RIFFLING THROUGH the rails of Gap Kids in Phoenix, Arizona, I discovered that jeans for eight-year-olds came in three cuts: regular, loose and — what’s this? — “husky”. “It’s for, er, larger kids,” explained the assistant, and I imagined the scene at Gap HQ as a boardroom of lean, black-clad fashionistas brainstormed to find the least derogatory word for obese children’s trousers.

“Bonny?” Too babyish. “Chubby?” Affectionate, but how a love-blind granny might refer to her 140lb grandson. “Affluent?” Hmm, good but maybe we’ll save that for the men’s outsize slacks range. “Husky?” Fantastic: it says large but in a powerful, outdoorsy way — and it sounds cuddly and fluffy too!

Of course, it was no surprise to find Middle America fat. On the flight over, I pondered the etiquette if seated next to one of many husky passengers. Keep your elbow rammed on the dividing arm-rest? Or take pity and allow him to ooze into your space? But what disturbs the British eye — even with our own swelling husky population — is how America no longer seems to care or even notice that 69 per cent of its citizens are overweight or obese. It has simply learnt to accommodate, to call it something else.

At SeaWorld theme park in San Diego electric buggies for the disabled were commandeered by fat people unwilling to walk between Ship Wreck Rapids and Shamu the whale. And at the dude ranch near Tucson, Arizona, was a sign giving warning that persons over 250lb (almost 18st) were not permitted to ride. “We could get the heavier folks on,” said a cowboy wryly. “But the horses would buck ‘em off.” However, the weight rule no longer applied: “We’ve just gotten bigger horses.”

In their stretchy leisure wear, with their tottering gait, perpetually sucking the straws of oversize drink cartons, American huskies look like sinister overgrown babies to whom no one has ever said “no”. But then America is an infantilised consumer culture predicated on getting what you want — now — even if it is killing you. After two weeks, I felt like congratulating every slim American I met because outside the LA and New York bean-sprout belts it requires exhausting acts of everyday sedition to remain healthy: to decline the butter served (ugh!) with your head-size choc-chip muffin, or to scour menus for any vegetable apart from a slathered salad.

But this attitude of “if people like it, so what?” has crept into British culture too. “We are giving children what they want, not what they need,” said a dismayed Jamie Oliver, this week on the TV programme, School Dinners, after a day serving burgers and chips in a Greenwich comprehensive. The Government has long got away with spending 37p per school meal because children will eat the only type of food this shameful sum can purchase. And so the lie that kids will eat nothing but fried junk is now enshrined, not just at McDonald’s but also on the chicken nugget-filled kids’ menus at the fanciest restaurants or middle-class homes where adults dine on Nigel Slater but stoke their heirs with frozen pizza.

There is no such thing as “kids food”, but it takes a grown-up to say it, to stand coaxing over a plate, to insist vegetables are eaten. But then we are a generation that shies from the uncooler duties of adulthood: being a killjoy, a rule-enforcer, an eat-your-greens nag. Doctors find many parents of obese children do not even see them as overweight. We are, like husky America, recalibrating our sizes, our language, even our own eyes.

Bad Booker

THE ONLY thing which stopped me hurling Ian McEwan’s Saturday across my American motel room, was the fact that I had bought it in hardback. This Booker shortlisted novel is the most self-satisfied and complacent work I have ever read in my life. This much-praised novel is about Henry, a brain surgeon who adores his beautiful, accomplished lawyer wife and brilliant grown-up children, who lives in a huge and gorgeous Fitzrovian house, is a giant in his chosen field, a great squash player, marathon runner and top shag, looks marvellous for his age, has unimpeachable morals and cooks a perfect fish stew.

It is like reading a 300-page Christmas round robin from the world’s smuggest family: “Well, everyone has been most busy: Rosalind has just saved press freedom (again!), Daisy was awarded a first at Oxford and her volume of poetry has won a literary prize (well done!) And our concerns about Theo leaving school at 16 were unfounded: he’s now a world-class blues musician . . .” On and on. While the only plot thread concerns Henry pranging his posh (lavishly-described) car into a minor villain. But even that does not burst his haute-bourgeois bubble.

The scene that made me howl with derision (read no farther if you do not want to know the “twist”) is when the thug, who is about to rape Daisy naked at knifepoint, makes her read a poem. And so moved is he by a quick stanza of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach that he lets her go. Oh behold how the gentle arts sootheth the savage beast. To which I replied in best southern Californian, “Oh pul-lease!”

Kerb career

THAT THE refreshingly honest Christine Wheatley has been dropped from the Labour Party candidates’ shortlist for admitting to having a youthful career in Paris as a “20-franc tart” seems very unfair. What better qualification for political office?

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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