Quoted: Raj Patel on poverty and obesity

Normally, I wouldn't quote the same book twice, but Raj Patel had some awesome stuff to say about the poverty-obesity issue in Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the Global Food System:

“Under apartheid, it was easy to see how space was legislated, how blacks were denied control of the rhythm and pace of their lives. The statutes were in the books, the police forces would make damn sure that the spatial order was adhered to. The problem, everyone could easily and readily acknowledge, was a social one and it was to be addressed not through individual transformations but by social protest, subversion and widespread change. Today, when a growing number of working poor people are forced into similar conditions, the target is not the social and political substrate of the problem, but its most cosmetic and superficial effect: obesity. It’s like suggesting that the reason blacks had it bad under apartheid was not because of apartheid, but because they were poor. And that the remedy was not to challenge apartheid, but to become rich.

We are encouraged to understand obesity to be, at the end of the day, an individual failing, an inability to deal with the farrago of choices offered to us, a deficit of impulse control. Conventional wisdom sees obesity as a symptom of an impoverished faculty of choice, never a result of an impoverished range of choices.”