Weighing In Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism [Paperback]

Weighing Intakes on the obesity epidemic, challenging many widely held assumptions about its causes and consequences. Julie Guthman examines fatness and its relationship to health outcomes to ask if our efforts to prevent obesity are sensible, efficacious, or ethical. She also focuses the lens of obesity on the broader food system to understand why we produce cheap, over-processed food, as well as why we eat it. Guthman takes issue with the currently touted remedy to obesitypromoting food that is local, organic, and farm fresh. While such fare may be tastier and grown in more ecologically sustainable ways, this approach can also reinforce class and race inequalities and neglect other possible explanations for the rise in obesity, including environmental toxins. Arguing that ours is a political economy of bulimiaone that promotes consumption while also insisting upon thinnessGuthman offers a complex analysis of our entire economic system.

Julie Guthmanis Professor of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author ofAgrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California(UC Press)

A bold, compelling challenge to conventional thinking about obesity and its fixes,Weighing Inis one of the most important books on food politics to hit the shelves in a long time. Susanne Freidberg, author ofFresh: A Perishable History

Weighing Inis filled with counterintuitive surprises that should make us skeptics of all kinds of food -- whether local, fast, slow, junk or health -- but also gives us the practical tools to effectively scrutinize the stale buffet of popularly-accepted health wisdom before we digest it. Paul Robbins, professor of Geography and Development, University of Arizona

If you liked Michael Pollan, this should be your next read. Guthman gives us the research behind the questions we should be asking, but, falling all over oursell£: