Food, Diet Reform, and Obesity Politics in the American Imagination

During a 2008 interview with journalist Amy Goodman, University of California, Berkeley, journalism professor Michael Pollan argued, “There’s an enormous amount of wisdom [. . . and] cultural authority contained in a cuisine.” ¹ Here, Pollan implies that valuing the localized cultural knowledge embedded in cuisine is one way of rethinking the authority surrounding food in the most intimate ways; that is, through understanding food sources, growers, growing locations, farmer practices, and values about the food consumers might buy or even grow. However, the interdisciplinary scholarship included in this review essay critically examines the “cultural authority” embedded in cuisine from entirely different perspectives, engaging the ways in which food, nutritional science, body politics, and dietary health pursuits are constructed within specific social, historical, and economic contexts. This is not to say that the authors do not consider themselves food activists. Each firmly situates themselves within an array of environmental and food activist work. Yet, using diet, body size, and nutritional health as lenses, and working across fields such as food studies, fat studies, critical nutrition studies, and political ecology, each of the texts reveals intersectional identity politics and diverse histories of naturalized social hierarchy.

This is a moment of heightened awareness, anxiety, and political engagement with the far-reaching social implications of food, diet, and body politics. In the 2009 documentary Food, Inc., Stoneybrooke Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg notes, “When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we’re voting for local or not, organic or not.” ² Access to “good food is a right not a privilege” as Alice Waters suggests. Yet, some of the most prominent proposals and widely recognized “faces” of food tend to push “voting with the wallet” and lifestyle shifts—just buy organic grapes at the farmers’ market rather than Nike shoes, Alice Waters argues on 60 Minutes; return to the land, eat locally, can your own tomatoes, as Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2008) suggests; cook and prioritize whole foods rather than processed, as Jamie Oliver argues in Jamie’s Food Revolution (2011). While these may prove excellent options for some, food politics will remain within privileged, predominantly white, and firmly middle-class frameworks without increased intersectional scholarship and coalition-building to provide counter perspectives, and critically examine the social constructedness of key presumptions embedded in common understandings about food, health, and the body. ³ I do not here situate myself against criticisms of industrialized food systems or food movements writ large, nor do I suggest the scholarship included in this review essay claims such a stance. Research by the authors included in this review, Charlotte Biltekoff, Amy Farrell, Julie Guthman, and Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, pushes for more: from food systems, from dietary reform, from environmental movements, and from cultural presumptions about health and body politics.

Amidst continued interdisciplinary scholarly interest in the burgeoning fields of food studies and fat studies, very little cultural studies scholarship has engaged the systemic dimensions of food, health, nutrition, and body politics through a critical lens. Likewise, there is a gap in scholarship addressing food and environmental research together. Even fewer scholars have included critical intersectional analyses of the racial, ethnic, class, national, or gender dynamics of food systems, food access, and food reform. Additionally, there is need for scholarship that intersects food, nutrition, environment, and body politics from the perspectives of disability, gender, and sexuality studies. While the four texts here reviewed do not address all of these gaps in the literature, each proves path breaking in grappling with the socially constructed dimensions of food, nutrition, and body politics.

American Studies and Food...