ABSTRACT

In sociocultural discussions of eating, metabolism is often either absent or framed as a dull biological hinterland to the interesting business of taste, meaning, ideology and so on. This chapter offers a definition of metabolism and uses this to show how thinking metabolically affords traction on particular questions related to eating, health and the politics of survival questions about the relations between fat, eating, metabolic illness and agency. The chapter presents a broader materialist analysis of epidemic obesity, an analysis that attends particularly to the behaviours of specific bodily tissues, such as fat, the brain, the stomach and bowel. It considers the human body as a product of evolution, but reads the thrifty gene hypothesis (TGH) against another account of evolution and metabolism, the selfish brain hypothesis. By attending to the agency and behaviour of these tissues, thus, it becomes possible to better understand the complexities of how and why people eat.