Biomedicalized food culture

This article presents my analysis of what I call the contemporary “biomedicalized food culture”. This food culture participates in defining the ways by which “healthy” food is currently understood and practiced, and in creating and orienting particular relationships between bodies and food. In this paper, I present Clarke et al.’s (2010) works on biomedicalization along with the works of researchers in critical food studies (such as Guthman (2014); Landecker (2011); Scrinis (2013)), which have inspired my analysis of the biomedicalized food culture. Inspired by Clarke et al.’s (2010) ways of presenting the biomedicalization of the social field, I present the contemporary biomedicalized food culture from and through its constitutive processes. Drawing from my fieldwork in Montreal, Canada, I discuss how mediatization, molecularization and commercialization processes participate in the development of the biomedicalized food culture as well as in the creation of knowledge and practices constitutive of “healthy” food, bodies, and the links between them. I approach this culture from a cultural studies’ perspective, which makes it possible to question the power relationships at stake in its development. I thus criticize how the biomedicalized food culture contributes to the (re)production of exclusions, discriminations, stigmatizations of some knowledge, practices and individuals, as well as to the (re)production of injunctions and normativities linking food, bodies and health, in particular and situated ways at the intersection of its constitutive processes. I finish up by opening up the discussion on how these relationships between food, bodies and health should be thought in their multiplicity and their complexity.