How to Recenter Equity and Decenter Thinness in the Fight for Food Justice
You can’t say no one ever told you how.
While working in public health and around other professionals concerned about the existence of food deserts, or food apartheid as coined by activist Karen Washington, I’ve been struck by the ongoing alliance between those who advocate for food equity and those who consider themselves soldiers in the ongoing “war on obesity”. The panic about food inequity is often justified through the relationship between higher weight and “food deserts”. The common line of reasoning is that marginalized people who don’t have access to “healthy” food are more likely to be fat, which causes them to be sicker and die earlier. The motivation of food equity advocates, especially those in public health, then becomes irreparably tied to a desire to make marginalized people thinner instead of holistically addressing their health and nutritional needs. The fight for food access becomes another way to enforce a narrow standard of acceptable body types.
This ongoing disconnect has been primarily enabled by fatphobia, or the hatred and fear of fatness. It is a historically-rooted, racism-driven notion that fat bodies are physiologically and morally deficient; and it is present in almost every inch of public health research, advocacy, and practice…
