ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will elaborate on the capitalist underpinnings of obesity and its cures. Specifically, and without conceding that fatness results in an entirely straightforward way from eating, I will use the concept of the socio-ecological fix as a way to suggest that the so-called problem of obesity in some sense exists by efforts of agro-food capital to overcome a particular limit of accumulation. This limit stems from the problem of inelastic demand for food, otherwise known as Engel’s Law. I will also apply this concept to commodified means to address the problem capital helped create. Here, metabolism-defying diet foods present the example par excellence. Finally, I will suggest that there are limits to these fixes because there are limits, albeit ones always being tested, of what substances humans can eat and digest. As such, capitalism’s involvement in food production is not only persistently crisis-prone but also unhealthy in the worst of ways. To work through this argument, I begin with recapitulating both the spatial and socio-ecological fix as resolutions to capitalism’s persistent crises.
