Politics of Health Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

In July 2024, after 14 years of conservative Tory rule, the British Labour party won a general election. Shortly after their landslide victory, in October, an interesting case study on fat politics played out in the UK. Keir Starmer, the party’s newly elected prime minister, announced he wanted to get fat, unemployed people back onto the job market with the help of free “weight loss injections,” a new turn of the screw in dystopian diet culture. In this piece, I want to reflect on the larger politics and consequences of this policy proposal and ask: What are progressive fat politics and what role do fat politicians play in shaping fat policy-making? According to British Health Minister Wes Streeting, the “widening waistbands” of his…

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In 2007, a few months before the launch of the iPhone, journalist Nancy Miller reflected on the ominous impact its predecessor, the iPod, was having on consumer behavior. As a handheld device, the iPod could store bulky album collections, allowing its owners to listen to music on the go. Miller also made a more ominous point, suggesting that Apple’s intentions were more far-reaching: the company was enticing consumers to watch television and movies, play games, and follow the latest fashion trends on the Internet-enabled device, freeing people from being stuck at home when it came to consuming content. To help readers visualize what this future portended, Miller used candies and snacks as examples. She presented the Mini Oreo, introduced by the multinational…

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This essay by Thomas Cousins originally appeared on Somatosphere on October 8, 2023. It is reposted with permission by the author and the editors. I start with the question, why was it necessary, from 2008, for Mondi South Africa to spend R50 million (USD 8 million) a year on a nutrition intervention for 10,000 timber plantation labourers in KwaZulu-Natal province? The simple answer, to improve labour productivity, belies the dark histories of colonial conquest and apartheid exploitation, on the one hand, and the developing science of fatigue, nutrition, and infectious disease over the 20th century. The question opens out to a critical look at the way in which these working bodies were understood to metabolise calories and other substances, and suggests a…

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Brazil is a huge, diverse country with significant social disparities. People are commonly judged and stigmatized due to their social class, race, education, gender, and body characteristics. Weight, particularly high weight, is one of the body characteristics that is used to stigmatize parts of the population, often intersecting with race and class. Similar to other parts of the world, the fat body in Brazil is seen as synonymous with ‘failure,’ ‘lack of control,’ ‘laziness,’ and ‘ignorance.’ Low-income classes believe that weight gain is related to heredity or stress, while high-income classes, especially those who are not fat, blame ‘poor’ diet and exercise choices. In reaction to this last point, the Brazilian government has propagated strategies to combat weight gain based on self-control, seeking…

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Darya, a 35-year-old PhD student in Florida who was born in Iran, shares a painful memory with me. At a New Year’s party, after she hadn’t seen her cousin in Tehran for three years and after an accident that had her gaining weight, “instead of saying hi and how are you doing,” Darya explains, “she tells me, ‘Darya you’re exploding!,’ or let me say it in Farsi, ‘Darya, Natereki!’” Darya responded by justifying her body: “I said, ‘yeah, I’m gaining weight but I will be okay soon.’” After the party, Darya was very upset that she didn’t defend herself; she didn’t want to upset her mother. As she told her mother, “I didn’t answer her [cousin] and next time, I’m…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Politics of Health:

Leftist Politics and the “Significant Burden” of Fatness

A World of Snackers? Parallels between the Analog and the Digital Age: The Japanese Experience

Metabolism and Capacity: History and Labour in Post-apartheid South Africa

Fat Bias and the Development of Clinical Protocols in Brazil

“You’re exploding!”: Sizeism among Iranian Americans in the Diaspora