ABSTRACT
The obesity discourse is saturated with attributions of responsibility and blame. As with the movie Super Size Me (Spurlock 2004), the fast-food industry and its products are often blamed. This is reiterated in a popular sociology book that is critical of the fast-food industry and the principles underpinning its massive success. Writing about the irrationalities, or unintended consequences, of a rationalized organization like McDonald’s, Ritzer (2004: 145) writes: ‘[t]here is much talk these days of an obesity epidemic (including children) and many observers place a lot of the blame on the fast-food industry, its foods, and its emphasis on “super-sizing” everything’. Within this type of excuse-account, abstracted, homogenized and objectified ‘fat bodies’ are passive McDonaldized bodies, the irrational consequence of Western rationalization.
