The leveling of agency

As I’m almost finished with Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People, and one bit of frustration is the author’s haste to rob people of any agency whatsoever. He goes to great lengths to show that obese people can’t be blamed for their weight as it’s entirely a food supply and social issue. Will power and personal agency are useless.

But then he also points out how much healthier he is because he chose to stop eating ultra-processed foods.

I truly believe van Tulleken has the best of intentions here. But this is precisely where a lot of wokespeak just becomes backdoor racism and classism. He’s indirectly saying that poor people and minorities are incapable of exercising any form of willpower — unlike him, one of the cultural elites.

In some sense this message is so much better than hate filled diatribes that fat people are just lazy gluttons. But the thing is, we all know that nearly everyone can have some influence over weight and many other health outcomes. To state otherwise is simply a baldfaced lie, which raises the question: is this a noble lie for the sake of being polite or the backdoor racism/classism of “oh those poors can’t ever be expected to help themselves”?

I fully agree that there are many people who have little to no choice about their food and health. If you are very poor, live in a food desert, have no access to a kitchen, then you don’t have much of a choice. But most people who are shelling out ten bucks for a book about processed food are upper middle class office workers. They have plenty of agency. Let’s focus on that.