Health Without Bodies

ISBN-13: 9789819949496 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Kim Hendrickx

Opis

Health Without Bodies invites readers on an ethnographic exploration of the boundary between food and medicine. Food-related health claims are governed in the EU as voluntary statements on food labels to help consumers make ‘informed choices’. This poses an interesting problem: when claims refer to health, one can no longer ignore that consumers have bodies. Asking how these claims have become possible as a new kind of truth-statement on the market, this book reveals the contours of a fundamental tension between what is expected from consumers in a liberal market economy, and how food and the body come to trouble those expectations. In doing so, it illuminates why the difference between food and medicine is such a sensitive issue, and why seemingly trivial health claims have been subject to so much debate and political control.
Afterword by Isabelle Stengers.

Spis treści

The contours of a problem.- Sugar’s Legacy.- Health benefits looking for a science.- The Common Market and the Rise of Information.- Liberal Food, Liberal Consumers.- Bodies of Evidence.- Territorial Disputes.- Health without Bodies.

O autorze

Kim Hendrickx is Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) in Belgium and member of the Spiral Research Centre at the University of Liège, Belgium.

Blurb

Health Without Bodies invites readers on an ethnographic exploration of the boundary between food and medicine. Food-related health claims are governed in the EU as voluntary statements on food labels to help consumers make ‘informed choices’. This poses an interesting problem: when claims refer to health, one can no longer ignore that consumers have bodies. Asking how these claims have become possible as a new kind of truth-statement on the market, this book reveals the contours of a fundamental tension between what is expected from consumers in a liberal market economy, and how food and the body come to trouble those expectations. In doing so, it illuminates why the difference between food and medicine is such a sensitive issue, and why seemingly trivial health claims have been subject to so much debate and political control.