750 words 8 hrs

Introduction

Our Big Fat Contradiction

Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than

one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million

happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are

outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are

overweight.

Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem

and, what's more, the route to eradicating world hunger is also the

way to prevent global epidemics of diabetes and heart disease, and

to address a host of environmental and social ills. Overweight and

hungry people are linked through the chains of production that

bring food from fields to our plate. Guided by the profit motive, the

corporations that sell our food shape and constrain how we eat, and

how we think about food. The limitations are clearest at the fast

food outlet, where the spectrum of choice runs from McMuffin to McNugget. But there are hidden and systemic constraints even

when we feel we're beyond the purview of Ronald McDonald. Even when we want to buy something healthy, something to

keep the doctor away, we're trapped in the very same system that

has created our 'Fast Food Nations'. Try, for example, shopping for apples. At supermarkets in North America and Europe, the choice is

restricted to half a dozen varieties: Fuji, Braeburn, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and perhaps a couple of others. Why these? Because they're pretty: we like the polished and unblemished skin.

2 Stuffed and Starved

e their taste is one that's largely unobjectio b Becaus . na le t

. •ry But also because they can stand transponatio O tfie maJorr . ' . . n over I . ces Their skin won t tear or blem1sh if rhey're kn0ck Ong ~~. ~~ in rhe miles from orchard to aisle. They take well to the w~ Ut

chnologies and compounds that make this transportation nr. . ng re yvSs1bJe and keep the apples pretty on the s~elves. ~hey are easy to harvest They respond well to pesticides and mdustnal production. These ar · reasons why we won't find Calville Blanc, Black Oxford, Zaberga:

Reinette, Kandil Sinap or the ancient and venerable Rambo on the shelves. Our choices are not entirely our own because, even in a supermarket, the menu is crafted not by our choices, nor by the seasons, nor where we find ourselves, nor by the full range of apples available, nor by the full spectrum of available nutrition and tastes, but by the power of food corporations.

The concerns of food production companies have ramifications

far beyond what appears on supermarket shelves. Their concerns are the rot at the core of the modern food system. To show the

systemic ability of a few to impact the health of the many demands a global investigation, travelling from the 'green deserts' of Brazil to the architecture of the modern city, and moving through history from the time of the first domesticated plants to the Battle of Seattle. It's an enquiry that uncovers the real reasons for famine in

Asia and Africa, why there is a worldwide epidemic of farmer

suicides, why we don't know what's in our food any more, why black people in the United States are more likely to be overweight than white, why there are cowboys in South Central Los Angeles, and how the world's largest social movement is discovering ways l · d ' arge an small, for us to think about, and live differently with

food. '

h The altem~tive to eating the way we do today promises to solve unger and diet-related disease by offering a w f .

growing food that 1 . . ' ay o · eatmg and s environmentally su t · bl

Understanding the ills of th fi . s aina e and socially just. e way ood ts grown and eaten also offers

The Battle of Seattle refers to the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle. Protests focused on workers' rights, sustainable economies, and environmental and social issues.

- 3

~ ro gre ter freedom. and a vay of reclaiming the JO'/ of ung The task is urgent as the pnze 1s greal. 1n evtr}' country. the conrradtcaons of obesuy. hunger, po\"Crty

and ,-eaJth are becoming more acute. India has, for example, descroyed millions of tons of grains. permitting food to rot in ilos,

"hile the quality of food eaten b India's poorest is getting v..-orse for the first rime since Independence in 194 . In 1992. in the same towns

and \.illages where malnutrition had begun t0 grip the poorest families, the Indian government admitted foreign soft drinks

manufactUrers and food multinationals to its previously protected

economy. Within a decade, India has become home to the world's largest concentration of diabetics: people - often children - whose

bodies have fractured under the pressure of eating too much of the wrong kinds of food.

India isn't the only home to these contrasts. They're global. and

they're present even in the world's richest country. In the United

Stares in 2005, 35.1 million people didn't know where their ne>..'t

meal was coming from. 1 At the same time there is more diet-related

disease like diabetes. and more food, in the US than ever before.

It's easy to become inured to this conrradiction; its daily version

causes only mild discomfort, walking past the 'homeless and

hungry' signs on the way to supermarkets bursting with food. There

are moral emollients to balm a troubled conscience: the poor are

hungry because they're lazy, or perhaps the wealthy are fat because

they eat too richly. This vein of folk wisdom has a long pedigree.

Every culture has had, in some form or other, an understanding of

our bodies as public ledgers on which is written the catalogue of our

private vices. The language of condemnation doesn't, however help

us understand why hunger, abundance and obesity are more

compatible on our planet than they've ever been.

Moral condemnation only works if the condemned could have done things differently, if they had choices. Yet the prevalence of

hunger and obesity affect populations with far too much

Stuffed and Starved 4

in too many different places, for it to be the ~esult of r('gulapr:~onal failing. Part of the reason our judgement is ~o out omt d. h 't kept up with the f J<iJter is because the way we read bo ies asn h

~mes. Although it may once have been true, the assumption t at :~ be overweight is to be rich no longer holds. Obesity can no longer be explained exclusively as a curse of individual affluence.

Th · features that make a difference. Here's an

ere are systemic . . example: many teenagers in Mexico, a developing country with an average income of US$6,ooo, are bloated as never before, even as the ranks of the Mexican poor swell. Individual wealth doesn't

explain why the children of some families are more obese than others: the crucial factor turns out not to be income, but proximity to the US border. The closer a Mexican family lives to its northern

neighbours and to their sugar- and fat-rich processed food habits,

the more overweight the family's children are likely to be. 2 That

geography matters so much rather overturns the idea that

personal choice is the key to preventing obesity or, by the same

token, preventing hunger. And it helps to renew the lament of

Porfirio Diaz, one of Mexico's late-nineteenth-century presidents

and autocrats: 'iPobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios; y tan cerca de los

Estados Unidos' (Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States).

A perversity of the way our food comes to us is that it's now

possible for people who can't afford enough to eat to be obese.

Children growing up malnourished in the favelas of Sao Paulo, for

instance, are at greater risk from obesity when they become adults.

Their bodies, broken by childhood poverty, metabolize and st0re

food poorly. As a result, they're at greater risk of storing as fat the (poor-quality) food that they can access. 3 Across the planet, the poor can't afford to eat well. Again this is true even in the world's richeSr

' . 0~ country; and in the US, it's children who will pay the price. research · rterns stay

team recently suggested that if consumpnon pa ars, the way they are, today's US children will live five fewer ye

Introduction 5

b cause of the diet-related diseases to which they will be exposed in their lifetimes.•

N consumers, we're encouraged to think that an economic

s rem based on individual choice will save us from the collective ills of hunger and obesity. Yet it is precisely 'freedom of choice' that has incubated these ills. Those of us able to head to the supermarket can boggle at the possibility of choosing from fifty brands of sugared

cereals, from half a dozen kinds of milk that aJl taste like chalk, from

shelves of bread so sopped in chemicals that they will never go off, from aisles of products in which the principal ingredient is sugar.

British children are, for instance, able to select from twenty-eight

branded breakfast cereals the marketing of which is aimed directly

at them. The sugar content of twenty-seven of these exceeds the

government's recommendations. Nine of these children's cereals are

40 per cent sugar. 5 It's hardly surprising, then, that 8.5 per cent of

six-year-olds and more than one in ten fifteen-year-olds in the UK

are obese. And the levels are increasing. The breakfast cereal story

is a sign of a wider systemic feature: there's every incentive for food

producing corporations to sell food that has undergone processing

which renders it more profitable, if less nutritious. Incidentally, this

explains why there are so many more varieties of breakfast cereals

on sale than varieties of apples.

There are natural limits to our choices. There are, for instance,

only so many naturally occurring fruits, vegetables and animals that

people are prepared to eat. But even here, a little advertising can

persuade us to expand the ambit of our choices. Think of the kiwi

fruit, once known as the Chinese gooseberry, but rebranded to

accommodate Cold War prejudices by the New Zealand food

company that marketed it to the world at the end of the 1950s. It's a

taste no-one had grown up with, but which now seems as if it has always been there. And while new natural foods are slowly added to

our menus, the food industry adds tens of thousands of new

products to the shelves every year, some of which become

Stuffed and Starved

indispensable fixtures which after a generation make , . . . h h I ' . f hfe unimaginable wit out t em. t s a sign o how limited

0 gasrronomic imaginations can be. And also a sign that we're n~; altogether sure how or where or why certain foods end up on

our plate.

Chosen by Bunnies 267

Prehensive systemic effort to control who gets to e·lt st com < ~ mo I c And that means looking at apartheid. a11d w 1er .

they squeaked to victory in 1948, the South African National en wasted little time in consolidating a racist project of t'/ tion and discrimination. The political philosophy of apart-

~upported a raft of legislation, to give the government the last

-,rd in racial classification (the Population Registration Act I9SO), 10 make it illegal for people from different races to have sex (the IJIUilorality Act of 1950), to split the country up into black and white

areas (the Group Areas Act of 1950) and to prevent whites and blacks from using the same beaches, toilets and other spaces (the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953). In so doing, South Africa not only inaugurated an official policy of state racism, they also spawned a new kind of food, and a new way to eat it.

In apartheid jails, of course, the apartheid regime regulated food, space and race with intricate precision. 'Coloureds and Asiatics', for example, were given different rations from 'Bantus' {Africans). The white government would, for example, provide no bread or jam to 'Bantus'. These processed foods were the privilege of white people. They were the sweet concessions given to coloureds and Asiatics for being more 'civilized' than Africans. But while apartheid's racial fantasies could be enforced and monitored every hour of the day inside the prison, it was outside the barbed wire, where apartheid tried to shape the diets of millions and wher~ it was subverted, that we will find lessons on food and consumption forus today. d

.d bl k and whites were prevente With the onset of aparthei , ac s , G "lle Golf dd. at Durban s reyvi from eating together. Black ca ies · he same cutlery and

. unable to use t Course were, for tnS t ance, v: t hey needed to eat quickly

. . . th hite golfers. 1e t washing fac1hues as e w

268 Stuffed and Starved

and speedily, in order to be able to spend ~s little time away fr their jobs at the golf course as possible. Th~s called for some inv:: tion. The solution meshed together two culinary traditions, both of

which themselves had been transplanted to Durban. The new apartheid-compatible food involved the ladling of curry (a food that came with indentured Indians, who'd been brought to South

Africa's Natal province by the British to work on the sugar

plantations) 28 into a hollowed-out loaf of white bread (a food

enjoyed by the British themselves). White bread, never brown.29The enterprising Gujarati Hindus who first put the two ingredients

together were of the Bunia caste. Thus was created Durban's signature food: 'bunny chow'. At its best, the curry is rich and warm. The pithed out bread can be dipped into the bunny itself, the comer

of the loaf lending itself to scooping the larger pieces of potato or

chicken in the stew. You eat it entirely with your hands, which soon

develop a yellow stain from the turmeric in the curry. And it's thoroughly delicious. 30

The key features of bunny chow were that it was hot, ready to eat, filling, appetizing and portable (though not too far, before

the curry soaked into the bread, making a mess of both). It meant

that caddies could, on the run, eat food that they enjoyed, that

nourished them and that embodied and celebrated an identity, a meaning that fought against racial injustice. 31 In mixing black and white foods along the boundaries established by the apartheid 5rat~, the bunny was both an obeisance to existing law and a ga5ttononuc fuck you.

. 80th th e ruthlessness that made apartheid possible, and th

e m · rtl ~~ ventiveness that fought back with bunnies, reach us a Ji e a the geography of our tastes and our choices. At the same tirJle_ as making it po 'bl nl d catet1118 . ssi e to open restaurants for whites o Y an .. d1fferentiall . . pa.moon

Y to its black prison inmates the South Afncan also made ·t ' 1 pa neW1

. 1 necessary for thousands of caterers to deve O nJt1

qwck food to b d h were o J e eveloped to cater to rhe poor, w 0

Chosen by Bunnies 269

tblt to ronuol the tempo and compass of their live . ln foreshndowed today's metropolises, and the way we

1beffl. Global North, the country that carries a candle for Sooth Africa, through the segregation of diet between

:poor, black and white, is the United States.3• Levels of the US and South Africa are, strikingly, about the same.J3 • is one of the richest countries in the Global South, and

States has the highest number of people below the line (12.7 pe.r cent) in the Global North.34 ln the US, people

and the poor have access to environments that are more lead to obesity~ while their richer and whiter counterparts likely to have access to foods that are fresh, nutritious and salt and fat. Across a range of neighbourhoods in the US

l

ones are not only likely to have four times fewer super- than rich ones, they're three times more likely to have

to consume alcohol. 35

Even after adjusting for levels of 'al activity, the presence of highways and median home

fast foQd restaurants are concentrated in neighbourhoods of people, and people of colour.36

t the environment is more than shops. It is the architecture our homes, the spaces through which we move to work, eat,

learn, rest and pray. To see this, it's worth looking at geography the eyes of a child." Within the home and state institutions, arly within schools, children are forced through a mangle of

advertising and educational co-branding. Pizza Hut has 'Book , McDonald's has the All-American Reading Challenge, Minute

Coca Cola has the Minute Maid Summer Reading Program in Durban4 the Wimpy beefburger chain has even managed to

r a Hindu school.ss These are topped off by a range of POOS tie-ins and sponsorships, through which food corpora-

for children's attention. The increased availability ~f food QJIWl k ~ d or any other) targeted at children, ltlllllV sugary, snac 100 ,

270 Stuffed and Starved

together with an nvironment in which chiklrcn are «bl · · d · h · I J • e effettw i.. to howl tor it, nn 111 w 1c 1 t 11s pester-power 1 1 e,, s evera&ed bi

marketers, ha led to cxplosfons in children's ill-health OVi Y billion a year is spent marketing food to children in the~ . er US$to

. n1ted Stat alone. According to Richard Watts, Coordinator of the Ch' ts

. ildreo· Food Campa1gn at the UK group Sustain, for every d IJ s

o ar Spent promoting healthy food globally, US$500 is spent on

promoting junk food. 39

The kinds of advertising that lead to paediatric disease aren' restricted to print or television. Advertising media, and the needs t; which they cater, are woven into the fabric of children's lives, from

textbooks to cyberspace to playgrounds to parks to packaging. This

isn't to suggest the totalitarian grip of food corporations on every

fibre of a child's being, but rather that their circumstances make

choices for them, and that the food system fits into, and amplifies,

the most profitable of these circumstances. This is why looking at

the case of children is so revealing. We tend to think that children

need shepherding in their choices, because the world not only

shapes their choices, but shapes them. While we look at children as

those least capable of independent choice, study after study

(sometimes sponsored by the advertising industry, sometimes not)

has found that children are often able to tell the difference between

what is an advertisement and what isn't. The implication is that it's

okay to expose children to advertising, because they'll figure it out.

But these results can be interpreted differently. It's also possible to

conclude that adult responses to the inducements to consume are,

in a meaningful way, no more sophisticated than those of a three-

year-old.

Certainly, the consequences of advertising food to children have

blurred the diagnostic difference between kids and grown-ups. Ir

has led to the renaming of 'adult onset' diabetes as 'type U', give~ ~he

increasing numbers of children with the disease. In Chinese citt~s,

the prevalence of childhood obesity increased from 1.5 per cent in

Cho rt Sunnies n

12 6 per cenr in 1997 . ..ci And in Brazil . . Q ro · in a rres offandm rk

f9 it becomes clear that poor child ha . rud1es, . ' ren ve it "·o t .

s . . nally depnved while young, theyre at h. h . urn°0 , 1 • 18 er nsk of obesit

fl grow older. Now and m the future th t a theY Th ' at of children will

. ·ted on aduJts. e argument, to put it d'tl' tie v1s1 . • r lerem.ly is that

are the canaries m the mineshaft, fo d l ' jtlJdren . . r a u ts a no 1

c ded with inducements and signs to make p . i,ornbar · Oor consumption

. . 5

we consider children hostage to thei . dec1st0n . . , . r unpul s, and

ffi ·enrlY responsible for the_ ir actions to be able , ·

·nsu ic1 to rutvigate 1 d fJ'unk food and unhealthy snack temptation Th . . worl O • . • eir bodies

1 eady begmnmg to suffer from the poor confecti . are a r . ons w1th ·ch they are bombarded every day. ft 1s the price they f

wh1 . pay or . rofit centres for the food industry. Yet the food with Whi h

being p d h . . al c surrounded, an t e nutr1t10n messages they're sup 1. d cheY are p 1e

h r e little different from the ones facing adults At the v

~t ,a · ery W

e can conclude that the world around us is rife w'th ~~~ . I

• lly harmful and certamly unhealthy food. potenna . . .

The physical world, its meanmgs and our Interactions with them

ll trl .bute to what Kelly Brownell calls 'toxic environments' -12 a con •

Hi h streets and highways have been transformed into commercial

sp:ces offering easy, iconized acces~ to quick cal~ries. McDonald's Golden Arches are now more widely recogmzed, claims the

Guinness Book of Records, than the Christian cross. Even in our places of work, the vending machine eats change and spits out sugar

to accommodate the increasingly irregular hours we are required to

work.•3 Away from work, at play, we find the environment shaping

both how we acquire and how we expend calories.

Poor people in cities, whether in the US or elsewhere, have

systematically less access to green space and recreational facilities,

and this has a direct impact on health. Across cities in Europe, and

controlling for income, the high availability of green space means

that citizens are three times more likely to be active, and 40 per cent

less likely to be obese, compared to those in areas with little green

211

PJ'- and lot ot g, ffiu, wht•re people~ re so r r °' n1nreJrL rot O\ o-.. ,1iht, ond so per rent le 11.kely to ex~tci ._ "- In the U , it's clear that poor neighbourhOOd lac.k

fo l.hncs, :md ju t as with blacks in urban South Africat't tiora whid1 African Ameucans live are substantially fess ltk

1 ' r in

e Y to ha,. ucces to green spaces, benches and swimming facilities parents taking a breather from the work of childcare in th · For

I . ' ' ·1. b . e hom for children p aymg, ,or ,arn1 1es emg together, green ~"' . , .. And . . 1 th ut"'lce IS a vital daily resource. , mcreasmg y, e enjoymenr of

pubJic space is a pleasure only the rich can afford. green

Diet~ aren't o~y affected ~y space, bu~ by time. For WorJcin people m the Umted States, time poverty 1s a serious issue , .. g

· ¥¥1th housing markets being the way they are, commutes are longer for poor people.'' A recent US report showed that for every dollar save(! on cheaper housing, commuters spent 77 cents on transponao

on. The twenty-three cent saving on the dollar doesn't include the time spent commuting. And there's mounting evidence that the longer one spends commuting, the more likely the risk of being over- weight. Yet, precisely because of the pressures to get to work (and

J

possibly, then to a second job) the working poor are substantially less likely to be able to eat well. In circumstances such as this, it shouldn't surprise us that fast food, with all its burdens up and down the food system, remains a meaningful choice to many of us. Just as tea nourished the Victorian English working classes, a Sr double cheeseburger and fries comes to be a welcome and warm meal in a day, and night, filled with work.48

The story of bunny chow points to an interesting anomaly in the

way this is thought through.◄9 Under apartheid, it was easy to see how space was legislated, how blacks were denied control of che rhythm and place of their lives. The statutes were in the books, the police forces would make damn sure that the spatial order wns adhered to. The problem, everyone could easily and readily acknowledge, was a social one and it was to be addressed nor

Chosen b~ Bunnies 273

d . ·dual transformation but by social protest subversion

h in 1"'1 ' ttlt1'u~ s read change. Today, when a growing number of working

d ,\f\de p . . ·1 d" . h an le are forced mto s1m1 ar con 1t1.ons, t e target is not the (~~ .

11°°. \ and political substrate of the problem, but its most cosmetic soaa b . l ' l"k ·

d P erficial effect: o es1ty. ts 1 e suggesung that the reason

an SU . b\acks had it bad under apartheid was not because of apartheid, but t,ecause they were poor. And that the remedy was not to challenge apartheid, but to become rich.

war on the Obese

lf the quality of food we eat is shaped by work and play, by the

neighbourhoods we live in, the jobs we can get and the time we

spend travelling between them, then we might want to consider

poor diets as a symptom of a systemic lack of control over our spaces

and lives. Yet in the media and in government, that diagnosis is

ruled out of court. lnstead, poor diet is understood to mean obesity, which in turn is considered an end in itself, simultaneously

symptom and disease, a skin-deep ill without need of further clari- fication, because we have all become literate in the art of reading the individual body. The meaning not only of food, but of obesity, has already been suggested to us. We are encouraged to un~er

st ~d

obesity to be at the end of the day, an individual failing, an 1~abihty , . ff d to us a deficit of impulse

to deal with the farrago of choices o ere , b ity as a symptom of an

control. Conventional wisdom sees O es . . h d . . a result of an impovens e impoverished faculty of choice, neve~ ure the solution

hi . b cause in large meas ,

range of choices. And t s ts e '. h b nan individual one. l f obeslty as ee

offered to the social prob em O . . deficit of self-control l that obesity is a

Suggesting, for examp e, f social anxieties.50 If at ns forth a set o

on the part of the poor 5ummo those concerns were ntieth century h or

the beginning of the twe . and about what t e po t' onal security, · f the

couched i.n worries over na l ·ot at the beginning o ,c · cause to n ' •

might do to the rich u given

274 Stuffed and Starved

twenty-first the same worries are articufoted in concernc; ov , . . . ersocia1 security, and about the cla1ms t~at the dt~abled and poor Will havt on the young rich and productive. In an mfluential 2 005 ~r+· 1 , ....,.ltc e in the New England Journal of Medicine, a group of academics p .

Ut It like this:

How much higher can life expectancy rise? This is not just an

academic question. The answer formulated today will have

substantial influence on the rate at which taxes are levied

and on the potential solvency of age-entitlement programs ...

The Social Security Administration (SSA) arrived at a ...

view that life expectancy in the United States will continue

its steady increases, reaching the mid-Bos later in this century ... Dire predictions about the impending bankruptcy

of Social Security based on the SSA's projections of large increases in survival past 65 years of age appear to be

premature. However, this 'benefit' will occur at the expense

of the economy in the form of lost productivity before citizens reach retirement and large increases in Medicare

costs associated with obesity and its complications. Presently, annual health care costs attributable to obesity are

conservatively estimated at $70 billion to $100 billion. With rapid increases in the prevalence of diabetes, and a decrease

in mean age at the onset of diabetes, the cost of treating diabetes-related complications, such as heart disease, stroke,

limb amputation, renal failure, and blindness, will increase

substantially. A similar escalation of health care costs from

other complications associated with obesity (e.g.,

cardiovascular disease, hypertension, asthma, cancer, and

gastrointestinal problems) is inevitable. The US population

may be inadvertently saving Social Security by becoming more obese ... 51

The worries of public-minded scientists in the US have their

Chosen by Bunnies 275

elsewhere, and all of them are concerned with what has --l-~ known as 'the obesity epidemic'. Clearly m ch · to~ . . , u 1s at But national concerns with obesity aren't new. In 1952, Lester

• 3

consultant to the US President's Commission on Health

of the Nation, had raised a flag, suggesting that substantial proportion of Americans are overweight. One

~rof 6 <well people' examined in the Boston Health Protection Clinic were 20 per cent or more overweight, and

2 out of 5 among a group of men employed in a physically

arduous occupation in San Francisco were 20 per cent or

more overweight. It is clear that weight control is a major

public health problem today. 52

fthe handwringing about obesity is a more constant feature than might think, it is wise to ask whether there is any reason to be

concerned. Obesity increased in the US by 71 per cent from 1991 to r,u and similar data exists for developed and developing

countries.54 There seems little to dispute. Yet much rests on how we tand what obesity means. In terms of the crude figures, the

in obesity levels in the US is equivalent to an increase in the ~ge individual's weight of between 3 ands kg (6 torr lbs) over

~eration. This has the effect of shifting the bell-curve of every-

toe's weight over to the right a little. This in turn leads to many

tlOre people being classified at or above the cut-off point for

:tbesity.5' In the words of biologist Jeffery Friedman:

Imagine that the average IQ was roo and that five per cent

of the population had an IQ of 140 and were considered to

be geniuses. Now let's say that education improves and the average IQ increases to 107 and ro per cent of the population

has an IQ of 140. You could present the data in two ways. You could say that average IQ is up seven points or you touJd say that because of improved education the number of

geniuses has doubled. The whole obesity debate is

276 Stuffed and Starv d

equivJlcnt to drawing conclusions about national td . ucnt,on

programmes by saying that the number of geniuses has doubled.!,6

Those who urge caution in interpreting obesity data do not deny

that there are cases where concern is warranted. It is . . . ent1rely

appropriate to worry over the m~reasm~ number of people who suffer ill-health as a result of morbid obesity. 57 There is reaso b

n to e concerned that a mere 3-5 kg per generation still signifies an imbalance between the amount of food eaten and the amoum of energy expended. There is little sign that the imbalance is 'self. correcting', to use the language of markets. Further, the causes of weight gain are also, it has been increasingly recognized, the causes of other kinds of ill-health, from heart disease to diabetes. But critics of the popular descriptions of the obesity epidemic point out that this isn't the sort of language or care that gets used in talking about obesity. Instead, they observe, when the obesity epidemic is dis-

cussed as a social problem, particular social groups become targeted as a result. 58 In other words, they argue, the obesity epidemic has become a 'moral panic'. In a recent study, 59 researchers examined 221 newspaper, medical and book sources. They found that two• thirds mentioned individual causes for obesity, while less than a

third mentioned structural factors (such as the food industry, or geography). More striking:

A full 73 per cent of articles that mention the poor, African

Americans, or Latinos blame obesity on bad food choices,

compared to only 29 per cent of articles that do not mention

these groups. Similarly 80 per cent of articles that mention

the poor, African Americans, or Latinos but only 29 per cent

of articles that do not mention these groups blame obesity on sedentary lifestyles. 60

1ndeed, poor people, people of colour, especially immigrants, care~

a great deal of the individualized blame for ill health. Take on

Chosen by Bunnies 277

·rculat cl exan1ple, of Gr g ri r in Harp r' Mag . 'd l 1 "- • • . . azLne: ~ ·de Mmni pla at s M1guehto with a giant c pple fritter. Pap tell lJ.nSI d pours ounc upon ounce of sugar and cream lnto h • jOke an . . 1 20 ..

:t coffee. Viewed through the lens of obesity, as I am ind ined to .ounce fi 1 · '6L O ld k he scene is not so e z.z. r we cou ta e another example, a r3

'ta 2005 New York Times article on obesity in Brazil, accom-;eiby a picture of 'fat Brazilians', three large women in bikinis, ed out to be women from Europe. 62 We were encouraged,

netheless, to find something rebarbative and unusual about their

ies. This is not to argue that significant public health challenges do

t face the poor. After all, Bo per cent of people with diabetes live

low income countries and, in rich countries, poor people are isproportionately affected by the disease. 63 The rise in cases of

'abetes, especially type II, which has doubled over the past twenty

s, happens at the same time as funding for research into the

ease is falling.64 Diabetes is associated with obesity, which in turn

· associated with lack of exercise, poor diet and smoking. Cardio-

cular disease, related to the way people eat and exercise, is found

India and China at rates higher than all the countries in the

fobal North put together. 65 It is clear that these diseases should be

subject of broad-based public concern. That's not what's at stake

ere. What's really up for grabs is the politics and economics of the ysis of causes, and its insidious by-product, the politics and

onomics of blame.