Q. What is "A Place At the Table" all about?
A. As fat people, we have been denied a Place At the Table, both literally and figuratively.
Every day we are told that we mustn't eat what we want, that we shouldn't enjoy our food, that whatever we're eating must be more than we should have, that we're entitled to only the most minimally adequate meals. Most fat people have heard this message again and again, sometimes in ways that are callous and cruel, and sometimes in ways that are meant as kindness--but all of them are hurtful.
We've been harassed and ridiculed by family members about every bite we eat. We've had restaurant menus snatched from our hands by our "friends." We've had complete strangers come up and criticize what we put in our grocery carts. The message comes through loud and clear: we don't belong there at the table with everyone else, not until we've atoned for the sin of being fat--and the only way to do that is to get thin, by whatever means necessary.
Moreover, fat people are refused some of the most basic rights and the respect due any member of the human family. We're fair game for ridicule and insulting, ignorant stereotypes in the media. We can legally be discriminated against in forty-nine U.S. states and virtually every country. Public accommodations--from theatre and airplane seats to essential medical equipment--often aren't accessible to people of size. Amazingly, we are blamed for our own lack, since many see it as our responsibility to abuse ourselves into a smaller body size, rather than the responsibility of providers of public spaces to accommodate a wider range of sizes; we are treated with contempt if we demand better treatment.
Medical practitioners are often quick to blame our weight for everything that goes wrong with our bodies. Some refuse to treat us until we've lost weight, effectively putting adequate care out of reach for many of us. They continue to prescribe diets (a treatment with a 95% failure rate), and blame us when this treatment fails yet again, often pressuring us to try something far more dangerous, like weight-loss surgery, or risky and questionably-effective drugs like "fen/phen."
Fat people aren't allowed to take their Place At the Table and enjoy basic rights and privileges that others take for granted--all because our culture has the idea that fat people are somehow less than human, and therefore shouldn't share the simple human right of fair and decent treatment.
While most people seem to think this is a trivial problem, some people have paid the ultimate price for this injustice: their lives. People are dying from size discrimination and fatphobia. "A Place At the Table" is an effort to remember those we've lost, and to make sure they haven't died unremembered and in vain. Inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Clothesline Project bearing witness to violence against women, we hope "A Place At the Table" will serve both as a memorial and as a means of increasing public awareness.
