends. \u2018Are you sure a salad will be enough?\u2019 Just watch me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve always felt irritated by those brightly illustrated articles that try to persuade you into veganism because it\u2019s so great for wellness and health \u2013 as if not eating animals wasn\u2019t argument enough. But I\u2019m used to it and, in any case, these days the divide lies elsewhere. Think of it as the gulf between that long file of sporty types waiting to buy a low-calorie fruit sorbet on the first hot day of the year, and the considerably shorter line of people beside them queuing for a bag of chips.<\/span><\/p>\n I know where I\u2019d be standing. Remember those posters displayed at bus stops with the words \u2018Go on, binge!\u2019 and the image of a sausage that looks like a time-bomb? The organizers of the campaign were flooded with criticism and, obviously, I stood with the critics. The poster was harmful, sure. It was classic, counterproductive fat-shaming. But at heart, under all those layers of adipose tissue, in the corners of my consciousness which I prefer, mostly, not to share \u2013 at least not spontaneously \u2013 I suspected that the advocates behind the image were right. It needs to be said straight: I am fat. And whose fault is that, if not mine?<\/span><\/p>\n This isn\u2019t an uncommon way of thinking. According to <\/span>research done in 2014<\/span><\/a> most people who are either overweight or obese blame the problem on their own behaviour (86.7%), their diet and eating habits (83.3%), or their genes (63.3%). I know the gene mantra well: it\u2019s in our blood, it\u2019s in the family, it\u2019s to do with being strong and well-built.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018Have you got a weight problem too, son?\u2019 an alcoholic father writes to his massively large offspring in George Saunders\u2019 short story, \u2018The 400-pound CEO\u2019. \u2018I realized all of a sudden, and now I\u2019m big as a house. Take care, it might be in our genes.\u2019 Saunders specializes in writing about life\u2019s losers and we know that the reference to genes is just a cheap excuse. Not only is he obese, he\u2019s deluded.<\/span><\/p>\n It may be my genes, but more likely it\u2019s the fact that I snack. I can\u2019t resist a desert, I\u2019ll have that extra canap\u00e9 for supper \u2013 can\u2019t do me any harm \u2013 and, since it\u2019s dark chocolate I\u2019m looking at, I might as well help myself to three pieces at once. (I no longer buy the sort filled with nut paste, don\u2019t even ask.) Is anyone forcing me? None that I can see.<\/span><\/p>\n I spent a long time imagining it was me. After all, as a child I was skinny. I remember the family wringing their hands and lamenting that I was all skin and bones. You could count my ribs. So, I guess this thing must have happened later, after I left home. Though I began to have my doubts when, in my first year at university, I ran into a hockey trainer I hadn\u2019t seen for years. I\u2019d been a goalie in his team at the age of seven, so I got him talking and reminded him who I was. He stared at me for a while and then said, very cheerfully: \u2018Oh, right! You were the slightly podgy one, weren\u2019t you?\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I was clearing my mother\u2019s flat after she died, I found a Year 1 report with a comment, written in that sweeping scrawl characteristic of the medical profession: \u2018More dietary fruit and vegetables recommended\u2019. But things have moved on since my mother and my grandmother passed, I suppose, and maybe the older I am, the easier it is to admit that not everything depends on me.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m reminded of the American feminist Roxane Gay, who is ranked \u2018the best\u2019 by Yazz, the youngest heroine in Bernadine Evaristo\u2019s novel <\/span>Girl, Woman, Other<\/span><\/i>. I should be careful in drawing any analogy, though, because our problems are of a different calibre. Gay writes:<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018For so long I\u2019ve never talked about this. I supposed we should keep our shames to ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But I\u2019m sick of this shame. Silence hasn\u2019t worked that well.\u00a0 Or maybe this is someone else\u2019s shame and I\u2019m just being forced into carrying it.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In her book <\/span>Hunger<\/span><\/i>, Gay describes how, in her teens, she was raped by her boyfriend and his chums. For years afterwards she ate compulsively, thinking that \u2018if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n My own story is nowhere near as serious, and my weight-associated troubles are not half as overwhelming as those Roxane Gay has endured. What\u2019s more, I am a man, and men with paunches have it easier than women with a similar issue. But the thing we both share may be an urge to get a grip on the shame we struggle with daily, an impulse to examine it in the cold light of day, and check for a hidden logo that might identify some kind of manufacturer to whom we could return this flawed and useless aspect of ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It might also mean we share a degree of compassion for each other. Rather like the waitress in Raymond Carver\u2019s story \u2018Fat\u2019, about a man who walks into a bar and eats, and eats, and eats. When the waitress\u2019 boyfriend, the cook, makes a jokey remark about their portly customer, she responds indulgently: \u2018Rudy, he is fat\u2026 but that is not the whole story\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018Until I started gaining weight, I had a healthy attitude towards food,\u2019 Roxane Gay writes. \u2018My mother is not a woman with a passion for cooking, but she has an intense passion for her family. Throughout my childhood she prepared healthy, well-rounded meals for us, which we ate together at the dinner table. There were no rushed dinners sitting in front of the television or standing at the kitchen counter.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n I cannot say the same about Hanka. It wasn\u2019t that my mother was indifferent to her children, she simply showed her love in other ways \u2013 not through cooking and certainly not by serving up balanced, healthy meals for a family seated around the dinner table. Hanka\u2019s cooking was more about feeding the masses. She would provide a huge saucepan of hunter\u2019s stew made with fresh and pickled cabbage, a few mushrooms, some sausage, a jar of tomato pur\u00e9e, and some spices. There was so much of it in the pot that we had to use both hands for stirring, to prevent her concoction from burning. Or there\u2019d be a stack of thickly breaded chicken breast cutlets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When Hanka launched into preparing these, she\u2019d make a cartload for her three children and herself, enough to last for days, maybe forever, so she\u2019d never have to cook again because, truth be told, she hated it. She had enough to do just going out to work. Running the household was simply too much and no wonder \u2013 she was bringing up a family on her own. And there were never enough chicken cutlets. We\u2019d eat them all in a single sitting.<\/span><\/p>\n We ate in front of the telly. I remember our Sunday screenings with particular fondness, though they took a degree of preparation. First, I would run over to the shop for some \u2018French\u2019 bread rolls (3-4 simulated baguettes) which Hanka then made into canap\u00e9s stacked with cheese, cured meat, radish and chives. Or she\u2019d use plain liver sausage. Each of us had a huge plate with a mound of these canap\u00e9s, which we\u2019d stuff into our mouths without so much as a glance.<\/span><\/p>\n But our staple diet was potatoes: boiled, fried, mashed, re-fried, mixed with flour and re-boiled, hot potatoes, cold potatoes \u2013 dishes fit for a king. But, above all, we loved potatoes served in their most perfect form, Western-style. I\u2019m talking chips. There was a bit of work involved, certainly. The spuds had to be peeled and chopped, and then you stood over a stove smoking with boiling oil. But it felt like a holiday, and the massive bowl of fries per head we all got at the end was a meal in itself.<\/span><\/p>\n Hanka wasn\u2019t like Roxane Gay\u2019s mother. She was no Pomona, no goddess of fruitful abundance and plenty \u2018spilling from her basket the colourful beauty of the sun\u2019, as in Bruno Schulz\u2019s \u2018<\/span>The Street of Crocodiles<\/span><\/a>\u2019(translated into English by <\/span>Celina Wieniewska)<\/span>. Mum was more of a Penelope from Evaristo\u2019s <\/span>Girl, Woman, Other <\/span><\/i>who\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018loved the feeling of being absolutely stuffed after a meal \/ When her stomach was bloated, ready to burst \/ Otherwise she felt an emotional vacuum\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I must have made it clear by now that Hanka was pretty large. Sure, she experienced different phases of obesity, leaner years and fatter years, though I only remember the fatter period, the times before chemotherapy succeeded in slimming her down so effectively \u2013 but that was pretty brief. My guess is she did her best to fill her stomach so as to chase away the feeling of emptiness pushing up from her viscera which, if not controlled in time, rose to tighten in her throat. I have no difficulty visualizing this, I often experience it myself.<\/span><\/p>\n The inner hollowness Hanka experienced might have been a metaphor for her life\u2019s failures: an unsuccessful career in sport, a broken heart, a difficult relationship with her mother. But it was also entirely literal. It expressed the emptiness of Mum\u2019s purse, for she had been left alone with three children at a time when the Polish state socialism was collapsing. The new order had barely been born, but it was already full of ideas about how to organize people\u2019s lives. No surprise, then, that it made one or two errors on the way. At home there were often loud shouts, demanding to know who\u2019d eaten the cutlets or drunk all the milk. \u2018Not me!\u2019 was the first calculated lie I learnt to tell. For much of my life, I imagined this was perfectly normal. I\u2019ve come to understand what it was really about only recently, looking back: this was poverty.<\/span><\/p>\n Obviously, at the time, we never thought of ourselves in those terms. Other people were poor. The neighbours living on the floor below \u2013 <\/span>they<\/span><\/i> were poor. This kind of rationalization is not uncommon. Take a recent <\/span>post<\/span><\/a> from Agata Diduszko-Ziglewska, for example: \u2018It was only as an adult that I realized that I\u2019d been a disadvantaged child from an impoverished household.\u2019 But was I starving? That\u2019s just it: I wasn\u2019t. Hanka\u2019s cooking was all about finding the cheapest and most effective way of assuaging hunger. The balance between satiety and cost was her prime concern.<\/span><\/p>\n This might serve as the answer to that great, bulbous riddle that is my paunch. Poverty, the economic transition, bad eating habits shaped by food scarcities in the Polish People\u2019s Republic, combined with even worse habits encouraged by capitalism run wild. Yes, Hanka was fat and she brought up three fat children, Rudy, but that is not the whole story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From late spring and throughout the summer, we transported kilos and kilos of fruit and veg from the allotment: green beans, new potatoes, peas, cabbage, field cucumbers, raspberries, strawberries. Towards the end of the summer there was a frenzy of preserving, jaring and bottling. We pickled cucumbers, poured sweet syrup over the strawberries and raspberries, we picked mushrooms (though, as activities went, that was rarer). The daily routine consisted of peeling potatoes, frying up the meat, grating apples and carrots for the salad, stewing the fruit, and heating up the meat broth. In the afternoons there were tiny oat and chocolate cookies or mini meringues to be baked. And then there was the shopping: homogenized cheeses<\/span>, small wheel-shaped pastries for the grandchildren, cakes to have with coffee, tinned tangerines in case the home-preserved strawberries and raspberries ran out. Albina\u2019s life was centred entirely around food.<\/span><\/p>\n In our relatively small, three generation family, our grandmother, Albina, was mistress of the kitchen. Her cooking was far from sophisticated, but it was healthy, simple and nutritious \u2013 or so we thought at the time. Yet when I remember the meals she prepared, I see above all a large, tempting, glistening splash of yellow fat. It seemed to cover everything. The portions she offered were never large, but the provision of food was continuous and unbroken. Even when no one could manage any more, Albina would slip a further round of specialities onto the table, and tended to get grumpy if they were left untouched. Our grandmother\u2019s love was expressed entirely through food.<\/span><\/p>\n And no wonder. She was one of ten children, born in the 1920s in a small village halfway between O\u015bwiecim and K\u0119ty. Her birth mother was most probably an orphan, and Albina lost her when she was very young. Over time, her stepmother proved more concerned about the welfare of her own children. Albina did just a couple of years in a state school. The story goes that the head of the school wanted her to stay on but her father, my great-grandfather, would have none of it. To the very end of her life, she could recite a poem in Esperanto which she had learnt as a young child. Albina was a peasant, from a peasant family. Her grandfather was born a year after serfdom was abolished in the Austrian partition, in the very same village as Albina, yet they never met. She failed to mention this \u2013 I discovered it only recently on one of those useful websites that traces your family tree.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Albina wasn\u2019t a moaner, but she did like to say that the first time she ever ate a full meal was when she found herself doing forced labour on a farm in the Third Reich. She must have been about seventeen. When I listened to her stories as a boy, there seemed nothing unusual about the fact that my grandmother remembered her years of enslavement under Adolf Hitler as the best time of her life. Her father was the brother of a village elder, to whom he transferred acres of land after the loss of his first wife, in exchange for a remedy to ease his mourning \u2013 vodka. Albina used to laugh as she described how he\u2019d never believe her story that the Germans didn\u2019t have to spend all night in the barn when a sow was about to give birth because they had so many sows, they didn\u2019t need to worry.<\/span><\/p>\n Albina (third from left) in forced labor in the village of Frankenstein. Image provided by the author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While Albina was eating so healthily, in the home of the good Catholic Germans for whom she was doing forced labour, the state of things in her Galician village was not improving. So, once she returned home and became pregnant, she most probably started going hungry again. Hanka was born towards the end of the final year of the war. I mention it, because a <\/span>Dutch-American research project<\/span><\/a> published in 2008 and based on the winter of 1944-1945 when many in the Netherlands starved, has shown that inadequate nutrition during pregnancy can have a long-term effect on the genes that cause obesity. The mechanism involved is circuitous, but essentially pretty simple. The children of parents who have experienced malnutrition get a biological warning signal that goes something like this: \u2018Care! This family has a tendency to run short of edibles, so best keep some supplies in store, just in case.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n But here I am talking about genes again when there might be a far simpler explanation. Albina knew about food deprivation and, when she became a mother, must have promised herself that her child would never starve. Consequently, she ensured that her daughter, Hanka, was supplied with ample quantities of food, so you wouldn\u2019t see her ribs, so she\u2019d grow, so her body had stockpiles of energy to draw on. And sure enough, it did.<\/span><\/p>\n There is just one twist to this story. Albina was thin. All skin and bones, in fact, except for a bit of muscle \u2013 my grandmother always had an imposing biceps. But essentially, she was skinny.\u00a0 She had her hang-ups, she was forever on the go, had no time herself to eat because she was constantly rushing to the kitchen to get second helpings for others, and never had a chance to build up any body fat. Instead, she criticized us \u2013 her grandchildren and her daughter \u2013 for being podgy. It\u2019s all that floury food, she said. Her own stomach grew just once, three months before she died. But that wasn\u2019t fat, it was a tumour: the same cancerous growth that had so effectively slimmed down her daughter.<\/span><\/p>\n When they were side by side, you\u2019d never have known there was a family connection. Hanka was tall, broad shouldered and rotund. Albina was slight and compact; you could all too easily miss her. They never knew (they couldn\u2019t have, given that I am discovering this only now) that, together, they represented the disjointed and tragi-comic national food history of Poland in the 20<\/span>th<\/span> century.<\/span><\/p>\n According to research by <\/span>Alicja Budnik and Maciej Henneberg published in 2016<\/span><\/a>, towards the end of the 19<\/span>th<\/span> century in the Kingdom of Poland, the quantity of food a peasant farmer could expect to consume over the course of a year was as follows: 135 kilograms of grain (mostly flour and bread), 18 kilograms of beans, 56 litres of milk, 3 kilograms of lard, 5 kilograms of meat and 426 kilograms of potatoes. The figures are based on medical reports dating back to the beginning of the 20<\/span>th<\/span> century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By way of comparison, a well-off townie living at the same period consumed a similar quantity of grain, but was in a position to spread their bread with butter (5 kilograms per year). Urbanites drank twice as much milk and dined on seven times more meat (37 kilograms per annum; in 2019, the average Pole ate 61 kilograms). In addition, they\u2019d have 130 eggs, which agricultural workers did not. On the other hand, town-dwellers ate half as many potatoes \u2013 most likely they were simply too full, because the evidence suggests they didn\u2019t do much in the way of weight watching. Budnik and Henneberg\u2019s research indicates that over 50% of gentry and burghers were overweight, as opposed to 30% of peasants. Curiously though, just 4.9% of working class men were categorized as obese, while the percentage of working class women with a weight problem almost equalled that of bourgeois women.<\/span><\/p>\n This was an era when paunches were all the rage. Belly bulges were flaunted by well-nourished burghers and self-assured nobles. They were patted contentedly and dressed up in elegant coats. The rich made a show of their success and the message to the world was clear: they could eat as much as they liked, there was no need for them to do anything that demanded physical strain, so all that adipose tissue could stay put. A pot-belly meant you were doing well \u2013 which is probably why modernist literature made such a point of deriding protruding, bourgeois middles. Polish readers may remember the lines from Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer from school: \u2018Long live art! Forget those well-girded bellies \/ those paltry Philistines!\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So, there you are. To be honest, I always felt a bit uncomfortable, especially when studying Polish literature at university because, naturally, I wanted to be in the same team as those undernourished-looking bohemians. Yet my paunch identified me as a corpulent bourgeois, even if the rest of me didn\u2019t quite fit the picture.<\/span><\/p>\n One way and another, the public jibes paid off and the burghers gradually got a grip on their eating habits. It was becoming patently clear that a paunch was nothing to boast about. As agricultural technology and industrial breeding took hold, food became more accessible to all. (This was less apparent in Poland and the whole Eastern Bloc, than elsewhere, chiefly for logistical reasons bound up with the erstwhile centrally planned economy. Here, pot-bellies are still <\/span>sometimes<\/span><\/a> viewed as status symbols. Since the transition to a market economy, however, our attitudes have been catching up.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As the lower classes finally found themselves able to fill their stomachs and show them off to the world (in the 1960s, globally, the <\/span>average calorie intake per person was<\/span><\/a> 2200; by 2018 it had risen to 2800), the privileged classes began to look upon this excess of calorific intake with increased distaste.<\/span><\/p>\n All this sounds much like that Greek myth about a mortal who sets out on a quest for the golden fleece but, when he finds and wins it \u2013 or because he does so \u2013 gets nothing from the gods but allegations of acquisitiveness. It is one of those historical ironies that Albina did everything she could to ensure her daughter had everything she herself had lacked, and ended up looking upon what she had done with growing unease.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, we are witnessing a similar process worldwide. It has led to an \u2019epidemic\u2019, in some cases a \u2018pandemic\u2019, of obesity: 39% of adults are overweight worldwide, and 13% fall into the obese category. <\/span>A World Health Organization (WHO) report published in 2014<\/span><\/a> linked this to an unequal distribution of wealth. (\u2018Within the EU, 26% of obesity in men and 50% of obesity in women can be put down to inequalities in education. In groups with a low socio-economic status, the likelihood of obesity doubles.\u2019)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A 2020 WHO report<\/span><\/a> also indicated that in developing societies, obesity goes hand in hand with hunger. Those extra kilos are not, as many people suppose, a signal of prosperity, but a sign of poverty. In his book <\/span>Hunger<\/span><\/i><\/a> (translated into into English by Katherine Silver), Martin Caparros remarks \u2013 with all the confidence of a reporter who doesn\u2019t hesitate to draw definitive conclusions from circumspect academic reports \u2013 that: \u2018In rich countries, the poor eat a lot of cheap junk food \u2013 fat, sugar, salt \u2013 and gain monstrous amounts of weight. They do not represent the opposite of the starving: they are the other side of the same coin.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What coin? No surprises: it\u2019s about power. \u2018Since the dawn of civilization, hunger has been one of the most powerful weapons available, an extreme form of wielding power,\u2019 Caparros writes. Obviously, there is also coercion, violence, rape and \u2013 in richer societies \u2013 invigilation and the distribution of privileges. But the evidence suggests that, where large-scale control is involved, hunger works best. Consider the opening lines of the <\/span>Internationale<\/span><\/i>:<\/span> \u2018Debout! les damn\u00e9s de la terre! \/ Debout! les for\u00e7ats de la faim!\u2019 (\u2018Arise ye workers from your slumbers \/ Arise ye prisoners of want\u2026\u2019,\u00a0 this \u2018want\u2019 may seem pretty vague in English, but the French \u2018la faim\u2019 is simply \u2018the hunger\u2019). As Caparros rightly observes, \u2018it takes real audacity to call hunger a metaphor\u2019, because hunger is the source of the metaphor, not the other way round.<\/span><\/p>\n The history of different peoples, and of humanity as a whole, can be presented in terms of a procession of personalities widely acknowledged as \u2018great\u2019 (you may laugh, but just take a look at school and university curricula.) History can be written as a chronicle of exploitation, or a sequence of chaotic social movements. It can be dressed up as a narrative about the constant transfer of information, or about tendencies to fusion and dispersal. But, in the end, it\u2019s all about hunger. Fundamentally, it\u2019s about food. In the final analysis, it\u2019s the stomach that counts.<\/span><\/p>\n What about Albina\u2019s husband? Was Marian, my grandfather, a peasant? Not really. He was born, reared and, to some degree, educated, in<\/span> K\u0119ty. Before the Second World War, K\u0119ty had a population of over 7000, which made Marian an urbanite. This is not to suggest that he wasn\u2019t undernourished. I have a photo of him, taken on the day of his First Communion, which he received courtesy of some goodly folk who sheltered him for a while in their home. The photograph reveals a considerable disproportion between his head and the rest of his body: he couldn\u2019t find a way of growing.<\/span><\/p>\n Marian. Image provided by the author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Marian was an orphan. He took his surname from his mother who simply didn\u2019t have the time to care for him. She most probably worked as a domestic servant in the nearby town of O\u015bwiecim. In her book, <\/span>The Maids who did Everything<\/span><\/i><\/a> [S\u0142u\u017c\u0105ce do wszystkiego]<\/span><\/i>, Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak explains how children like Marian came to end up on the streets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018Most housemaids who had an illegitimate child were dismissed\u2026 You lost everything: your income, board and lodging, security. Furthermore, the child had a birth certificate with her father\u2019s name given as N.N., which stigmatized her from the start.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But all this is speculation. Who was Marian, exactly? We don\u2019t know and, for some reason, no one in the family was too bothered about it. He was a husband, a father and the best grandfather in the world. In our household, it would not have occurred to anyone to judge any human being by their social origin. And in any case, Albina\u2019s mother was probably an orphan too, so there was nothing of special interest to discuss.<\/span><\/p>\n Am I, then, a man of the people? In what percentage? How far am I descended from country folk or serfs or the workers or nobles or the merchant class? What exactly <\/span>are<\/span><\/i> these questions? Well, strictly speaking, they relate to a feudal cast of mind. They are questions posed by a culture in which genealogy is everything and social background means more than individual achievement. They are questions put by Micha\u0142 Garapich in <\/span>The Children of Kazimierz<\/span><\/i><\/a> [Dzieci Kazimierza]<\/span><\/i>, for example. The book attempts to dismantle myths about the author\u2019s family\u2019s upper class origins, yet Garapich sets about his task like a purebred member of the nobility: he seeks out his ancestors and adds them to the \u2018family books\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These are questions we were taught to ask at school, so we could differentiate between Poland\u2019s historically high-ranking families, magnates with names like Czartoryski or Zamojski, say. Doubtless, this might have made sense, once, to the Czartoryskis or the Zamojskis as they clung to their estates and sought to keep their blood pure and uncontaminated. But for Albina, Marian and Hanka drawing up a family tree of any kind would have proved impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n The same is true of my paunch. I may be trying to persuade you that, just below my chest, I am the proud bearer of a peasant heritage, but the truth is I\u2019ve no idea where it came from. It could be my grandmother who was a country girl, or my grandfather who was an orphan, or indeed any of my forebearers. And not every clodhopping grandson is fat, just as not every granddaughter of peasant farmers is overweight. If I\u2019m trying to fill the gap in my family tree it\u2019s only because I was taught to do so at school, though I should have wisened up by now. \u2018Why dwell on it?\u2019, someone of a more practical bent of mind might ask. \u2018OK, so you\u2019ve got a middle. If it bothers you, do something about it. If not, just leave it.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n It might be more sensible to heed those specialists who offer lists of well-documented factors that cause obesity: a sedentary lifestyle (yes), driving a car (yes), work that makes no physical demands (yes), easy access to sugar and carbs (I watch those calories, I swear), a high-fat diet (yes again). And then there is age. Take a look around the streets and you\u2019ll see that paunchiness is a common problem for men in their middle years.<\/span><\/p>\n It looks very much as though fatty tissue, like money, is an analogue of so many human troubles: physiological and psychological; health-related and financial; issues with our ancestors and our descendants; problems with wealth, poverty, success and failure. All this is effortlessly translated into cells that find their niche in the secret recesses of our tormented bodies. <\/span>Researchers who argue<\/span><\/a> that the connection between social status and excess weight is \u2018complex\u2019 and \u2018not entirely understood\u2019 may be closest to the truth. It\u2019s very much like life \u2013 complex and not entirely understood. So if I\u2019m still hanging on to the adage \u2018follow the fat\u2019 it is because I\u2019m trying to fix a problem. Rather like the historians who persuade us that stories about forced drudgery under the feudal system can explain today\u2019s world better than analysing the structure of capital markets, examining the effects of global warming, or studying epidemiology. In other words, there is a degree of arbitrariness involved, which usually meets with intense disapproval from academics, even though it is simply evidence of the fact that we are human beings with personal preoccupations, and not objective functions of historical determinants.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So why am I so hung up on my peasant genealogy? To feel better, I suppose; to (quite literally) throw off some of the weight I carry and identify, in my failings, the action of forces over which I have no control. In other words, to stop blaming myself and designate someone else as responsible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018I shouldn\u2019t have to carry all the responsibility for my body by myself,\u2019 Roxane Gay writes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Right. So, for starters let\u2019s try blaming Count Karol Jozef Larisch, the owner of the largest estate in the vicinity of the village where Albina was born. From now on, send your complaints to him. I bet he carried a fair bit of flab as well.<\/span><\/p>\n Or maybe I need a peasant paunch as my personal legacy, to connect with Hanka, Albina, Marian, and the history of the Polish working class and people as it fades in the mists of time. The fictional <\/span>Caak people<\/span><\/a> in Olga Hund\u2019s novel <\/span>Coots count to Three<\/span><\/i><\/a> [<\/span>\u0141yski licz\u0105 do trzech]<\/span><\/i> have a third eye; in the US, skin colour can cause Blacks a lot of trouble, but it can also be a source of pride. And what do I have to offer? A nervous laugh? A tendency to scratch my back or pick at my fingernails when I\u2019m unsure? Too many doubts? Think I\u2019ll stick with the paunch.<\/span><\/p>\n Or maybe the point is to link up with other paunchy men and women, who eat their feelings because it\u2019s the only way they have to calm their anxiety? Perhaps if we dig deep enough into the story something might eventually improve? Maybe a podgy little village boy from Silesia will feel better about himself for a moment? Or is it just that I want to explain something to myself?<\/span><\/p>\n Maybe to explain that scene from <\/span>Damien Chazelle\u2019s film <\/span>Whiplash<\/span><\/i><\/a> in which a young jazz drummer, Andrew, attends his first rehearsal at the music conservatory he has just joined. The legendary conductor, Terence Fletcher, walks into the room. He greets Andrew with great charm and then, just to balance things, introduces a dose of terror into the equation. \u2018We have an out of tune player here,\u2019 he growls. Fletcher circles like a predator between rows of young, handsome men who look like they should be playing in Carnegie Hall, before descending on Metz, a trombonist with a chin that\u2019s just a little too round. The wiry, muscular J.K. Simmons (who plays Fletcher) stands over Metz (played by C.J. Vana, who was later cast in a similar role in the 2017 film <\/span>Fatties: Take down the House<\/span><\/i>). At this point the message becomes crystal clear: there is no room for paunches in the best band in town. \u2018I\u2019ve carried your fat arse for too long, Metz!\u2019 Fletcher roars. \u2018I\u2019m not going to have you cost us a competition because your mind\u2019s on a fucking Happy Meal instead of on pitch!\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Blink and you\u2019ll miss it, but <\/span>Whiplash <\/span><\/i>is a film about fatness. Andrew seems visibly inclined to follow in the steps of his father, a pleasant enough guy who may not have achieved much in life but is extremely fond of his son. He enjoys munching on popcorn with his boy in the cinema and doesn\u2019t give a monkey\u2019s about the paunch under his shirt. It makes sense then that the key moment when Andrew leaves his family to become a top percussionist is marked by his departure from the dining table. The film is not about finding a way to success, it\u2019s about fat. Andrew\u2019s surname is Neiman (newcomer). He\u2019s the kid from nowhere. Before the first rehearsal Fletcher asks him if either of his parents have ever been musicians. No? Mum\u2019s gone and Dad\u2019s a school teacher? Too bad. Career stories and food histories tend to intertwine. After all, the provincials who migrated to the Polish capital Warsaw, hoping for a better life, were widely dubbed \u2018jars\u2019 (<\/span>s\u0142oiki<\/span><\/i>). Now ask yourself: what are jars for exactly? And there you are.<\/span><\/p>\n While I was doing my PhD and (much like any doctoral student) doubting that I\u2019d ever get down to writing my thesis, <\/span>Geoffrey Miller, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico, tweeted<\/span><\/a>: \u2018Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn\u2019t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won\u2019t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In response, Miller\u2019s university hurriedly barred him from admissions decisions and made him undergo sensitivity training. But I was watching and I<\/span> knew<\/span><\/i>. It felt true. PhDs are not for fatsos.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I had chosen to be an academic because it let me hide my shamefully tubby body behind stacks of books\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018There was something consoling about being in higher education and living a life of the mind. My body meant nothing,\u2019 Roxane Gay writes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n
Hanka<\/span><\/h2>\n
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Albina<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nThe Exchange<\/span><\/h2>\n
Marian<\/h2>\n
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Andrew<\/span><\/h2>\n