system construes people, in every situation, as market actors subject to competitive conditions. Moreover, neoliberalism, as political scientist Wendy Brown writes, is “a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct’ [Foucault], and a scheme of valuation.” The actions of subjects must be geared toward investing in themselves in order – always and everywhere – to increase their own “portfolio value.” The goal is for these investments and one’s work on oneself to yield visible results. Such evident success enables individuals to be recognized as productive members of society. Consequently, in neoliberalism the relationship between individual and society is measured in a new way. Recognition as a citizen is not just a matter of rights. Nor is it linked solely with the individual’s concern for the public good. Such recognition arises from the individual’s success as an investor in themself and from the maximization of their human capital. It is thus the most effective investor that best meets the requirements of a good member of society: only a homo oeconomicus can attain the status of homo politicus.26
The political heft of fitness in neoliberalism is neatly captured by the concept of “biological citizenship.” Sociologist Nikolas Rose emphasizes just how much, in liberal societies, concern for one’s body and health, the maximization of one’s vitality and potential, has become a kind of universal duty.27 Rose is particularly interested in the social and political implications of genetic engineering and stem cell research. According to Rose, it has become a requirement for good citizens to track suspected health issues down to the basic programming of the body, examine options for correction, and adapt their lifestyle accordingly.28
The concept of “biological citizenship” sharpens our awareness of the relationship between bodies, freedom, fitness, civic duties, and recognition. Liberal societies have in fact never done without biologically construed distinctions.29 For example, upon its founding, the American Republic declared liberty for all its core political principle, yet at the same time it long tied the degree of individual liberty and social recognition to “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality,” that is, to categories conceived in biological terms. And it was long asserted that only white men have the fundamental capacity to get fit and make meaningful decisions about their own bodies and lives. Feminists have fought against this idea since the nineteenth century (by composing an ode to cycling as a personal and political practice, for example).30 But it was only from the 1960s onward that the various civil rights movements prompted American society to shift away from the idea of fixed, biological categories. Although these categories persist in some measure to this day, they have certainly been shaken to their foundations. Belief in the malleability of societies, people, and bodies, meanwhile, has grown.31
This development, however, has changed what we might understand by “biological citizenship.” The shaping and optimization of one’s body, its capabilities and potential, that is, investment in one’s fitness, is now crucially important. Hence, distinctions made through the body are no longer necessarily distinctions between black and white or between male and female (though they still exist and are still very powerful). A culture and society in which fitness is a regulatory ideal distinguishes between “fit” and “unfit” bodies. In other words, there are people who can credibly show that they invest in themselves, work on themselves, and know how to tap their own potential. And then there are the others, who cannot demonstrate these attributes.32 The determination and ability to optimize the self are of great importance to the degree of one’s social and civil recognition, and the fundamental capacity for success or failure in this endeavor appears to show in the body and its form. Fat bodies have become the constitutive, contrasting counterpart to the fit, “capable” body and to the successful person in general. Fat is considered a sign of laziness, ineptitude, ignorance, and lack of discipline, of “wrong,” unhealthy behavior. The fat Statue of Liberty, then, stands for the failure of individuals, as well as the crisis of the nation and the liberal-democratic system.33
The roots of our age of fitness lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the ideas of liberalism, competition, and Darwinism were gaining traction. These concepts staked out a field that was the prerequisite for the emergence of fitness as principle and practice, and thus a sphere in which fatness could be grasped as a problem.34 I will explain this in more detail in the next chapter. For now, though, I will stay with the recent past, because a closer look at history since the 1970s helps us better comprehend the vehemence of the discourse of fitness in our immediate present.
Eating “right” since the Me Decade
In the age of fitness, eating right is one of society’s obsessions. The issue of what the “right” food might be leads us directly to the tensions between consumer society and the achievement-oriented society (Leistungsgesellschaft). Soon after World War II, during its “economic miracle” phase, Germany succumbed to a feeding frenzy. After years of deprivation, Germans could finally afford to splash out a little. Food was once again available in greater abundance, even if the average German family was still on a tight budget. In postwar America, consumption became the core activity of good citizens. Food was not the only element in the consumer republic of the 1950s, but it was a highly important one. It was increasingly manufactured industrially and – especially in the United States – consumed in a “progressive” and “modern” way, for example as a defrosted and heated-up TV dinner, or on the go at the first McDonald’s branches. The 1950s were the golden age of the food industry. It grew massively and its actions went largely unquestioned. Americans praised themselves as the best-fed people the world had ever seen. Soon, experts were talking about the end of hunger in America. Yet this applied chiefly to the growing white middle class. Critical press and TV reports, meanwhile, 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
