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Resisting health: extreme food and the culinary abject
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-17, 15:02 authored by Phillipov, MControversies involving calorically extravagant fast food hamburgers are not only significant manifestations of nutritional surveillance and policing, they are also important sites of debate about food, health, and eating during a so-called “obesity epidemic.” This paper examines the media coverage and controversies surrounding two “fat” burgers that were sold in the Australian market in 2008 and 2011. It argues that the almost total subsuming of the “meaning” of these burgers into a framework of health simultaneously limited comprehension of their pleasures and provided opportunities for resistance to public health agendas. By locating the consumption of these burgers as part of a broader, masculine “turn to the extreme” in contemporary culture, this article suggests that the burgers' transgression of healthy eating edicts not only reveals the limits of public health education's ascetic agenda, but also highlights the complex and interdependent relationships among media, food, health, and its discontents at a time when eating and nutrition are sources of heightened anxiety, surveillance, and control.
History
Publication title
Critical Studies in Media CommunicationVolume
30Issue
5Pagination
377-390ISSN
1529-5036Department/School
School of HumanitiesPublisher
RoutledgePlace of publication
USARights statement
Copyright 2013 National Communication AssociationRepository Status
- Restricted