Introduction

This chapter argues that being sensible has three strategic roles in the context of governing the purported ‘obesity epidemic’ (Flegal 2006; Mitchell and McTigue 2007; Chiolero and Paccaud 2009; Wright and Harwood 2009): as a personal and collective risk mitigation strategy; as a way of overcoming both individual and geographical luck; and as a core driver of growth within the food and beverage market. Being sensible thus does not necessarily entail self-denial and the avoidance of consumption, but rather the creation of new market opportunities for the instrumental deployment of purposeful and informed consumption choices. As Bauman's quote above suggests, obesity thus renders consumption a political battleground with inevitable and definitive tensions within the multiple enterprises that, as is explored throughout this book, constitute the governance of health. Moreover, the governance of obesity is inherently contingent and contextual, with strategies developed, mediated, legitimated and gaining meaning in situ. For this reason, this chapter will draw on examples from both the US and the UK. The active comparison of national-level policy discourses and stances is important in order to situate obesity as a public health ‘crisis’ (Ebbeling et al 2002; Carmona 2003; Campos et al 2006; Lobstein 2006; Orbach 2006) relative to ‘crises’ unfolding in other places. This also offers a means by which the condition can be excised from a situation of moral panic and, instead, held up as a societal concern representative of broader structural failings and limitations. Kwan's suggestion that ‘obesity is not an unambiguous medical fact. It is a social fact that various cultural producers vie to define’ (2009: 45) is thus useful here. This is not to suggest, as the growing band of obesity sceptics do (Gaesser 2002; Campos 2004; Campos et al 2006; Oliver 2006), that obesity is simply a medical fiction and constructed category that acts to discipline, control and coerce.