Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context by Helene A. Shugart (review)

The same corporate food industries that sell mega-calorie meals also sell diet cookbooks, low-calorie meal alternatives, fat-burning pills, and weight-loss programs. Television shows feature unattainable body types, and the commercials beseech spectators to consume the same foods thought to be the cause of America's obesity crisis. How are Americans to make sense of these contradictory messages? Depending on which narrative one fınds convincing, the obesity crisis is caused by caloric imbalance, environmental factors, genetic predetermination, culture, emotional distress, psychological problems, and/or moral weakness. In Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context, Helene Shugart disentangles the often-contradictory narratives that comprise the unique rhetorical landscape of obesity. The book is organized around a series of provocative questions that help place the obesity crisis in context. What does it mean to be fat in American culture? Why do some explanations of obesity resonate more than others? How do narratives of the obesity index broaden anxieties about the body? Why do anti-obesity campaigns fail? These questions inevitably lead Shugart to the underlying ambivalence concerning the body in a culture that claims to value both the rational individual of the market and the collective good of democracy.

Shugart establishes a novel approach to the study of obesity that is less preoccupied with the dubious veracity of competing theories than it is with how changes in the public discourses about the body, scarcity, abundance, economic security, and national security render particular theories of obesity more persuasive than others. The author makes bold, yet well-evidenced, claims about how the obesity crisis resonates with the same fears engendered by the catastrophic events of 9/11 and the 2008 fınancial crisis. Regarding the former, Shugart describes the cultural anxiety about national security, which generates public concern about "controlling" and "tightening" borders and keeping the nation's defense apparatus "lean" and "vigilant" instead of "bloated," "soft," and "impotent." The latter directly concerns the predominant economic ideology that governs the tensions between competing commitments to individualism and protection of the vulnerable. Shugart argues that these competing narratives evince the culture's ambivalence about neoliberalism: the predominant economic theory is that individual choice, private initiative, and self-suffıciency are preferable to government.

The second central tenet of the book is that obesity explanations pivot on the antagonism between rational individualism and authenticity. While narratives that emphasize individualism locate both the causes of and solutions to obesity in individual self-control, narratives that emphasize authenticity address obesity by emphasizing the explanatory force of cultural, psychological, or spiritual factors. Shugart's key insight is that a narrative must address both individualism and authenticity to gain traction. What is perhaps most remarkable about Heavy is that it offers seven extraordinarily well-researched case studies that account for nearly every explanation of the obesity crisis. Each chapter explores how competing narratives of obesity prefıgure the relative plasticity of fat bodies on a continuum from rational individualism to structural constraints.

In chapter 2, Shugart accounts for how the "calories in, calories out" narrative has become the predominant explanation for obesity. In this narrative, obesity is caused by caloric imbalance—the consequence of individual overconsumption and lack of physical activity. Shugart argues that this narrative won overwhelming adherence because it mobilizes the tenets of neoliberalism in which the consumer, rather than the food industry, is responsible for public welfare. This narrative accounts for the emergence of the "obeseconomy," a cottage industry of products designed for weight loss and sold as forms of individual empowerment. Here, the onus is not on government to make structural public health interventions; instead, the onus is on individuals to make correct choices.

Chapter 3 analyzes the environmental story of obesity. In this account, factors such as endocrine disruption and pollutants in America's food supply explain the obesity crisis. At times, this narrative also accounts for how economic injustice and environmental racism explain the health disparities between white affluent...