Read "Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale"

I've always like Yolen's writing but I never knew she also wrote poetry too. Good poem.

People tend to forget that back before the age of easy modern transportation and the agricultural (or green) revolution of the 50's and 60's, that most of the lower classes couldn't usually manage to buy enough food to get fat on and even if they could, most of the lower classes had enough hard physical labor to do to keep them fairly slim.
Sugar and thus foods made with sugar weren't readily available and even if they were, most people couldn't afford to buy them and eat them in large quantities until the 1950's.
Prior to the Twiggy era of the 60's women with curves were the most admired and not the super-skinny.
:\

Beauty mores tend to reflect what the rich and healthy look like at the time. When the rich and healthy were healthy because they could afford to eat and not break their bodies in grueling labor, and their riches were reflected in how much food they could buy, we admired plumpness.

Now health is reflected in people who look like runners, and the rich reveal their riches by the leisure time they have to devote to maintaining athletic, healthy bodies, so that's what we admire now.

I'm not sure how easy it is to divorce what we find attractive from what we find healthy and indicative of power and money. :,

An excellent point!
:)