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Author: Julie Guthman
ISBN : B005T5O8JU
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Format: PDF
Free download Free Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (California Studies in Food and Culture) [Kindle Edition] from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Weighing In takes 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 obesity—promoting 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 bulimia—one that promotes consumption while also insisting upon thinness—Guthman offers a complex analysis of our entire economic system.Direct download links available for Free Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism
- File Size: 680 KB
- Print Length: 243 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0520266242
- Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (January 2, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005T5O8JU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #419,618 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism
Erratic
Guthman's second book is one of the most wildly uneven works of nonfiction I have read. Parts of it border on brilliant. Others are clumsily assembled and hardly convincing. The strong sections are the ones in which she applies a political economy perspective to her personal research and experience in agriculture and what she calls the `alternative-food movement' (farmers markets, CSAs, community gardens, etc.). She has consider insight into this, though it's easy to tell when she's moved beyond her own work -- e.g., not as thorough exposure to the food justice movement and a few sloppy sentences like one commenting on how Obama agreed to cut food stamps in 2014 [actually, the time that a temporary increase in benefits meant to cover the Great Recession is scheduled to end, though the current 2012 Farm Bill may very well have such cuts and be signed by him].) In these chapters, Guthman gores many a sacred cow.
Then there are the chapters that are more theoretical or are focused obesity. They're so bad that it's hard to believe that the author of this book also wrote the excellent _Agrarian Dreams_. These parts tend to be toward the beginning. The prose in these academic in the worst sense, and the arguments are not persuasive. For instance, Guthman rejects the `balanced energy model' explanation for the rise of obesity since the 1980s. That is, she does not accept that people are fatter because they are eating more. The way she handles this is odd, however. She talks at length as if she's going to disprove this, but then when she gets to it, she devotes two pages to it, relying heavily on a single USDA study about demographics of calorie consumption.
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