Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations... Except for Fat

I’ve written here before about how much I love Star Trek in all its forms. I cut my fandom teeth on the original series and was there all through Deep Space Nine and most of Voyager and even Enterprise. Now I’m all in on Discovery. It is beautiful to see all those humans and people from other planets all working together and serving together. It is the realization of what I think Roddenberry imagined when he started Star Trek.

Now that we’re halfway through the third season (Spoilers ahead)

and there’s been a significant time jump, we’re more than a millennia from everything we know from the universe that has been established. So far we’ve seen a good chunk of the functioning society that exists in the 30th century. It’s a desperate time without the Federation to keep the peace and everyone is trying to scratch out an existence as best as they can.

But clearly no matter what has happened in the intervening 900+ years, all of the fat people have disappeared. If they were ever there to begin with. I mean, it’s statistically improbable that there’s NO fat people. Even if all of the systemic issues that perpetuate nutrition deficiencies and high-calorie, high-fat, low-cost foods in marginalized communities have been taken care of, fat bodies can and should still exist.

One of the images from the credits is the symbol for IDIC, or infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It was inspired by Roddenberry and became part of the Vulcan philosophy: “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity. And the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty." (“Is There in Truth No Beauty?” ST: Original Series)

Roddenberry said “Until humans learn to tolerate -- no, that’s not enough; to positively value each other -- until we can value the diversity here on Earth, then we don’t deserve to go into outer space and encounter the infinite diversity out there.”

So, where are the fat people? The problem is that Star Trek is written by people that still have biases, who do not positively value everyone. Anti-fat bias remains rampant and has increased over time, while other biases have started to decrease. So even in while trying to imagine a society so far in the future that everything is new, and the writers can not only play in Roddenberry’s sandbox but potentially expand it in any direction, it is impossible for them to imagine fat people existing.

Until we can learn to positively value fat people, until anti-fat bias is totally eliminated (along with every kind of bias out there), until we can look at a person in a fat body and not see something that needs to be fixed, hidden, or eliminated, then we can’t move forward as a society.