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By Anna Rahmanan
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Can you really be surprised that a culture this obsessed with excess has devoted an entire week to ranking fat bears?
This is, after all, the country of the Venti and the Big Gulp, of "add a dollar and make it a large," Costco bulk packs, 40-ounce tumblers, two-for-one deals and Shein hauls where $30 buys enough polyester to clothe your whole family through spring and summer, twice. Here in America, more is the default setting. You want bigger? Just drop another buck.
So, yes, of course we have Fat Bear Week.
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The annual competition at Alaska’s Katmai National Park wraps up Tuesday, after a week in which the public gets to study photos of enormously well-fed brown bears and vote, bracket-style, for the one that has done the most impressive job of getting fat before winter. Think of it as fantasy football for, let's say it, unapologetically fat-obsessed Americans.
The contest kicked off in 2014 as a one-day event and, last year, more than 1.7 million votes were cast, which means millions of people clicked approvingly on increasingly rotund bears until one was crowned champion. America at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.
But why are we so obsessed with all things grand?
Perhaps Americans simply understand fatness, in both the literal and philosophical sense. The country is huge—3.8 million square miles huge, putting it among the five largest nations on Earth. Everything here is big and, in the most literal sense, some of our most ubiquitous, unhealthy and cheapest food is engineered to keep us eating more and more and more.
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We fear the fat, but we sell the fat. Then we medicalize the fat and moralize it and spend fantastic amounts of money trying both to acquire the fat—in the nonliteral sense—and get rid of it in the literal one.
We supersize dinner and microdose breakfast. We invented an economy in which you can have 1,200 calories delivered to your door without putting on shoes and then, in perhaps the most American twist of all, have a weekly injection delivered to help undo some of the consequences.
And obesity has, quite literally, taken over. According to the CDC’s latest state-level data, every jurisdiction with usable 2025 figures except Washington, D.C., had an adult obesity rate of at least 25 percent.
But there is another kind of obesity here, too.
Look around: American cars are enormous (families without three-row cars may as well bike around) and so are homes. Our televisions have gone from furniture pieces to things that are basically the wall. Our stores are warehouses but then our warehouse stores have actual warehouses attached to them. Even our cups have stopped being cups and become 40-ounce, handled, must-have vacuum-sealed vessels designed to transport enough water across the kitchen to survive…an apocalypse?
It's not just that we like to consume a lot, it's that we like our things to be a lot.
Which is all to say: Fat Bear Week is far from the eccentric little Alaska story we might once have thought it was. It is a tiny, furry mirror held up to a country that has spent generations turning bigger into better (we think), more into normal and excess into a valuable aesthetic. The bears, at least, have an excuse: they have to get enormous to survive the winter. We just seem to like it that way.
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