From food to the body Obesity and exclusion in the 21st century

Contemporary societies suffer obesity as an epidemic for the first time in the history of humanity and this is a phenomenon that requires a comprehensive look that goes from biological and medical issues, through food processing, to seeing eating habits and sociological aspects that involve the appearance of people. This last point refers to a very important issue for sociology, which has to do with domination and has been analyzed from symbolic violence, which is only one of the ways in which domination is exercised, and therefore it is relevant to study. Likewise, the aspects of distinction involved lead us to think about the phenomenon together with Bourdieu, and as obesity is missed in the prevailing thinness paradigm, it causes it to be constituted as the strange or the monstrous, and there we have to think about it from Foucault as one more type of abnormality generated in our time. An era impregnated by the mass media with its already globalized and monolithic aesthetic models, but which at the same time has a growing heterogeneity, which, as a counter-face, generates social networks and the expansion of new technologies. In this tension, it is very important to pay attention to the habitus in which the social practices that surround food develop, which should thus be thought of as a constitutive part of the strategies carried out by agents in the social world.