Eating the money: Diabetes and the embodiment of consumer culture

Abstract

My research explores the relationship between metabolic health and the rise of capitalist food and labor systems, through interviews and long-term ethnographic research with Maya peoples of southern Belize. As work has been replaced with wage labor and farm foods with store-bought alternatives, diabetes has begun to affect Indigenous communities in Southern Belize. “Eating the money” earned by paid labor through consumption of commodity foods and accumulation of resources is seen to produce inequality and nutritional disease. The co-occurrence of diabetes with economic success represents the emergent and contradictory risks posed by integration into consumer capitalist economies. Concern over nutritional diseases like diabetes has led to reflexive critique of the deleterious health effects of modern food and labor relationships. Research participants’ narratives emphasize the nutritional consequences of consumer culture as well as the challenges of balancing health and economic concerns in a rapidly changing world. By engaging Maya paradigms of health as embodiment with social scientific literature on political ecology and cultural studies of food systems, this article reveals that diabetes is endemic to the commodification of food and work. These findings demonstrate the integral role of commodification and consumption-oriented cultural practices to the global rise of nutrition-related diseases.