Michael Fry: Chewing the fat helps make life worth living

FAT? I love it. Nothing can more readily bring a benign, Buddha-like grin to my chubby countenance than the sight of a rib-eye steak marbled with fat, or a belly of pork nestled juicily beneath its crackling, or a breast of lamb baked to a crisp in its own adipose tissue, or a duck brought golden and sizzling from the oven, or – most sublime of all – a roast goose.

A good, plump goose can render a couple of pints of fat, which needs to be drained off during the cooking and saved for browning potatoes and onions.

When I run out then, of course, I use butter instead. In my house marge is good only for making pastry, oil only for dressing salads. Why this liking for the lipid? There can be just one valid answer: the taste.

Meat is made tastier by fat. To prove this, buy a cow's tongue and simmer it gently for three-and-a-half hours. Then the skin can easily be stripped off. You will be left with a thin bit at the front, looking rather like a human tongue.

Slice off a sliver. It will not have much flavour. Give the rest to the cat. But the broad back of the tongue is (you may tell the cat) a different kettle of fish. It is much more delicious.

This is because it is full of fat. Within a single cut of meat you will have, by the infallible testimony of your senses, felt the difference that fat makes.

Fat is not usually regarded as an aesthetic phenomenon. But think of those ancient Greek statues, Venus de Milo for a start. None of them look like Twiggy. The models for them must all have had a layer of subcutaneous fat to produce in them that pleasing roundness of breast and buttock.

Would they have appeared any better with protruding belly buttons or with collar bones pressing out against the skin? The question answers itself.

The ancient Greeks had a superior idea of human beauty to ours, and they would not have found anything desirable in the modern fad for emaciation.

So fat is in fact an aesthetic phenomenon, and not only in terms of sight but also in terms of taste and smell. It gets three of our five senses working, and of what other substance can that be said?

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said the world is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. I will offer a free translation and say fat is one of the things that make life worth living.

Needless to say, none of these arguments would be accepted or perhaps even understood by Michael Kelly, the former provost of Glasgow, who this week wrote in these pages a fanatical diatribe against fat.

He demanded that fatties should be treated in the same way as drink-drivers or smokers, and hounded from decent society.

If he has his way, I can see myself a few years from now huddled in a doorway in the face of a howling gale, nibbling my foie gras and asparagus, watched with scorn by the skinny from their warmth and comfort within.

But then I shall think of them with their chick peas and coleslaw, and entertain no doubt who has the better of the bargain.

Is there something redolent of more perennial contests in this difference between Kelly and me?

He is a small thin guy from Glasgow and I am a big podgy guy from Edinburgh. Glasgow is a city which always has trouble finding the happy medium, one of the reasons for its continual and continuing decline over the last half-century (which Kelly's invention of a single slick slogan only briefly arrested).

That flaw may account for the strong streak of authoritarianism in the place's character and, in particular, its identification of public power as the source of all good.

For example, Kelly describes with outrage how much the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board has to expend on all these fatties with their heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as if it were a matter of the people existing to make the service efficient rather than the service existing to make the people well.

On the same lines, he thinks it is time for a higher authority in the state to step in and coerce its citizens into a proper relationship with it, that is, one of abject subservience.

"A bit of ostracising might be in their own best interests," he observes of the fatties, "a policy of public disapproval might help their motivation." Josef Goebbels could not have put it better.

With official attitudes like that, it is easy to see why all private initiative vanished from Glasgow long ago – and its lack of private initiative is one big reason for its economic failure, while its economic failure is one big reason for its widespread ill-health.

So Kelly and his like may themselves be at the root of failings he rails against in others.

As for Edinburgh, things are naturally a bit more subtle. A good example might be found in one of its citizens, namely myself.

For the past ten years, I have weighed more than 20 stone. Yet when, from time to time, I go to get my cholesterol checked I find it is normal, or at worst only slightly raised above the recommended level.

One reason may be that the body regulates its own level of cholesterol, and perhaps mine is good at that. The other reason is probably my diet, full beside the delectable fat of nature's gifts at their most unspoiled, like oysters and partridges, or exotic fruits such as carambola, durian or physalis, while claret keeps my arteries unfurred.

I have never in my whole life eaten a deep-fried Mars bar, not even a hamburger. If I were in Glasgow I would already be dead; but I am in Edinburgh so I am alive.

There was another report in the press this week on one fine detail of human health that would again have escaped the crudity of Kelly's analysis.

It is that thin people are not always in such a wonderful condition. One reason they are thin may be that they are always worried, that they cannot cope with the everyday stresses that more normal types take in their stride. And mental health could be as important as physical health in determining the span of life.

As for the fatties, some of them are so because they are sad, it is true, yet others are so because they have no worries.

They take the world as it comes, they laugh at life's little ups and downs, they enjoy themselves during the day and they sleep soundly at night.

Not a single one, I bet, would swap their existence for that of a gaunt control freak.