Healthy Lifestyle Habits Policy: Critical Analysis of Public Initiatives Aimed at “Fixing” Health Inequalities Through Food
In this article, I offer a discursive analysis of the new “Healthy” Lifestyle Habits Policy from the Montréal-Nord borough (Quebec, Canada), and more specifically of the broader issues and power relationships that permeate and inform it. The analysis highlights the norms, assumptions, and processes of exclusion that take form within the Policy. First, I mobilize works in Critical Fat Studies to demonstrate how this Policy is in line with anti-obesity discourses and practices, fostering the emergence of forms of oppression at the intersection of bodies, food and health. I then carry out an analysis of the hegemonic and normative discourses that permeate the Policy and make “healthy” food (understood following Western knowledge informed by nutritionism [Scrinis, 2013]) a solution to adopt in the fight against obesity or chronic diseases. Throughout the article, I bring forward how public policies can contribute to reproducing forms of discrimination and oppression that combine with existing ones, and can shift attention from systemic and structural inequalities that materialize eventually in health issues currently associated with diet. I conclude by briefly contrasting this Policy with the new plan adopted by the Toronto Food Council (Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan) which recognizes systemic racism and its role in health issues and food access. I discuss some of the guiding orientations of this Plan to highlight the privileged approach.