Eating Anxiety The Perils Of Food Politics Analysis

Chad Lavin approaches “Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics” from an ontopolitical perspective in an attempt to analyze the relationship between food, personal identity, global inequality, and cultural authenticity (Lavin ix). He uses a fusion of politics, philosophy, and the politics of being a political self, to discuss these. His main question lies in how food functions culturally, politically, and metaphorically to structure individual understandings of the world and autonomy. He uses the work of philosophers from the 17th and 19th centuries to situate Eating Anxiety historically, and to understand how what he calls “digestive subjectivity” can help us navigate globalization, neoliberalism, global inequality, and democracy in the modern world, as well as our understandings of modern liberalism. Digestive subjectivity relies on the idea that food and digestion disrupt the dominant discourses associated with liberal institutions such as property, ethics, and politics, …show more content…
The three paradigms are the psychological, which relies on the idea that your diet has everything to do with managing fault desires and promoting individual control (5), the metabolic, which focuses on the body as a machine that can be manipulated through fitness, and finally, the hormonal paradigm which focused on the chemical reactions of the brain and a regulation of carbs and the reliance of food science. These paradigms fell into line with the popular cultural and scientific ideologies of their time: privatization of political power and labor (diet being a new form of labor)(7), control and self-regulation the industrial idea of “human cost and efficiency” (8), and the new digital, information economy