Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world by Greg Crister

receiving federal financial assistance." Applied to physical education, where classes had long been conducted separately, and where boys' sports received the majority of support, the law was transformative. A year after its implementation, physical education in California went co-ed. Programs once reserved for boys now opened to girls. To accommodate them, PE staffs were split up and reassigned. And because equal facilities were mandated by the law, existing sports fields, equipment, and locker rooms had to be reapportioned as well. By 1978, when all schools were expected to be in complete compliance with the new law, remarkable progress had been made, with girls finally receiving many of the resources long denied on the basis of gender alone.
    The progress came with a cost too. In boom times, those costs might have been absorbed by ever expanding school budgets. But the late 1970s were not exactly booming. Government spending was limited not just by economic trepidation, hut by the "small is beautiful" philosophy of the state's brainy new governor, a former Jesuit seminarian named Jerry Brown. Brown was the New Age opposite to his father, Pat, who as governor in the early 1960s had put the government — and its huge budget — center stage in the education field. Now the inclination was to contract. Or, as the younger Brown put it, "to focus resources on small projects that might bring fundamental change." The state legislature began retrenching. In 1976, trying to save money while complying with Title 9, the state allowed individual school districts to exempt juniors and seniors from PE requirements. By 1977 a de-

    WHY THE CALORIES STAYED ON OUR BODIES
    partmental survey found that almost all public schools had done so. It also reported a dangerous trend: "Staffing has been reduced and teaching methods changed as a direct result of the new programs." Such was the first of a hundred ultimately fatal paper cuts on the corpus of modern PE.
    Betty Hennessy, a veteran PE teacher and later adviser to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, noticed the on-the-ground changes almost immediately. Where, in the past, unequal but abundant economic resources had allowed physical education instructors to get equipment and personnel support from district headquarters, now "teachers were on their own." With large classes, and the necessity of getting students in, suited up, and then showered and out the gym door, "the PE teacher became little more than a scorekeeper," she says. To relieve the strain, the state legislature passed a bill allowing non-PE teachers to coach. Although this was a bit like having a PE teacher with no science background tutor kids in chemistry, no one, at least at the state level, seemed to notice. By 1980 another Department of Education survey reported that only half of juniors and seniors were taking PE, and that while many schools were "successfully" implementing Title 9, "about 40 percent of schools .. . perceive that it has caused program quality to decline."
    The second pre-Proposition 13 trend at work was more personal: the so-called fitness boom of the '70s. Originating in the popularity of aerobics — long, slow running, mainly — and its various health benefits, personal fitness had been taken up passionately by many California adults. The rise of private gyms and celebrity exercise videos was a natural outgrowth. But unlike the old PE, where group participation and peak performance were goals, the underlying premises of the new fitness boom were individualistic and medical. One exercised for specific ends. Many were, of course, purely cosmetic ends. Others were health-based — one exercised to "reduce health risks," or to "feel better about oneself." Fitness, the new acolytes believed, was about self-empowerment, about autonomy, about self-definition. It was, like

    FAT LAND
    the Reagan revolution it took place within, all about throwing off the old bourgeois liberalism of the past, particularly