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Here in America, where more of us are obese than ever before, we can’t look at fat people without cringing. More important, we can’t look at fat people without projecting character flaws onto them. Being fat is a failure of decision making, a sign of poor choices.

A few years ago, a couple of New York teenagers sued McDonald’s for contributing to their obesity.10 Their suit was quickly thrown out amid national ridicule. There was nothing more ridiculous, Americans agreed, than fat people suing McDonald’s for their french-fry habit. It was as if people around the country said, It’s one thing for fat people to let themselves go. But it’s another thing for the fatties to try to shift responsibility for their food addiction to a clown with red hair and yellow coveralls. People know what they are getting when they buy a Big Mac. They are getting cheap, fatty food that could give them a heart attack if they eat a lot of it. If they get fat, develop diabetes, or die of heart disease, they only have themselves to blame.

But what if we learned that obesity is less a product of genuine choice than it seems? More and more studies show that people are “hard-wired” to eat by deep biological commands. Eating to excess is often a product of the kinds of foods available and how they are marketed, the cultural messages people receive about food, how much money they have, and the availability of safe places to exercise. In other words, what individuals choose to eat is very contextual. As a New York Times commentator said, “It’s the environment, stupid.”11 Fast food companies are intensely aware of how contextual our food choices are, and they are brilliant at taking advantage of situations and environments—low-income neighborhoods, roadside rest stops, or airport concourses—that are conducive to selling unhealthy, fatty foods. (Why do you think there are so many Cinnabon stores in airports?)

I am not saying that people have no control over their muscles when they move a Whopper, chicken wing, or Cheez Whiz nacho from the plate to their mouths. But our decision to eat—even the decision to eat really bad food—is affected by what happens around us and inside us. Fast food companies, supermarkets, cigarette manufacturers, and beer makers know that choices can be affected, and they take advantage of it in decisions about what to put in products, how to advertise them, and where to sell them. People may have about the same level of choice about being obese as Henry Lamson did about getting hit in the head with a hatchet, as Jane Costa did about getting hit in the face with a baseball, and as New Orleans residents did about staying in their homes in the face of Katrina warnings. And fat people probably have less responsibility for their size than the climbers on Mount Hood had for being on the slopes of a mountain in December.

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So what is going on here? On the one hand, we revel in a culture of personal responsibility and choice. We hold people responsible for things that may or may not be their own doing, or that are due as much to the actions of others as to their own. On the other hand, we often let people off the hook for things that go horribly wrong because of something they did.

Maybe we need to be more consistent in applying notions of personal responsibility. Perhaps we are making a mistake when we excuse people from making bad choices—like to climb a dangerous mountain rather than stay home in the face of a coming storm. Or maybe the opposite is true—perhaps we should be more forgiving than we are, more understanding of the mistakes people make and of constraints that limit or compel their decisions.

This book is about our fixation on choice and our confused responses to it. The rhetoric of choice and personal responsibility is all around us, yet we have little real understanding of what makes choices valid and worth respecting. Sometimes we can be unforgiving. (Jane Costa should have known that a hit baseball could ruin