Abstract
Amid increasingly frantic claims of an obesity epidemic, scholars have begun to investigate how and why Americans eat. There are reams of existing research on the causes and consequences of rising obesity rates, most of which relies either on an overly individualistic account of people’s dietary patterns or an overly deterministic one. In Weighing In, Julie Guthman offers a fresh perspective that is sorely needed.
With chapters entitled “How Do We Know Obesity Is a Problem?” (answer: we don’t, necessarily) and “Does Your Neighborhood Make You Fat?” (answer: maybe, but not in the way you think), Guthman critically interrogates many of the assumptions made by the literature on the obesity epidemic. For example, she argues that while it is undeniable that Americans, on average, have gotten bigger over the past thirty years, it is harder to validate the assumption that this means they have necessarily gotten fatter or the additional assumption that this represents a medical problem. Guthman offers several critiques of the statistical evidence used to document the epidemic: she analyzes the crude measures offered by Body Mass Index statistics, the erroneous assumptions that underlie them, and the way that forcing continuous measures like BMI into discrete categories (“overweight” and “obese”) imbues small shifts with great meaning. (For example, several million Americans became overweight overnight in June, 1998, when the National Institutes of Health released new guidelines that reduced the lower BMI limit of the overweight category from 27 to 25). Furthermore, she argues convincingly of the dangers of conflating thinness with good health, noting that the discourse surrounding the epidemic has led to framing obesity as a pathological condition.
One of Guthman’s most important contributions is a critique not only of the individualizing discourse that is often adopted by nutritionists, but also, more controversially, the food environment perspective that is frequently marshalled by more progressive academics and activists. She describes this literature as comprising the “dozens, and possibly hundreds, of studies completed in the past decade or so that test the thesis that people are fat because they are surrounded by cheap, fast, nutritionally inferior food and a built environment that discourages physical activity” (p. 66). Guthman argues that although the environmental perspective on obesity seems structural, and therefore progressive, it ultimately focuses more on food consumption than food production, relying on elite norms about what constitutes good food and ultimately concluding that obesity could be prevented with improved education and access to the “right” kinds of food (i.e., local, organic, fresh). As she explains: “Too much food and too little sidewalk translate into too much eating and too little exercise, where the environment plays a mediating role, at best. And yet, since the thesis doesn’t allow much for the agency of people who inhabit these environments, it reinforces the idea that they are unthinking dupes, without personal responsibility” (p. 87). Furthermore, she argues that the “obesogenic environment thesis,” by lauding environments that are unavailable to most (those with the amentities often associated with urbane, privileged neighborhoods), might actually help produce a social geography that reinforces inequalities (p. 86).
In order to show how spatial patterns in the food environment reflect, rather than produce, social relations of race and class, Guthman conducted interviews with 12 women in “obesogenic environments.” Her interviews allowed her to understand how these women articulated the ways in which their environments, combined with other issues, primarily related to class, affected their daily lives. Unfortunately, these interviews did not play a central role in the book. Although Guthman had other (very important) objectives in writing this book, given her overarching focus on inequality, it seems that she missed an opportunity to show how practices and perceptions are shaped (but not determined) by inequalities related to race, class, gender, and size. An approach to obesity informed by intersectionality theory would allow for an examination of how bodies “eat with vigorous class, ethnic, and gendered appetites . . . articulating what we are, what we eat, and what eats us” (Probyn 2000:34).
Overall, this is an excellent and important book. It would be useful for both undergraduate and graduate classes. Guthman’s provocative arguments about the causes and consequences of obesity provide a good counterpoint to more conventional approaches coming from nutrition, public health, and even sociology. In her final two chapters, Guthman pushes her argument one step further. She contends that eating the fast food and convenience foods that are often linked to the “obesity epidemic” is a “triple fix” within the current political-economic system: it entails the super-exploitation of labor, provides cheap food to support the low wages of the food and other industries, and absorbs the excess of agricultural surplus. She continues that, thanks to the erosion of the welfare state under neoliberalism, cheap food has become a necessity for those who are food insecure.
In the end, Guthman argues that we need to reconsider where the problem really lies. She writes, “We have a political economy that produces and makes cheap food and goods, underpays people, and urges them to buy this food and these goods to keep the economy afloat—and then a culture that blames them for consuming this food and these goods after all” (p. 193). If we are going to address inequalities in the food system effectively, she argues, we need to put not only fresh fruits and vegetables on the table, as many efforts of the alternative food movement have done, but capitalism itself.