Resisting Health: Extreme Food and the Culinary Abject

Abstract

Controversies involving calorically extravagant fast food hamburgers are not only significant manifestations of nutritional surveillance and policing, they are also important sites of debate about food, health, and eating during a so-called “obesity epidemic.” This paper examines the media coverage and controversies surrounding two “fat” burgers that were sold in the Australian market in 2008 and 2011. It argues that the almost total subsuming of the “meaning” of these burgers into a framework of health simultaneously limited comprehension of their pleasures and provided opportunities for resistance to public health agendas. By locating the consumption of these burgers as part of a broader, masculine “turn to the extreme” in contemporary culture, this article suggests that the burgers' transgression of healthy eating edicts not only reveals the limits of public health education's ascetic agenda, but also highlights the complex and interdependent relationships among media, food, health, and its discontents at a time when eating and nutrition are sources of heightened anxiety, surveillance, and control.

Keywords:

• Extreme Food
• Fast Food
• News
• Advertising
• Masculinity

Notes

[1] In Australia, the Burger King franchise operates under the name “Hungry Jack's.”

[2] For young adult males, the recommended average daily dietary intake is approximately 2500–3000 calories.

[3] “Terroir” is a term referring to the unique environmental conditions under which food is grown/produced.

[4] See also Brayton (2007) for a similar argument about Jackass.