Consuming health, negotiating risk, "eating right"

Abstract

In the health-risk society, food choice is framed through public health nutrition and dietary risks which are produced through nutritionism and econutrition. Dietary guidelines recommend the consumption of functional foods to target bodily health (Scrinis 2013; Mudry 2010), whereas ecological nutrition pushes sustainable diets for planetary health (Mason & Lang 2017; Friedberg, 2016). These healthy eating discourses construct dietary food risks and reorient ideas about what constitutes good food and eating right. This paper explores how food risk discourses extend the moralizing of healthism through emerging public health nutrition discourses and the ‘new public health.’ I suggest that in considering what constitutes eating right, dietary health risks extend individual responsibility for bodily health to increasing responsibility for the health of our environment or ecosystems, exercised as choice over the foods one chooses to eat. The feminine-citizen-subject is particularly targeted because as Moore (2010) contends, hegemonic femininity is constructed through beliefs about health and the healthy body. Thinking through feminist intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) however, I draw attention to the limits of choice and individualized approaches to managing food risk given the structural constraints of food and health.