NYU’s Institute of Public Knowledge is hosting the launch of Practicing Food Studies, edited by Amy Bentley, Fabio Parasecoli, and Krishnendu Ray. I wrote the Foreword. We will all provide brief perspectives on our quarter century of teaching food studies. For information and registration, click here. For 30% off on the book, click here.
A food politics thought for the weekend: treatment vs. prevention
I’ve been at meetings in London and Geneva on non-communicable (what we call chronic) diseases and how to prevent them.
On the way to Europe, I did some catching up on reading past issues of The Lancet and ran across this letter from Sally Casswell of the School of Public Health at Massey University in Auckland.
Professor Casswell was responding to an article arguing that a major priority in chronic disease prevention should be to strengthen the capacity of countries to deliver primary care services.
Yes, professor Casswell writes, primary care is important. But it is even more important to focus prevention efforts on the environmental factors that influence the behavior of individuals and cause them to need primary care services in the first place.
Do we really want to continue to live in a world where the oversupply and marketing of tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy processed foods, and soft drinks is tolerated simply to allow continuing profits for the shareholders of the transnational corporations producing and distributing them, while the taxpayer funds the health services and pharmaceutical response to the ensuing disease and injury?
This is a refreshing way to look at this problem, and one well worth pondering.