Description

Date and Time: Tuesday, 18th March 2025 – 7:00-8:00pm

Venue: via Zoom

Cost: £12

Healthism and nutritionism are tools to think with for equitable nutrition policy, research, and practice.
The last few months have seen an outpouring of food policy documents most of which include, to varying degrees, mention of farming, UPFs, sustainability, climate crisis, advertising, nutrient density, sugar tax, school meals, fatness (pathologized as obesity), expert panels, and corporate control of the industrial food system. However, there is a dearth of detail on how tackling these issues will catalyse the systemic and structural change that is a prerequisite for equitable, dignified food for all. Thus, there is a chasm between recommendations for dietary change and academic research on food system transformation and activist research on health justice that consistently highlights the need to address anti-racism, trauma, disability justice, coloniality, fatmisia and gender equity as integral to food and climate justice.

These two linked sessions introduce the ideologies of (1) healthism and (2) nutritionism as tools to think with to repair any rupture between current policy recommendations and the sociopolitically-engaged research being produced in the field.

After defining and situating the terms, we will focus on identifying when the concepts, or ideologies, of healthism and nutritionism are being mobilised and work together to create responses that are more aligned with an anti-colonial, liberatory agenda.
(Sessions can also be attended stand-alone).