Healthy Choices and Heavy Burdens: Race, Citizenship and Gender in the ‘Obesity Epidemic’

The ‘obesity epidemic’ is widely accepted as a major public health threat in the United States. This paper provides a critical examination of the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity’s action plan that is foundational to First Lady Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move!’ campaign. The report reveals ideological anxieties about race, American citizenship, changing gender roles and women’s bodies. The framing of obesity as a personal problem and individual failing reflects the merger of American individualism and neoliberalism. Self-regulation and responsibility (and the mother’s responsibility for her children) are key in prescriptions to manage obesity, reflecting biopolitical techniques of governance and a new model of ‘the healthy American citizen.

Book review: making milk: the past, present and future of our primary food edited by Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo

In Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food, editors Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo assemble a provocative collection of strong interdisciplinary scholarship to explore milk’s material, affective, historical, semantic, symbolic and economic relations, writes Jeanne Firth

Practicing food anxiety: Making Australian mothers responsible for their families’ dietary decisions

Concerns about the relationship between diet, weight, and health find widespread expression in the media and are accompanied by significant individual anxiety and responsibilization. However, these pertain especially to mothers, who undertake the bulk of domestic labor involved in managing their families’ health and wellbeing. This article employs the concept of anxiety as social practice to explore the process whereby mothers are made accountable for their families’ dietary decisions. Drawing on data from an Australian study that explored the impact of discourses of childhood obesity prevention on mothers, the article argues that mothers’ engagements with this value-laden discourse are complex and ambiguous, involving varying degrees of self-ascribed responsibility and blame for children's weight and diets. We conclude by drawing attention to the value of viewing food anxiety as social practice, in highlighting issues that are largely invisible in both official discourses and scholarly accounts of childhood obesity prevention

New Orleans’ “restaurant renaissance,” chef humanitarians, and the New Southern food movement

In this paper, we situate New Orleans’ post-Katrina “restaurant renaissance” within a context of historical and contemporary racial and gender inequities. This context provides a space for critical consideration of the celebratory narratives popularly attached to the city’s most prominent chefs and their roles in “rebuilding” New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Our critique focuses on the practice of chef “celanthropy” (celebrity philanthropy) and the contradictions often underlying that practice. While we situate this critique in New Orleans, our analysis is more broadly applicable to what Lily Kelting has described as the “New Southern Food Movement.” This movement relies on contradictory tropes of pastoral utopian pasts and harmonious multicultural futures that elide white male hegemony within the food industry, and southern food’s grounding in colonialism and enslavement

La historia de la tierra: un enfoque relacional y basado en el lugar para enseñar geografías alimentarias (más) radicales

The History of the Land (Brown et al., 2019) is a workshop, field trip, and pedagogical lens developed at Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans and led with teenagers and adults. Using popular education methods, the lesson explores the relational biography of the land on which the farm currently resides. We argue that the history of the land is essential to understanding the spatial and social configurations of contemporary foodscapes; however, critical land histories are not engaged with in many alternative food initiatives and food justice organizations. We offer the adaptable pedagogical apparatus of the History of the Land as a tool for others to further the generative convergence of food geographies and anti-oppression work. In addition to discussing the workshop at Grow Dat, we reflect upon our own learning and healing from participating in an ongoing series of history of the land field trips to rural Mississippi where several of us hold deep personal ties to the land. We coauthors are a collective of farmers, food activists, educators, and academics. Across differences of gender, race, sexuality, class, location, and history, learning about the land together has brought us into intimate conversation about loss, memory, narration, transformation, and how we imagine alternate, liberatory futures

A syndromic form of Pierre Robin sequence is caused by 5q23 deletions encompassing FBN2 and PHAX

Pierre Robin sequence (PRS) is an aetiologically distinct subgroup of cleft palate. We aimed to define the critical genomic interval from five different 5q22-5q31 deletions associated with PRS or PRS-associated features and assess each gene within the region as a candidate for the PRS component of the phenotype. Clinical array-based comparative genome hybridisation (aCGH) data were used to define a 2.08 Mb minimum region of overlap among four de novo deletions and one mother-son inherited deletion associated with at least one component of PRS. Commonly associated anomalies were talipes equinovarus (TEV), finger contractures and crumpled ear helices. Expression analysis of the orthologous genes within the PRS critical region in embryonic mice showed that the strongest candidate genes were FBN2 and PHAX. Targeted aCGH of the critical region and sequencing of these genes in a cohort of 25 PRS patients revealed no plausible disease-causing mutations. In conclusion, deletion of ?2 Mb on 5q23 region causes a clinically recognisable subtype of PRS. Haploinsufficiency for FBN2 accounts for the digital and auricular features. A possible critical region for TEV is distinct and telomeric to the PRS region. The molecular basis of PRS in these cases remains undetermined but haploinsufficiency for PHAX is a plausible mechanism.<br/

A syndromic form of Pierre Robin sequence is caused by 5q23 deletions encompassing FBN2 and PHAX

Pierre Robin sequence (PRS) is an etiologically distinct subgroup of cleft palate. We aimed to define the critical genomic interval from five different 5q22-5q31 deletions associated with PRS or PRS-associated features and assess each gene within the region as a candidate for the PRS component of the phenotype. Clinical array-based comparative genome hybridisation (aCGH) data were used to define a 2.08 Mb minimum region of overlap among four de novo deletions and one mother-son inherited deletion associated with at least one component of PRS. Commonly associated anomalies were talipes equinovarus (TEV), finger contractures and crumpled ear helices. Expression analysis of the orthologous genes within the PRS critical region in embryonic mice showed that the strongest candidate genes were FBN2 and PHAX. Targeted aCGH of the critical region and sequencing of these genes in a cohort of 25 PRS patients revealed no plausible disease-causing mutations. In conclusion, deletion of ∼2 Mb on 5q23 region causes a clinically recognisable subtype of PRS. Haploinsufficiency for FBN2 accounts for the digital and auricular features. A possible critical region for TEV is distinct and telomeric to the PRS region. The molecular basis of PRS in these cases remains undetermined but haploinsufficiency for PHAX is a plausible mechanism.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: A syndromic form of Pierre Robin sequence is caused by 5q23 deletions encompassing FBN2 and PHAX journaltitle: European Journal of Medical Genetics articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmg.2014.08.007 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.status: publishe