Jess’s Reviews > Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism > Status Update

I wish there was some interrogation of the claim that organic is healthier (is it? I truly don't know) but I appreciated the points about how we're not going to be able to buy our way into a better food system, and food justice initiatives that ignore policy work in favor of "civilizing" the food choices of poor people and people of color isn't really justice

Points out that the problem with "cheap food" isn't really the farm subsidies, it's the social conditions that mean people's survival depends on cheapness and also it's making innovation and efficiency a higher priority than the precautionary principle

Critiques of the universality of the energy balance model and theories about the adaptive role of fatness as a way of sequestering toxins introduced by the food industry that the body can't safely metabolize so they get stored in adipose tissue instead

Question: does your neighborhood make you fat?
Answer: infrastructure doesn't remove people's agency, people can still make choices, but racism and poverty do limit options

I am absolutely here for this critique of healthism and also know that 20 years ago I would have had opinions nearly as problematic as the author's students

Since it takes abnormality to determine normality, difference itself becomes the problem. ... Appeals to the natural borrow heavily from evolutionary biology [which] suggests that human's natural state is one of hunting and gathering, rendering modernity in all of it's forms a problem... raising the question about which moment in evolutionary time was the pristine one from which human embodiment has since deviated.