How Picky Eating Becomes an Illness—Marketing Nutrient-Enriched Formula Milk in a Chinese Society

ABSTRACT

The essential adaptive food selection behavior of young children has become increasingly medicalized as a kind of disease—the “picky-eating” syndrome in Hong Kong. The researcher used the multiple case studies approach with data collected from in-depth interviews and advertisements to examine the process of the medicalization of picky-eating disorder, which demonstrates how an essential adaptive human behavior can be redefined by the market and medical system as a deviant, abnormal behavior that needs to be eliminated and how the resulting health risks can be resolved by modern medicine produced by this pharmaceutical nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• eating disorder
• food marketing
• formula milk
• malnutrition