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  • Food, Health, and Global Justice
  • Mary C. Rawlinson (bio)

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC 2015) estimates that 35 percent of American adults are obese, while 69 percent are overweight. The CDC also estimates that nearly one in every five children in the United States is obese. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that medical treatments of obesity cost US$168.4 billion a year, or 16.5 percent of national spending on medical care (Cawley and Meyerhoefer 2010). Public Health England (n.d.) estimates that 25 percent of the adult population in England is considered obese, while 62 percent of adults are overweight. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in North America, large portions of Central and South America, most of Europe, Russia, and Australia, 60 percent of the population is overweight. The United States and the United Arab Emirates have the highest obesity rates, according to the WHO, at 32.6 and 33.8 percent, respectively. The rest of North America, those large portions of Central and South America, Europe, Russia, and Australia exhibit rates over 20 percent (WHO n.d.).

While obesity rates are highest in high-income countries, obesity is nonetheless associated with poverty (Drewnowski and Specter 2004). Poverty limits access to fresh, healthy food and encourages, if not requires, a reliance on processed or fast foods. At the same time, low-income countries are being targeted as new markets by global agribusiness and processed food corporations. In many low-income countries, infectious disease is declining, while obesity and obesity-related diseases as well as dental caries are on the rise. These epidemiological effects appear to be directly related to the incursion of global food into local markets (Prentice 2006).1 [End Page 1]

Undernourishment, particularly of mothers and children, remains responsible for about 10 percent of the global burden of disease. The WHO estimates that 104 million children around the world are undernourished. Maternal undernourishment frequently reflects gender inequity. Undernourishment also results from environmental catastrophes and civil or military violence as well as poverty or economic corruption and maldistribution of food (Burgess and Danga 2008).2 Conflict resolution, education for girls, and the elimination of corruption might allow the farming to flourish that would eliminate undernourishment.

The WHO estimates that there are 1.5 billion people globally who are overweight and 500 million who are obese, and these statistics are directly related to what and how humans eat. Globally, obesity accounts for 2.6 million deaths annually. It appears that humans around the globe are eating themselves to death.

Debates in food ethics frequently fail on two counts. First, they often hinge on a spurious dichotomy between individual responsibility and state coercion. Second, these discussions rarely pay attention to the sociality of food and to what food means to individual identity.

Medicine and public policy tend to focus on obesity as an individual problem that must be addressed with various disciplines and regimens of selfcontrol. The medicalization of obesity holds the individual responsible for her obesity, while undercutting her agency as insufficient to address her situation without relying on medical interventions and treatments. Efforts by the state to encourage healthy eating as public policy run afoul of claims to liberty, both on behalf of individual “choice” and on behalf of the “freedom” of the market. A proposal to ban the sale of supersize sodas meets with both moral indignation and commercial opposition, as if liberty were so thin a reality as to be embodied in the purchase of an enormous sugary drink.

Agency depends on a culture of possibilities, and the culture of food in the United States, for example, makes it very difficult for many people to eat healthy, satisfying food. A single mother of three who has unreliable transportation and lives in a food desert probably does not have access to fresh fruits and vegetables and organic products, the money to buy them if she did, or the time to invest in home-cooked meals.3

Moreover, while isolated bans on certain foods are unlikely to remake the culture of eating, they would not be a new intrusion of the state into the [End Page 2] domain...

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