6 thoughts on “Weighing In”

1. Colin Sutherland
   Weighing In Reflection

   The most powerful thing that Julie Guthman did in her book Weighing In for me was to engage the reader with the idea that fatness, and by association obesity, should be considered in the same way we have framed homosexuality and alcoholism in the past. This framing really stuck with me and helped me keep tabs on my preconceived ideas associated with obesity. For Guthman to do this forced me to consider not only the ugly preconception I may hold for fatness as being outside what I consider ‘normal’, but also to acknowledge the thickly constructed reality in which we live, where obesity is both structurally induced and dually punished for being outside the norm other structures. This concept of deconstructing obesity challenges us to take on this hydra of sorts, one that can only be defeated, or understood, if we take on the core of the problem, capitalism.

   One thing that kept creeping up on me was the question of how this work fit into Political Ecology. I think it is clear that many scholars, some that we have read in this very class, Forsythe, Robbins and authors from STS like Latour, make their appearances. Through a conversation with Kelsey in preparing for my presentation we discussed how the body becomes, in essence, controlled and lead by social structures and through its politicization contests many of the things we see as normal or ‘natural’. I think through this the biopolitics of the body directly mirrors (or perhaps fully embodies?) discussions we have had on the more broad concept of nature. Suddenly the body in how it is described (flabby, chunky, etc.) And attacked takes on highly politicized meanings. This aside I think the body itself becomes something unique simply because of it’s direct social and biological (if that can be a separate lens at all) relationship with humans.

   While I have a number of things I would like to bring up, and will do so during my presentation, I found Guthman’s obsession with Pollan almost distracting. I say ‘almost’ because I think Guthman makes it very clear that authors from the healthism and food system perspective have had an overwhelming influence over upper and middle-class pop culture and how we interact with obesity. I recognize that this character of Pollan needs to be deconstructed and held accountable for the information he and his colleagues are spreading, but the style of Guthman’s writing in the first few chapters seems to be ‘Pollanized’ as her writing style takes on a New York Times bestseller aura. I’m not certain if this is a good or bad style to have but at first I found the authority with which she called out various authors somewhat distracting from the excellent points she was making. There is clearly a long history behind this text but this aggressive authority over the ‘truths’ that prevail over the ‘myths’ of obesity became off-putting rather than inspiring. I wonder what a pop-Political Ecology text on the subject might look like, and I wonder if it would have made her academic text any different. If Guthman really wants to change what people think, where should she publishing? Should she be surprised by the views of her students if there is not something similar to contest Pollan on the bookshelves of Amazon and Chapters? But is it really realistic to expect a book contesting

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2. I found that in reading this book a lot of issues addressed in previous weeks coalesced for me. For example, we have discussed the policy imperatives of each topic at some length, and here I found that Guthman really engaged with the possible and concrete “ways forward”, as it were. I felt that it particularly fulfilled Forsyth’s imperative of a critical political ecology “not to falsify myths…rather…to illuminate problems in new and meaningful ways that might lead to other types of policy interventions, if there are any at all.” (16) In fact at the end, Guthman notes that one of the problems surrounding the study of obesity and its surrounding discourse is the emphasis on the “idea that ‘something must be done’”, and that rather we must begin with broadening the “normal” to include a range of sizes and bodies. (194) This seem particularly crucial to me after the way that Guthman demonstrates the degree to which body size and cultural preferences influence obesity discussions. Illustrated quite clearly by the idea that a thin person, who may eat “unhealthy” food and live an “unhealthy” lifestyle would fall into the normal range of BMI and be socially considered healthy. Whereas an “obese” person who is eating “healthy” foods and exercising will be viewed as unhealthy and as a social burden. This continued the ideas that we have been seeing throughout the course, that there is much more to the construction of an “obese” body, just as there is to a “wilderness” space.

   Perhaps I found this week’s reading to be particularly resonant because many members of my extended family have struggled with obesity. Furthermore, as farmers and workers in the agricultural industry, their lives directly intersect with the things she discussed in Chapter 6: “Does Farm Policy Make You Fat?” Growing up I heard a lot about the boom and bust cycle of the local farms, and we lived a couple of miles away from a cattle feedlot, in hindsight I was seeing a part of the cycle, acres and acres of corn fed into the beef industry, in fact numerous family members worked at the alfalfa mill. The point of this is to say that I have also seen how these same family members have struggled with obesity, and will not respond to the alternative food movement. Guthman’s points made so much sense to me, of course I have heard the phrase “the obesity epidemic”, but never thought to dissect its meanings and implications. The medicalization of obesity and holding it up as a harm to the collective, as an individual choice that is hurting the national whole, perpetuates a complicated cycle.

   I was also intrigued that whenever I discussed this book with a friend she repeated many of the comments of Guthman’s students. It seems that many who consider themselves quite left and accepting of “otherness” run out of tolerance when it comes to sizes that veer from the normal, an ironic subscription to neo-liberal ideals. For my friend, obesity was a problem of the food industry and personal choices, where people choose to eat unhealthy food and then to not control portions, just as they choose not to exercise. I also found it interesting that she acknowledged that for some obesity may not be a personal failing, but for those that she knew, it must be.

   In the end it seemed most important to me that Guthman’s book be used to impress just how complicated this issue is, where some simple missionary food activism will not solve the problem. Furthermore, greater understanding is needed when it comes to the discussion of obesity. I particularly appreciated this quote of Guthman’s: “those who make these choices tend to be already privileged and thin and forget that they probably didn’t become privileged and thin through these choices.” (141)

   Guthman hints at this, but what are some examples of how the “obesity epidemic”intersects with other topics in this class like feminist political ecology or environmental racism? How can we use tools discussed in those weeks to approach this topic?

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3. Weighing In caught my attention from the first to the last page. I think this book represents the perfect example of Forsyth’s model of critical political ecology, what Guthman describes as a way “to illuminate problems in new and meaningful ways that might lead to other types of policy interventions.” I was especially surprised by how Guthman assertively applies this approach to complicated subjects such as obesity, health and the global food system, critically assessing taken for granted concepts and positioning them in the global picture. She begins by exploring how quantitative certainties have become our society’s principal and often only way to measure obesity rates and their health related problems. She mainly criticizes these measures for giving much more importance to phenotype – the visible ‘normality’ – than to pathology – its relation to health. She then carries out an analysis of our society’s norms of self-efficacy, which she identifies as ‘healthism’; she particularly criticizes the fact that this movement supports and encourages neoliberal concepts of governance, the energy balance model (notwithstanding the recent evidences rejecting its accuracy) and a revulsion against obesity. She also shows how healthism, by evolving in parallel with capitalism, does not “take on the big fights” (p. 186) and lead to a marginalization and an escalation of the problems and stigmatizations linked with obesity. Her three next chapters adroitly deconstruct the massively accepted conceptions that obesogenic environment (Ch. 4), excessive caloric intake (Ch. 5) and food subsidies (Ch. 6) are the main drivers of obesity in the United States. Of particular interest is how she proficiently vulgarizes and synthesizes the complicated notions related to the origins and roles of obesogens and their intrinsic connection with the larger political economy. I believe that Guthman’s book becomes even more unique and useful when she initiates the complicated task to tackle the problems related with the alternative-food movement – most probably treasured by most of her readers – and how capitalist and neoliberalism lead to ‘consumer-subjects.’

   Not only is this book very enlightening on how the different discourses on obesity are often socially constructed by larger processes (e.g., whiteness, neoliberalism), but it also forces the reader to challenge its own personal assumptions. I found myself more than once uncomfortable in regards to various subjects, including the alternative-food movement (to which I identify with) and the idea that personal choices have a lot do to with obesity. I often had to stop reading and reflect on my efforts to refute Guthman’s arguments based on unfounded and emotional attachment to the environmentalist romantic idea that, like she puts it, we “can change the world one meal at a time.” What both frustrated, frightened, and impressed me the most in Guthman’s work is how she convincingly demonstrates how the current dialogue of most activist groups and the current available ‘solutions’ they offer are “very much in the vein of what Robbins calls “apolitical ecologies,” in which explanations of ecological problems (and obesity is that) focus far too much on individual behaviour and choices and far too little on the broader political and economic context in which choices are made” (p. 191).

   To conclude, Guthman convincingly argues that the current framing of our problems related to obesity (if it is one, as she points out) and, more generally, to our food system, leaves out other essential explanations and have important social consequences. In term of solutions, what Guthman asks for – an alteration to our whole economic system – is very ambitious, if not impossible, at least on the short term. The book, as I think Guthman intentionally sought, also leaves the readers with important questions: if the alternatives (healthism, alternative-food movement, food justice) to the current food market economy are not enough or are misleading, what should be done? Are all the ‘sustainability’ efforts (e.g., community gardening, local and organic farming, urban farming, farmers market) meaningless? What should we do and eat while asking for and working towards national regulations and subsidies “that allow farmers to grow in the most ecologically and socially responsible ways without having to overtax the environment; subsidies that allow all eaters to buy what they want and need” (p. 195)? Are these even possible in a globalized world profoundly reliant on the market economy? What kind of ‘revolution’ would be sufficient to lead to these national regulations, at least in the United States? What would be the impact of these politics on other countries’ economies and food systems? Put differently, what would be the political ecology of modifying our entire food system?

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4. Victoria Padilla
   Reflections
   Guthman, J. (2011) Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley, University of California Press.
   Julie Guthman’s Weighin In is an insightful approach to the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the United States as an ‘environmental orthodoxy’, under the light of Tim Forsyth’s Critical Political Ecology (2002). One of the most interesting things about her approach is that Guthman questions the ‘facts’ of the obesity epidemic and at the same time debunks the most problematic aspect of this orthodoxy –following Paul Robbins this time- the apolitical understanding of the so-called epidemic. She argues that the now commonsensical ideas about public health and environmental problems –such as obesity- as caused by consumption practices at the individual level are an oversimplification. Furthermore, these ideas are pernicious because while focusing on individual choices they overlook bigger issues like corporate accountability, market forces or state policy.
   Interestingly Guthman contends that said now commonsensical understanding of obesity as a health problem that comes from individual decisions derives from neoliberal driven mentality that encourages the subject to act through the market by executing consumer choice instead of making actual demands to the state–hence voting three times a day with your fork. The product of this frame of government and thought is that health becomes a personal rather that a social responsibility. That, she argues- along the rise of health as a sort of supervalue in 1970s United States supports the fat-phobic and socio-politically blind discourse of the obesity epidemic and the alternative food movement in the U.S.
   The alternative food movement and much of the environmental justice discourse regarding obesity in the U.S. emphasize the problem as one of constrained choices. The obesogenic environment theory is a classic example of this way of framing the issue. But, Guthman argues that by making the problem about unequal access to high quality food –meaning the circumstantial impossibility of making the ‘right’ choice they obscure the real problems such as disparities in wages, working conditions, exposure to toxic materials, race, and class inequities. Even as I agree that the neoliberal focus of ‘healthism’ on individual responsibility and choice is problematic as it is embedded in moral judgment and hides the politics and economics of fatness it also allows us to jettison the understanding of individual agency. Guthman somewhat overlooks the possibility that perhaps (fat)people while constrained by the political and economic context of food production and consumption also make deliberate decisions about what to eat, that those decision can be valid and actively responsive to that context, regardless of their ‘healthiness’. But in all fairness that may be the subject of a different book.
   Another only barely discussed yet ever-present issue has to do with the aesthetic displeasure with fat, how it underlies many of the arguments and decision about the obesity epidemic and how it has been discursively cloaked by the notion of health especially in healthism and the alternative food movement. As Guthman does bring up this issue several times in the book the permanently underlying aesthetic problem with fat (often called revulsion) is quickly solved by a seeming correlation between health and beauty, to me the role of the aesthetic displeasing seems under explained.

   Questions
   How can we account for agency in environmental issues while understanding the complex context that shapes, constrains and allows said agency? How could Guthman include a critical discussion of individual decisions about food without undermining her argument about the politics and economics that determined food production and consumption as the real problem? Could Guthman account for agency in a way that contrasted with the morally ridden understanding of individual responsibility of healthism?
   Also, were aesthetic values underplayed in Guthman’s argument? Is there room for aesthetic consideration in political ecology? Or better yet, how can Political Ecology help us understand aesthetic values in environmental issues?

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5. I really enjoyed reading Weighing In. Julie Guthman’s style quite unique, and I suspect that we’ll enjoy a rousing discussion come Wednesday. I do think that she’s entirely correct in her assertion that the modern food movement focuses on individual choice and consumerism as the site of social change, without acknowledging or appreciating underlying structural matters. I’m sure that one of the questions that will come up in class is then, how do we feel about things in the alternative food movement that we like, such as farmers markets, organics, and co-op grocery stores? Guthman clearly likes and benefits from these things too. In that sense, her work doesn’t offer any concrete suggestions as to how we negotiate these facets of the current food economy. I do, however, thing her point that things are not what they seem, and that we need to acknowledge the underlying structures that shape our understandings of food and obesity is something to be taken seriously. There are a couple of things more specific things on which I’d like to comment:

   1) Her use of student comments and insights. Seems quite likely that some ethical concerns will emerge in relation to this tactic, and perhaps it runs the risk of her students feeling exploited. But I liked that she was so explicit where some of her ideas came from—in that sense, she’s kind of giving her students some credit even if she’s not portraying them in an exceptionally positive light. Also, I appreciated that this technique was disruptive. The opinions of the students shock you a little bit, and I found it surprising how deeply ingrained normative values of health and body image are even in a group of educated students with a sustained interest in food justice and food politics. I do wonder, however, if my surprised reaction to student opinion was in part due to how Guthman sets up the statements. I wonder if some of my own unconscious biases would have rendered these statements much more neutral and less surprising if I encountered them without Guthman’s guidance.

   2) I’m quite curious about her use of scientific studies, and why she chose the studies she did to represent the scientific literature on food and obesity. I suspect that this may be problematic in some ways, as one could argue that she was able to choose studies that fit her purposes since she was never presenting a comprehensive review. However, as a reader with out a scientific background in such matters, I thought it was useful to come across such neat summaries of contemporary work that I would never have considered on my own. I wonder how she became so well versed in so many different areas of science?

   3) To what extent would we consider this work political ecology? What does it actually mean to do a political ecology of the body? How do we include the body when we think about nature? How does including human bodies as nature change how we are able to think about obesity? One thing that this book brings up is how much our bodies operate beyond our conscious control, rendering arguments that think of obesity solely in terms of choice irrelevant.

   4)For Guthman, the villain at the end of the story is neoliberal capitalism. Does this render her account economistic? Is it possible to have a fair and just food system under modern day capitalism?

   5) How would Michael Pollan respond to this account?

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6. I enjoyed the book. I thought it was well written, clearly argued, and it challenged me to reappraise a range of tacit assumptions that fashion my own understandings and practices of ‘bodily health’. Among the book’s many contradictions, perhaps its largest lies in its unresolved stance on health – what is it to be healthy? Should we (I) not try to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”? I got through the entire book and I agree with her argument but I still think health citizenship needs to be a part of the discussion.

   I can see how the book may have been controversially received, and while I agree with the overarching argument (and politics) of the book I think that Guthman took a few too many hostages, when she only really needed to take one or two.

   THEORY OF CHANGE
   Guthman critiques the ‘theory of change’ which focusses on consumer- and even production-oriented practices, arguing that they don’t fundamentally change the system. Fair enough. But I don’t think she gives enough sympathy to two of the potentially progressive arguments underneath. First, by creating effective demand for alternative foods, we create new markets, which can lead to more competition/suppliers and innovation, and the lowering of cost of said alternatives. This is somewhat analogous to large scale government procurement. Second, perhaps more contentiously, we are moving into new kinds of consumer consciousness (‘moral economies’ as per Peter Jackson, or ‘geographies of responsibility a la Doreen Massey) and efforts for consumers to ‘think their ways up’ and develop moral guidelines for consumption can (perhaps!) change the nature of things. The fair trade movement has not been entirely for nothing… right?

   PATERNALISM AND CHOICE
   The book develops a kind of postcolonial-inspired critique of ‘healthist’ food missionaries, drawing attention to the mobilization of normative concepts without the associated material means to sustain them. Guthman is critical of efforts to make ‘healthy’ foods to communities, at least through philanthropic (neoliberalism reinforcing means). Again, fair enough. But what is problematic here, is what happens when you shift choice making up one level. Whose notion of ‘good’ food should be reified in policy? Guthman’s own? I could imagine a (perhaps neoconservative) populist counterargument, framing a policy-level attempt to make all food ‘good food’ into an infringement on personal choice and freedoms. In the same way that people demand their ‘ability to choose’ exploitative health insurance programs takes pre-eminence over the actual quality of said health insurance provided by Obamacare, one would have to accept that yes – we are arguing that obesogenic (bad) foods should no longer be within the choice set and that this non-choice should be regulated across rich and poor alike. I agree that this is desirable, but I would then have to make the argument about which kind of food is worth being in the choice set. This is certainly not a line of argument that Guthman fleshes out… and citing a study published in an alternative medicine journal doesn’t reek of scientific consensus, which seems to be the apparatus that Guthman places stock in to make such decisions.

   CULTURE AND SUBJECTS
   I don’t think I would be alone in hypothesizing that if we regulated EDCs and other chemicals out of food production that the obesity ‘epidemic’ would cease. I am also skeptical of evolutionary arguments to the core, but societal changes around our patterned practices and the nature of work (eg from field to plant to office) as well as increased standards of living and access to foods (which are fatty) across the spectrum have too much salience to be ignored because of a lack of ‘laboratory studies’, the complexity of the human body and the inherently partial nature of epidemiology. I certainly agree that such common sense ought to be questioned, but in my mind it also ought to be tested rigorously, and couched within wider systems of signification (ie culture). Again, we see a political ecology argument which sets up culture as a straw man to be cut down, when really it should be folded into a wider explanation. Given this grand anthropocenic experiment we are embarking on (‘modernity’?) we may well need to develop different habits if we want to maximise our (socially mediated, biologically constrained) life quality and length. Should we eat healthily? Sure. Does this mean we need to roll back the state? No. In the same way that we self-police sexist jokes or violent tendencies (rather than hold back and defer always to the state) I think it is important to think about cultural projections of health, but not simply as hegemonic and negative. We would instead ask, how can we take healthism and link it to expanded and plural forms of care for others?

   Question – should health cultures be part of this political project, and if so, how?

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