Health Without Bodies
Health Without Bodies: Health Claims and Scientific Evidence on the European Market
English | 2023 | ISBN: 9819949491 | 271 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 6 MB
English | 2023 | ISBN: 9819949491 | 271 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 6 MB
Health Without Bodies invites readers on an ethnographic exploration of the boundary between food and medicine. Food-related health claims are governed in the EU as voluntary statements on food labels to help consumers make ‘informed choices’. This poses an interesting problem: when claims refer to health, one can no longer ignore that consumers have bodies. Asking how these claims have become possible as a new kind of truth-statement on the market, this book reveals the contours of a fundamental tension between what is expected from consumers in a liberal market economy, and how food and the body come to trouble those expectations. In doing so, it illuminates why the difference between food and medicine is such a sensitive issue, and why seemingly trivial health claims have been subject to so much debate and political control.