Alimentary uncertainties: From contested evidence to policy

Abstract

This article examines the way the category of 'the sensorial' is mobilised across obesity research and care practices for overweight persons in France. The 'natural' body is understood to have developed mechanisms that motivate eaters to seek out energy-dense foods, a hardwiring that is maladaptive in today's plethoric food environment. The article analyses the feedback models mobilised in scientific literature on the neuroendocrine processes regulating appetite. The analysis of how 'the sensorial' is studied and used to treat patients provides a vantage point onto the ways foods and bodies transform each other. Recent findings show that fat cells influence metabolism by secreting hormones, revealing that eaters are affected by the materiality of the foods they ingest. 'The sensorial' functions as a regulator in the feedback mechanisms where social norms regulating foodscapes become enfolded in the molecular processes that control appetite regulation. The article traces the work that the category of 'the sensorial' does as it flows through the loops and feedbacks between scientific evidence, policy and care. It examines the way pleasure and the sensations of eaters are increasingly foregrounded in French nutritional health promotion strategies in a context where informing eaters is increasingly deemed ineffective.

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

“…At stake here is the capacity to intervene in an operational manner, as well as to define the kinds of knowledges that enable intervention. Where the public health response to the problem of obesity is concerned, the difficulty of implementing measurably effective interventions is both a problem for action and an endless resource to fuel further action (Sanabria and Yates-Doerr 2015).…”

“…I draw on materials gathered in the context of my research on alimentary health in France (Sanabria ; Sanabria and Yates‐Doerr ) and on a retrospective ethnographization (see Ingold ) of my encounters with colleagues at the WPHNA and in my (French) workplace, where I was hired to carry out anthropological research in the field of health education. This article refracts a series of global questions concerning the circulation of ignorance in the construction of evidentiary regimes of nutritional interventions through a range of materials collected in France and through my participation in global forums such as the WPHNA.…”

What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City

“…Entanglement assumes relational beingness, permitting us to see how linear boundaries restrict our ability to know the world better (Barad ; Rozental ; Tosoni and Pinch ). However, despite my own continued participation in entanglement, life conditions in Colonia Periférico—where breathing shit offers protection against security and health officials in contemporary Mexico—make me increasingly uneasy about the deployment of entanglement and the embrace of its close relations, “uncertainty” (Sanabria and Yates‐Doerr ) and “staying with the trouble” (Haraway ). So, while investigating the implications of how allowing and even welcoming noxious permeability provides a boundary that prevents other penetrations like police violence, I am not celebrating the endless entanglement of those who can live within the shit.…”

Wicked Nutrition: The Controversial Greening of Official Dietary Guidance

“…The ongoing debate between advocates of animal proteincentered, low-carb high-fat (LCHF) diets and supporters of DGAC's recommendations reflects the difficulty of "paradigmatic uncertainty" of nutritional science more generally (Sanabria and Yates-Doerr 2015), given the complexity of diet-health relationships and the practical and ethical difficulties of investigating them. Exactly how a particular way of eating impacts individual bodily health can no more be measured or verified than can its impact on global warming.…”