Today's excerpt

"If the quality of the food we eat is shaped by work and play, by the neighbourhoods we live in, the jobs we can get and the time we spend travelling between them, then we might want to consider poor diets as a symptom of a systemic lack of control over our spaces and lives. Yet in the media and in government, that diagnosis is ruled out of court. Instead, poor diet is understood to mean obesity, which in turn is considered an end in itself, simultaneously symptom and disease, a skin-deep ill without need of further clarification, because we have all become literate in the art of reading the individual body. The meaning not only of food, but of obesity, has already been suggested to us. We are encouraged to understand obesity to be, at the end of the day, and individual failing, an inability to deal with the farrago of choices offered to us, a deficit of impulse control. Conventional wisdom sees obesity as a symptom of an impoverished faculty of choice, never as a result of an impoverished range of choices. And this is because, in large measure, the solution offered to the social problem of obesity has been an individual one.

— Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved : The Hidden Battle for the World Food System