Fat Food Studies

Fat food studies is an emerging field of study that brings together the more established fields of fat studies and food studies. Fat study scholars are often situated in the humanities and social sciences. They explore the construction, embodiment, and lived experience of fatness in society with a social justice orientation that advocates for the acceptance of all bodies. Fat studies operates in parallel with related fields, critical weight studies and critical ‘obesity’ studies, which may focus more on critiques of epidemiological studies; size-stigmatizing health policies and practices; and discourses pertaining to an ‘obesity epidemic’, ‘crisis’ or ‘time bomb.’ Critical weight or ‘obesity’ scholars often deploy a health or social sciences perspective. Overlap and slippage between these fields is, of course, common and taken for granted. Food studies scholars explore foodways, the socioculturally patterned ways individuals and groups eat and prepare food, and food systems, the interlocked networks through which societies produce, consume, transport, and dispose of food. Food studies scholars distinguish themselves from other scholars invested in food, such as nutritional scientists, by their social science—not biological science—orientation; however, interdisciplinary critical nutrition/dietetic scholars contribute to fat food studies. Food studies scholars often adopt a critical orientation to existing inequitable neoliberal food systems, which reinforce colonial power relations in exploiting the labor of the Global South and enriching the Global North, and by exploring alternative foodways and systems. Fat food studies bring into dialogue these admittedly often siloed fields. This dialogue does not operate without tension. Food studies scholars may not critically interrogate the taken-for-granted pathologization of fat bodies and may reproduce fat-stigmatizing discourses when critiquing existing food systems. Fat studies scholars may invoke the role of food in embodiment surprisingly infrequently. However, there are rich opportunities for collaboration when considering how food is implicated in the denigration of certain gendered, racialized, and classed bodies and the embodiment of food producers and consumers embedded in food systems and subject to food discourses. While still an emerging area, the seeds are there for a rich interdisciplinary area of scholarship.