The Neoliberal Diet
Excess weight and obesity are increasingly salient public health issues in many countries of the world, including Canada.
Can this be attributed to increasing incomes coupled with individual bad choices, or are there deeper societal causes, like inequality, which tilt food choices in the direction of energy-dense diets?
What is the role of companies in the food industry in contributing to or ameliorating obesity? Can education and public policy steer matters in a different direction?
If so, how should they be directed? Moderated by Dr. Gerardo Otero.
Gerardo Otero is a professor of sociology and international studies at Simon Fraser University. Author of Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico (Westview 1999), he has published numerous scholarly articles, chapters and books about political economy of agriculture and food, civil society and the state in Mexico and Latin America.
His latest edited book, Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2008), was recently co-published in Spanish in Mexico by Simon Fraser University, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco and M.A. Porrúa.
In Fall of 2014, Gerardo was the Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was awarded by its Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program, and hosted by the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology.
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