Weighing in : obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism / Julie Guthman.
This book takes on the "obesity epidemic," challenging many widely held assumptions about its causes and consequences. The author examines fatness and its relationship to health outcomes to ask if our efforts to prevent "obesity" are sensible, efficacious, or ethical. She also fo...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Ebook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Berkeley :
University of California Press,
©2011.
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| Series: | California studies in food and culture ;
32. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Click here to view this book |
| Summary: | This book takes on the "obesity epidemic," challenging many widely held assumptions about its causes and consequences. The author examines fatness and its relationship to health outcomes to ask if our efforts to prevent "obesity" are sensible, efficacious, or ethical. She also focuses the lens of obesity on the broader food system to understand why we produce cheap, over-processed food, as well as why we eat it. She takes issue with the currently touted remedy to obesity, promoting food that is local, organic, and farm fresh. While such fare may be tastier and grown in more ecologically sustainable ways, this approach can also reinforce class and race inequalities and neglect other possible explanations for the rise in obesity, including environmental toxins. Arguing that ours is a political economy of bulimia, one that promotes consumption while also insisting upon thinness, she offers a complex analysis of our entire economic system. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xi, 227 pages : maps) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0520949757 9780520949751 |