San Francisco’s new consultant on “weight stigma” is a pro-fat activist promoted by the food industry. On Monday, Virgie Tovar, the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, announced the new role with the city’s Department of Public Health to nearly 100,000 followers on Instagram.
“I’m UNBELIEVABLY proud to serve the city I’ve called home for almost 20 years in this way!” wrote Tovar, who describes herself as a “plus-size Latina author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity” on her personal website.
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Tovar released few details about her new role with San Francisco’s Department of Public Health on Monday, and the agency did not respond to repeated inquiries.
As reported in my new book out a month ago, Fat and Unhappy: How ‘Body Positivity’ Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself), Tovar is also one of the most prominent influencers for the fat acceptance movement with support from the food industry. In March last year, Tovar was featured in Dove’s “Campaign for Size Freedom,” a collaboration with similar influencers launched roughly 20 years after the company’s infamous “Campaign for Real Beauty” in 2004. The soap brand’s website characterizes the latest initiative as a “movement to end body discrimination” and lists the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance as a primary partner.
“Everyone deserves care, love and respect — at every size — yet body size discrimination is legal in 48 US states,” the initiative’s webpage reads. “We’ve joined forces with National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) and Fat Legal, Advocacy, Rights and Education Project (FLARE) Project to strengthen legal protection against body size discrimination and shift cultural conversations around a broader definition of beauty through education, advocacy and social responsibility.”
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Several states and cities, however, as outlined in Fat and Unhappy, have begun to consider laws similar to one passed in New York City last year that make obesity a legally protected class as being overweight becomes the new norm. More than 40% of U.S. adults age 20 and older are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and nearly 74% are at minimum overweight. In other words, Americans who are at a healthy weight are now a minority.
For Dove, the profits from extra skincare might be marginal. For the bar soap’s parent company, Unilever, the profits are exponential.
Unilever is a U.K.-based company that is among the top 40 processors of packaged foods in the United States. Popular brands include Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. Name a better saleswoman for ice cream than the author of a self-described “manifesto” against “diet culture” and “fatphobia.” It’s unclear whether Tovar has received money from the campaign, though Tovar has pinned a 37-post-long highlight reel dedicated to Dove at the top of her professional Instagram page. While her activism on behalf of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream might not be explicit, her efforts to undermine healthy biases against excess weight certainly are. She defines “fatphobia” in her 2018 book as “a form of bigotry that positions fat people as inferior and as objects of hatred and derision.”
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As explained in my new book with wellness writer Gina Bontempo, activists such as Tovar promoted by the food industry will often co-opt the victimized language of social justice, characterizing obese people as oppressed not by the extra pounds they carry but by external pressures to lose weight. That’s despite the obvious consequences from long-term obesity such as heart disease, diabetes, joint problems, and myriad cancers, just to name a few. Others featured in Unilever’s soap campaign against “size discrimination” include anti-diet author Megan Jayne Crabbe and celebrity singer Lizzo, perhaps the most famous icon of the contemporary body positivity movement.
In 2023, Unilever made roughly $60 billion in revenue, making the company one of the largest food corporations in America selling addictive products to an already overweight nation. It makes sense, then, that Unilever’s subsidiaries would want to capitalize on a movement to make Americans increasingly eager to buy snacks and ice cream in the name of “size freedom.”
Tristan Justice is a national correspondent for the Federalist and the co-author of Fat and Unhappy: How ‘Body Positivity’ Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself).