ABSTRACT
I chose the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ideology’ for the subtitle of The Obesity Epidemic with a precise goal in mind. What I was not trying to do was to show how obesity researchers, doctors, journalists and other commentators were cruel, stupid or dishonest. There are always exceptions, but then, as now, I did not believe the obesity epidemic was primarily a fabrication created by people with something to gain or an expression of one group’s hostility or hatred of another group. My target was not people, but ways of thinking. As with this book, I was interested in the way pre-existing moral convictions and ideological commitments influence and shape what people believe, say and write. This is why my primary source of data has always been the words that researchers and other experts use. I look for moral and ideological traces in these words because this is one of the ways (although obviously not the only way) we might judge whether a given statement is credible. For example, it is clear to me that much of the hyperbole that surrounded children’s use of televisions and computers grew from an underlying and long-standing cultural anxiety about technology and its effects on human minds and bodies. While new technologies bring with them the allure of a better, more comfortable future, they also generate nostalgia for an imagined past in which we lived more natural, robust and less alienated lives.
