ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the political-economic production of the food system of the Global North. It considers the commercial strategies of Big Food, from the creation of products that are deliberately engineered to encourage craving and desire, to the geo-spatial location of stores and the ergonomics of their interior design, that generate an environment of overabundance and excess. The chapter shows that such understandings also act to make food and diet a means of biomedical governance, offers a range of individualised and commercially profitable solutions to the 'problems' of excess in ways that make the consumption of food a means of displaying citizenship. It argues the normalising gaze of these approaches is particularly directed towards the poor, ethnic minorities and women in ways that ultimately reveal the hidden despotism of neoliberalism. The food industry that, quite literally, feeds the system of consumer capitalism is characterised by overabundance, excess and waste.
