Sobo - The Sweetness of Fat

This chapter describes the traditional health beliefs in rural Jamaica.

1. The ideal body for Jamaicans is plump with vital fluids.
2. Jamaicans are physically linked by body liquids
   Blood (red wine, built from thick, dark liquid items such as soup
   Sinews (come from okra, fish eyes, and other pale slimy foods)
3. Jamaicans villages consist of people brought together by ancestry, or by proximity to a shop.
4. Food: serve to make people feel full.
5. Food sharing and social relations
   Socially dominant individuals
   A respected adult is called “a big man” or “a big woman”, good relations involve food sharing.
   Weight loss signals social neglect
6. Mothers feed children, kin feed kin, and lovers feed each other.
7. Fatness at its best is associated with moistness, fertility, and kindness.
8. Drinks, warm moist, cooked food can make the fat.
9. Plump woman more attractive for man.
10. Plumpness is important for good health.
11. A few Jamaicans want to reduce.
12. Diet food and drink are only in bigger town.
13. People meant for diabetics.
14. People taunt others by saying they will dry up and grow thin from antisocial meanness.
15. Kindness involves altruistic, kinglike sharing
    Kind people: give what is asking for, offer things, treat others as family.
16. Mean person: stranger, never share, refuses, requests. Use very little salt, salt costs money.
17. Jamaican kinship ideally involves a sense of interdependence and obligation.
    Jamaicans ascertain kinship through blood ties.
18. Parents feed, build, and grow the fetus with their body substances.
19. White blood=mothers’ milk
20. Nurture kinship can be altered after birth.
21. Thin people have little nurturing, willingly sociable capacity.
22. Mules do not reproduce, just work, serve as pack animal, do not breed. Mules are traditionally associated with prostitutes, do not reproduce.
23. Women carry wood, water. No fecund woman are called mules.
24. A good shape is a matter of firmness and proportion.
25. Men should be muscular, never flabby. Women’s bottoms should be broad.
26. Sexual fluid: fatness itself must be discharged. Prostitution and oral sex are not condoned.
27. Men need to be careful about semen, albeit, emphasize the importance of intercourse and ejaculation.
28. Jamaicans believe men as opposed to Women. Men always want sextant cannot control their urges easily. Male sexual behavior is justified. Men lose much more sinews when discharging than do women.
29. Dry spine can occur if a man involves himself with abnormally libidinous, can reverse itself over time. Men with dry spine will draw down thin.
30. Cow’s milk and other foods build sinews increase a woman’s store.
31. A nursing woman should only have intercourse with lovers.
32. The body shape associated with a separation between sex and reproduction.
33. Americans prefer regimes that lead to thinness. Jamaicans attempt to fatten their bodies.
34. Plump body is healthily, happily to fulfill, obligations to kin and community, but fat person’s body is richly fertile. Thinness is linked with death.