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After decades of increases in the number of overweight children in New York, a new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a 5.5 percent decrease in obesity or 6500 fewer overweight children in public schools. New York City’s health commissioner Dr. Thomas A. Farley stated in the Times that although the drop is slight, “[w]hat’s impressive is the fact that it’s falling at all.” The health commissioner attributes the drop to an aggressive ad campaign against sugary sodas. This is similar to attempts nation wide to curb the consumption of high caloric and high-sugar foods that are linked to obesity. Julie Guthman’s new book entitled, Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism is an in depth discussion about how we identify the scope of the issue and how there are many assumptions that limit our ability to address obesity. Traditional arguments about obesity center around the link between “overeating and obesity.” As a result, solutions to this ‘epidemic’ follow logically to ideas about the overconsumption of calories as, “the current public health consensus is that reducing calorie intake, along with increasing calorie expenditure through exercise, is what must be done.” Another traditional reaction, popular among progressives, is to advocate for locally produced, organic and seasonal foods as an alternative to the social endemic of low cost high calorie fast food. Guthman argues in her book that both of these approaches are reductive and feed into a discourse that blames the victim without addressing the root cause of the problem: that poor Americans simply can’t afford to eat better and that addressing low wages is one important but often-ignored step toward food justice. Guthman likens obesity to an ecological condition, one that requires a comprehensive look at a ‘broader cultural and economic context.’

GUEST: Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor in UC Santa Cruz’s department of Community Studies. She is the author of Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (UC Press).