bnarchives | Food is still a crucial form of social
control – only that now it comes in a very different guise. Whereas until
recently – and even today in parts of China, South Asia and Africa – the main
threat for the underlying population was having too little to eat, nowadays it
is having too much. The poor, traditionally punished by hunger, are now much
more likely to be penalized by obesity.
This massive, ongoing transformation is
reshaping the heart, mind and body of the capitalist subject. The
undernourished, underweight, work-till-you-drop poor are gradually being
replaced by their overfed, overweight, shop-till-you-drop descendants. And this
inversion is hardly for the better. Although the adipose poor live longer than
their scrawny predecessors, they are not necessarily healthier. They tend to
suffer from non-communicable diseases – primarily diabetes, hypertension,
strokes, cancer, heart attacks, atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular ailments
Diamond 2012: Ch. 11. And having been born into a hyper-capitalized complex of cheap
industrial food, accessible pharmaceutical drugs and a highly intoxicating mass
media, many of them are gradually losing their ability to control their
inflating bodies and liberate their captured souls.
Ironically, this obesity revolution has
been driven by wheat, rice, corn and potatoes – the very same crops that
leveraged food power in the earlier hunger era. The plants that forced and lured
hunters and gatherers into centralized state structures are now used – together
with numerous supplements, both chemical and mental – to enslave capitalist
subjects to their own irresistible cravings. And as the sedated, junk-food
eating subjects become bigger and heavier, their previously ‘fat cat’ capitalist
rulers eat organic, go to the gym and grow leaner and meaner.
