Introduction: Contesting Obesity Discourse and Presenting an Alternative

Presenting an alternative perspective is the obesity challenge, an issue that routinely pervades all corners of their late modern cultural landscape, albeit through a limited and often reductive way of thinking which not only restricts how the authors come to understand it, but which can explode into knee-jerk reactionary panics.

Abstract

Formidable authorities continue to issue warnings about a global 'obesity crisis' (UK Parliament, 2004; WHO, 1998), ultimately the result of inactive lifestyles and poor diets. What medicine calls 'obesity', and its precursor 'overweight', must be fought, we are told, because they lead to escalating morbidity and mortality from, among other conditions, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancers. These twin ideas of runaway population weight gain and 'excess' bodyweight being intrinsically associated with poor health have achieved such momentum in developed nations that it is difficult in the contemporary discursive terrain to imagine fatness as anything other than obesity: unhealthy, morally defunct and something to be corrected. As such, obesity is an issue that routinely pervades all corners of our late modern cultural landscape,1 albeit through a limited and often reductive way of thinking which not only restricts how we come to understand it, but which can explode into knee-jerk reactionary panics. Presenting an alternative perspective is the obesity challenge we tackle throughout this book.