Image via Duke UP website

Newly released this May 2016 from Duke University Press is Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India (available here.) In this text, Solomon takes an environmental approach to obesity as a global problem, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai, India. Rather than reading obesity as the result of the exportation of Western diets and food items, the author addresses food, fat, and the body as ‘porous’ with the city and the state. Obesity and diabetes, Solomon argues, are a matter of “absorption” between bodies and the environments in which they operate. Clinics, social service offices, food companies, markets, and kitchens exist between the domains of the body and the state: sites at which the relationship between the individual body and the larger societal structures emerge and develop, altering local experiences of obesity, food, and metabolic illnesses.

This text will interest medical social scientists and scholars of medical humanities interested in the intersections between urban life and human health, and between the environment and the body.

About the author: Harris Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University.