Abstract
Crafting policies to address the increasing obesity of Americans and associated increases in rates of diseases like diabetes, cardiopulmonary disease, cancers, asthma, and serious complications from infection with the Covid 19 virus have foundered on the dominant rhetoric of choice and personal responsibility. Though many believe food producers are creating and manipulating consumers’ cravings and addictions to junk food in ways that are comparable to the efforts of tobacco producers to hook smokers on cigarettes two generations ago, approaches to increasing rates of obesity and attendant health problems still mostly focus on individual efforts to become better informed about nutrition, get more exercise, and choose a healthier diet. How can policymakers concerned about the public health effects of such a diet shift the dominant discourse so that personal choice and responsibility are no longer treated like a mantra? Reframing how we think about obesity in the U.S. is critical if we want to hold the food industry responsible for making American consumers fat, and create policies that address corporate responsibility for the toxic food environment most Americans live in. My paper proposes food justice as a way to make a powerful normative appeal to change how we produce and market food in the U.S.. I relate food justice to notions of systemic racism, including connections between class, job access and race, ethnicity or national origin, food deserts and swamps, the availability of safe places to exercise, and cost and time as determinants of what people end up “choosing” to eat.
Presenters
Patricia BolingProfessor, Department of Political Science, Purdue University , Indiana, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Obesity, Policy, Food Justice, Framing
