In a new episode of Bad News, Alice Snedden talks to the minister of health about fatness in Aotearoa, except he just can’t seem to say the word.

Language evolves and terms previously deemed acceptable can suddenly be understood as offensive. At the same time, words that have long been considered offensive due to a learned aversion to their meaning can be reclaimed and used accurately. In a new episode of Bad News titled “FAT”, host Alice Snedden talks about her own fatness and fat people in Aotearoa. During the episode, she sits down with minister of health Andrew Little to discuss the country’s high obesity rates and whether fat people are people who have made bad choices or simply products of their environment and genetics. It’s a fascinating topic but one that Little can’t bring himself to name. Here’s how it went, with visual aids:

“Are you comfortable with the term fat people?”

Little’s interview opens with Snedden asking how he feels about “society’s attitude towards fat people”. Little hesitates. “I’m not-” he stammers, before Snedden interjects. “Are you comfortable with the term fat people?” she asks.

He responds by saying that we are now more likely to stigmatise people by labels and “I take people as they are and who they are… I don’t care what people look like, or anything.”

“Ummmmmm”

When Snedden follows up by asking if Little thinks there is a stigma around fat, Little takes his time to think.

“Off the top of my head?” he asks himself. “Aaahh, I can’t, look, I don’t, I can’t say,” he shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“People of all sorts of shapes and sizes”

Snedden and Little debate a little about how much a person’s weight is a result of environmental factors vs personal choice factors. Snedden suggests that a trepidation to talk openly about issues like this “or even to use terms like fatness” leads to dragging feet on environmental changes from the government around things like cost of food and socio-economic factors impacting neighbourhood food options. Little responds by saying that he goes mountain biking on the weekends and sees “people of all sorts of shapes and sizes”.

“People who I might describe as having a high BMI, to be polite about it”

This is the closest he gets to saying the word. In elaborating on who the “people of all sorts of shapes and sizes” are on his bike rides, Little adds, “people who I might describe as, you know, having a high BMI, to be polite about it.”

The whole episode is centred around fat stigma and the assumption that fatness equals bad. Little attempts to “be polite about it” by referring to fat people as “having high BMI”. Previously he had stated that he did not know if there was a stigma around fatness in New Zealand.

Throughout the episode, Snedden talks about fat and fatness, with only part of the episode featuring Little. But a peek at the full transcript of Little’s interview shows he avoided using the word “fat” throughout except once when referring to “fats and sugars”. Just something to think about, really.

Season three of Alice Snedden’s Bad News is releasing weekly now. Watch here.