The Capitalist Diet: Energy-dense and Profitable

Abstract

First paragraphs:

The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People analyzes how global diets have changed in recent decades, what caused these changes, and who loses and gains by the transformation. Author Gerardo Otero is a professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of several previous books on the global food system. In the book, Otero describes how the global diet that emerged at the turn of the 21^st century has contributed to world­wide increases in overweight and obesity and how neoliberalism, the variant of capitalism that evolved in this period, promotes obesogenic diets.

Neoliberalism posits that markets are best equipped to solve all problems and that by deregulating, privatizing, and emphasizing individual responsibility, governments can unleash capitalist economies for growth (Harvey, 2007). Harvey describes neoliberalism as the corporate capitalist class’s political response to the threats to their control that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. . . .