On Weight
If you’d be so kind as to humor me with an additional observation piggybacking off last week. A modern day mystery, part two, if you will: how was everyone “back then” so skinny in comparison to today? As of late, I’ve seen people blame corporations, the chemicals they put in our food, seed oils, the internet and the like. All of which play a factor to some degree based on the 300 hours of research I conducted in preparation for this article (6 hours a day, every day, for 50 days straight). Once I peeled back enough onion layers the answer became quite simple: the military.
Roughly 1 in 3 men served in WWII. In 1970, roughly 1 in 3 men served or currently were serving in the military. I’m starting to pick up a scent. The obvious physical discipline, voluntary or not, combined with the mental fortitude of a combat warrior follows one throughout life. These ideals linger after discharge and latch onto offspring. Do you really think the children of a man who killed 14 Germans in France while freezing to death in Bastone, surviving off 2 bites of SPAM each day and a pack of Lucky Strikes are going to be overweight? Those men know real hunger, and it certainly isn’t that 3:30 feeling in your cubicle between lunch and dinner. Did you grow up with a friend who had a parent actively serving in the military? I would love to see the obesity stats on children under 18, in 2025, who live with a parent that served in the military within the last 10 years.
And there are additional onion layers - “back then” - to those who didn’t serve or were too young to serve. My grandpa was born in 1935, the heart of the Great Depression. Rationing food wasn’t something you thought about it was something you did. Pearl Harbor happened on his 7th birthday. When the wartime rations were announced, his family and the entire country were already experts in conserving. During the Depression, your finances limited how much food you could buy. During WWII, the government did. In which case I repeat myself. Food ration stamps during WWII literally limited how many groceries you could buy weekly and if you went over the allotted amount - either through fraud, forgery, your Italian cousin’s black market connections - you could face severe fines and/or imprisonment. For the first 10 years of my granpap’s life, this was all he knew. Waste and abundance were equally incomprehensible. So when he (or rather my grandma) had my dad 14 years later, do you think they suddenly switched to a life of extravagance? Human beings are creatures of principle, or at least they ought to be.
And to play the devil’s advocate, watch any black and white movie. You will see fat people. I was re-reading A Moveable Feast last year and Hemingway talked about the “puffiness” of Scott Fitzgerald’s face. Clark Gable topped out at 230 pounds in the 1950s. Marlon Brando was a binge eater and became a parade float in his later years.
None of this is to say we aren’t a fat society, I wouldn’t stoop to such levels. And by the looks of the rest of you, you couldn’t stoop at all. Dick Winters, a WWII Major in the 101st Airborne Division, wanted to continue his career in the military after the war ended. But witnessing how soldiers conducted themselves in peacetime, he thought better of it. 1 in 10 Americans have served or are actively serving in the military in 2025. I certainly do not want to get back to WWII levels, but what’s that saying? Hard times create weak men or something like that?