Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics

Abstract

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. “In Eating Anxiety, Chad Lavin steadfastly rejects what have come to be clichés about our modern relation to food and gives us new answers to old questions about what makes us anxious about food. His innovative analysis tacks back and forth between political philosophy and contemporary food treatises to show how ethical consumption is founded on untenable notions of the liberal, disembodied subject—ironically so. Taking swipes at obesity hysteria, food localism, and post-humanism alike, Lavin asks us to confront our anxieties—including those about our failing democracy—rather than to seek solace in individualist approaches to food system change.” —Julie Guthman, author of Weighing in: Obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism