The Taste of Necessity, the Taste of Freedom, and Nutrition Transitions in Urban Mexico

• In Event: 280 - Section on Consumers and Consumption Paper Session. Bodies and Embodiment in Consumer Culture (co-sponsored with Section on Body and Embodiment)

Abstract

Mexico has undergone an astonishingly rapid nutritional transformation: twenty-five years ago malnutrition was Mexico’s primary nutritional health problem; now its prevalence of obesity exceeds even the extraordinarily high levels in the U.S. As incidence of obesity has increased nationally in Mexico and become a widespread public health issue, it is becoming concentrated in the low-income population. In Mexico, low-income families are migrating from undernutrition not to good nutrition but rather to equally debilitating conditions of obesity and diet-related diseases. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study conducted in a low-, middle-, and high-income community in urban Mexico; it identifies food consumption patterns and factors influencing those patterns in distinct socioeconomic groups within a single city with an interest in examining how socioeconomic status shapes risk of obeseogenic diets. The findings suggest that several socioeconomic-status-related factors, including economic (in)security, food scarcity and monotony, body size norms, and food ideology, underlie the social patterning of the nutrition transitions that are occurring in Mexico.

Author

• Susan Bridle-Fitzpatrick, University of Denver