| Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics
In Eating Anxiety , Chad Lavin argues that our culture's obsession with diet, obesity, meat, and local foods enacts ideological and biopolitical responses to perceived threats to both individual and national sovereignty. Using the occasion of eating to examine assumptions about identity, objectivity, and sovereignty that underwrite so much political order, Lavin explains how food functions to help structure popular and philosophical understandings of the world and the place of humans within it. He introduces the concept of digestive subjectivity and shows how this offers valuable resources for rethinking cherished political ideals surrounding knowledge, democracy, and power. Exploring discourses of food politics, Eating Anxiety links the concerns of food--especially issues of sustainability, public health, and inequality--to the evolution of the world order and the possibilities for democratic rule. It forces us to question the significance of consumerist politics and--simultaneously--the relationship between politics and ethics, public and private. |