Obesity as Violence

This post is inspired by Live Real's Food and Freedom Rides that I was fortunate enough to participate in this weekend.  Live Real's mission is to change the food system and they characterize the food system as perpetuating violence through obesity and other diet related illnesses.  I find this to be a profoundly important approach to obesity, and I want to use this post to meditate on the ideas of violence and obesity that Live Real's fellows addressed during their event at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham.

Part of Live Real's idea is, obviously, to connect the struggle for food justice to the struggle against segregation in the 1960s.  The Civil Rights Movement was met with overt violence in the form of beatings, murders, dogs, and fire hoses, but Live Real asserts that obesity and diabetes are also forms of violence.  At first this seems like an odd comparison.  The perpetrators of the violence during the Civil Rights Movement were obvious - Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, and the police, while the perpetrators of obesity are less obvious and less easy to identify.  However, upon further examination, the two forms of violence are not so different; in fact, they are quite similar.

I tend to shy away from individualistic solutions to complex problems.  It can certainly be said that Bull Connor, the Klan, and the police were products of their environment.  For these perpetrators, white supremacy was as normal as the sun rising in the east, and those violating white supremacy were the actual perpetrators.  This does not excuse Connor's, the Klan's or other's behavior, but it merely points out that the true perpetrator of the violence, or at least the beliefs underpinning that violence, was white supremacy which still exists today.

Likewise, the food system that makes us obese and unhealthy is underpinned by a belief that greed will allocate food resources equitably.  The food system is founded on the assumption that corporations acting with the sole interest of making profit will somehow produce high quality food for the most disadvantaged people.  In other words, like white supremacy, the logic of the for-profit food system harms or causes violence to the poor and people of color through its normal operation, and, indeed, those who claim the right to food can be seen as violating the norms of food markets.  What is clear is that the murder of Civil Rights workers and the obesity "epidemic," while different, are the violent consequences of unjust systems - white supremacy and the food system, respectively.

Finally, I do not want to minimize the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.  Murder is not really something that modern activists in the US face on a daily basis, though, apparently police repression is still very real and very racialized.  Still, we don't face the same risks as our elders faced.  Even the nature of the violence is less overt and more covert and insidious.  Obesity, as an embodied form of injustice, kills over the long term while murder kills immediately.  Nowadays, injustice is less visible and in some ways more difficult to address, but it doesn't carry with it the dangers that battling injustices of the past carried.