Sugar ecologies: their metabolic and racial effects

Hatch, Anthony Ryan; Sternlieb, Sonya R.; Gordon, Julia T.

doi:10.1080/15528014.2019.1638123

Cited by 22 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Some scholars such as Hatch et al ( 57 , p. 596) have taken the historical context of colonialism further by acknowledging the racialised aspects of these economies whereby “sugar is guided into Black bodies”, thus bringing historical dynamics of racialisation and enslavement into the contemporary economic and social moment. As they suggest (16. p. 595), “sugar ecologies (are) the product of an unequal and racist system of food production and distribution.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research on the marketing practices of unhealthy products and corporate strategies for impeding policy change must be contextualised within globalisation and free trade policies [ 58 ] and historicised as part of ongoing colonial dynamics [ 14 , 57 , 59 ]. Our interviewees placed special emphasis on the trade and importation of sugar and unhealthy products into Jamaica, and barriers to regulating industry practices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Situating commercial determinants of health in their historical context: a qualitative study of sugar-sweetened beverages in Jamaica

Barnett-Naghshineh,

Warmington,

Altink

et al. 2023

Global Health

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Background Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of mortality across the Caribbean and similar regions. Structural determinants include a marked increase in the dependency on food imports, and the proliferation of processed foods, including sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). We focused on Jamaica as a case study and the health challenge of SSBs, and situated contemporary actions, experiences and policies within their historical context to investigate underlying drivers of commercial determinants of health and attempts to counter them. We asked: how can a historical perspective of the drivers of high level SSB consumption in Jamaica contribute to an enhanced understanding of the context of public health policies aimed at reducing their intake? Methods An ethnographic approach with remote data collection included online semi-structured interviews and workshops with 22 local experts and practitioners of health, agriculture and nutrition in Jamaica and attending relevant regional public webinars on SSBs and NCD action in the Caribbean. Our analysis was situated within a review of historical studies of Caribbean food economies with focus on the twentieth century. Jamaican and UK-based researchers collected and ethnographically analysed the data, and discussed findings with the wider transdisciplinary team. Results We emphasise three key areas in which historical events have shaped contextual factors of SSB consumption. Trade privileged sugar as a cash crop over food production during Jamaica’s long colonial history, and trade deregulation since the 1980s through structural adjustment opened markets to transnational companies. These changes increased Jamaican receptiveness to the mass advertisement and marketing of these companies, whilst long-standing power imbalances hampered taxation and regulation in contemporary public health actions. Civil society efforts were important for promoting structural changes to curb overconsumption of SSBs and decentring such entrenched power relations. Conclusion The contemporary challenge of SSBs in Jamaica is a poignant case study of commercial determinants of health and the important context of global market-driven economies and the involvement of private sector interests in public health policies and governance. Historically contextualising these determinants is paramount to making sense of the sugar ecology in Jamaica today and can help elucidate entrenched power dynamics and their key actors.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Situating commercial determinants of health in their historical context: a qualitative study of sugar-sweetened beverages in Jamaica

Barnett-Naghshineh,

Warmington,

Altink

et al. 2023

Global Health

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“…By seeing the production of taste as woven into women’s everyday domestic obligations, I enter into dialogue with and extend theoretical accounts of taste rooted in political ecology paradigms, approaches that aim to understand taste as a material phenomenon located at the intersection of domestic work, embodiment, sensory experience, historical and economic change, and access to food (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2015 ; Kinkaid 2019 ; Nichols 2022 ; Nisbett 2019 ). Ecological approaches to eating trace encounters between macrohistorical forces and metabolizing bodies, analyzing how food production, trade agreements, and food policies “guide” commodities into bodies (Hatch, Sternlieb, and Gordon 2019 ). I argue that work in this emerging tradition has often neglected the role of cooking as a critical mode of interpreting, resisting, querying and reproducing eating.…”

Section: Ecologies Of Taste In the Kitchenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“For us women, flavor is king”: Gender, saf sap and flavor work in urban Senegal

Poleykett

2023

Food, Culture & Society

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Over the past decade home cooking in the Senegalese city of Dakar has come to be dominated by culinary practices of saf sap : the incorporation of new commodities and flavor enhancers and the invention of new cooking techniques that intensify the taste of everyday dishes. Producing a well flavored meal is a crucial part of women’s domestic work, but cooks are increasingly critiqued in Dakar, accused of traducing culinary heritage, challenging the authority of elders, and spreading metabolic disease. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegalese households and qualitative interviews and focus groups with women who prepare food, I introduce the analytical category of “flavor work” to show how the everyday making of taste in a West African city is embedded in historical and contemporary forms of household social reproduction. Controversy over the taste of home cooking reveals how women’s flavor work serves a double reproductive purpose. Flavor work creates culturally coherent and intelligible meals, but it also forms part of broader subsistence strategies: techniques for navigating scarcity and rupture.

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“…Food justice scholars pay explicit attention to the role of structural racism and racial inequities in the root causes of food insecurity (Bowen et al 2021 ; Garth and Reese 2020 ; Hatch et al 2019 ; Reese 2019 ). For instance, food justice activists have challenged the term food desert because it suggests such inequity is “natural” (Bell et al 2021 ) and implies barren emptiness, ignoring the cultural richness of the community and failing to acknowledge the context of structural racialization, segregation, and racial injustice that drives the lack of full-service grocery stores in communities of color (Corcoran 2021 ; Dickinson 2019 ; Usher 2015 ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relationship between neighborhood food access and food security stems from the ways urban development patterns and housing discrimination have contributed to spatial inequities that separate communities along racial and class lines (Ball et al 2009 ; Bruce et al 2020 ; Raja et al 2008 ), so that low-income communities of color who experience higher rates of food insecurity are also more likely to live in neighborhoods with less access to fresh foods. A line of related scholarship further unpacks the conception of food deserts and swamps, conceptualizing the centrality of sugar-sweetened foods and beverages as a form of environmental racism (Hatch 2016 ; Hatch et al 2019 ). Other scholars have called for expanding conceptions of food access (Usher 2015 ) and connecting analyses of the food environment with structural racism and racial inequities in socioeconomic status (Bell et al 2019 ; Dombrowski et al 2022 ; Odoms-Young 2018 ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

LGBTQ+ food insufficiency in New England

2022

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As a group, LGBTQ+ people experience food insecurity at a disproportionately high rate, yet food security scholars and practitioners are only beginning to uncover patterns in how food insecurity varies by subgroups of this diverse community. In this paper, we use data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey—which added measures of gender identity and sexuality for the first time in 2021—to analyze New Englanders’ food insufficiency rates by gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. We find that (1) in the past seven days, 13.0 percent of LGB + (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other non-heterosexual) New Englanders experience food insufficiency—which is nearly twice the rate of heterosexual people—and 19.8 percent of transgender+ (transgender, genderqueer, gender non-binary, and other non-cisgender people) New Englanders experience food insufficiency—which is two to three times the rate of cisgender men and women. (2) Whereas cisgender New Englanders experience food insufficiency at a lower rate than their counterparts in the rest of the nation (about two percentage points lower for both cisgender men and women), transgender+ New Englanders experience no such New England advantage compared to transgender+ people in the country as a whole. (3) LGBTQ+ New Englanders of color experience devastatingly high rates of food insufficiency, with, for example, one in three Black transgender+ New Englanders not having enough food to eat in the past seven days. These findings suggest that addressing food insecurity in New England demands approaching the problem with an intersectional queer lens, with attention to the ways in which racism, cissexism, and heterosexism are creating a systemic, ongoing food crisis for LGBTQ+ New Englanders, especially those who are transgender+ and/or people of color.

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Sugar ecologies: their metabolic and racial effects

Cited by 22 publications

References 44 publications

Situating commercial determinants of health in their historical context: a qualitative study of sugar-sweetened beverages in Jamaica

Situating commercial determinants of health in their historical context: a qualitative study of sugar-sweetened beverages in Jamaica

“For us women, flavor is king”: Gender, saf sap and flavor work in urban Senegal

LGBTQ+ food insufficiency in New England

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