Individual and Collective Action

Maurie Cohen raised the issue of unsustainable consumption and obesity, following  a feature in the New York Times reporting on a just-published article in The Lancet, that three-quarters of all Americans are now deemed to be overweight or obese. 

Maurie Cohen

This is not necessarily a surprise, but the new data and analysis raises the issue on the attention scale. At the risk of being unduly provocative, I would like to raise a question about communication strategy and conceptual framing with respect to sustainable consumption. For a number of years, I have in my own work sought to build a connection between public health (and in particular nutrition) and (un)sustainable consumption. See, for example, this article. More recently, I wrote a short piece (intended to be at least partly ironic) that posed the notion that the popularity of Ozempic and other GLP-1 pharmaceuticals could have a consumption reduction co-benefit. 

I am not bringing this up as a case of fat-shaming (though I recognize that some may interpret it as such) but rather to bring to light the contributing role of the so-called “obesogenic environment” in shaping food consumption (and physical exercise) patterns. The NYT article makes the following point:

While the prevailing viewpoint once was that obesity was merely a problem of calories in and calories out, and that people simply needed to eat less and exercise more to lose weight, the reality is much more nuanced, Dr. Armstrong said.

“Obesity comes from genetic, physiological and environmental interactions,” she said. “It’s not the fault of any one individual who has the disease.”

Sustainable consumption researchers have over the years made the clear connection between outsized consumption and land-use practices, zoning, automobile dependency, excessive flying, and so forth. There has also been an emphasis on the widespread availability of fast food, processed food, and, I dare say, overly cheap food subsidized by governments in the form of generous agricultural subsidies. However, have we been hesitant to draw out the fact that the prevalence of obesity and overweight conditions is a manifest symptom of unsustainable consumption? I have to acknowledge that I was somewhat amazed to find that a Scopus search on the terms “sustainable consumption” and “obesogenic” generated a total of zero hits. Have we fallen victim to a certain brand of political correctness?

Robert Rattle

I think what you are orbiting is the accretion disk of the SDoH black hole. I say that specifically because there are strong tensions between lifestyle (downstream/proximate) and upstream policy and research approaches – especially between public and population health with the biomedical sciences, and particularly across policy interventions – that cuts across mental health and addictions, diet and nutrition, exercise and healthy lifestyles, poverty and inequality and even climate change and environment choices. 

The reasons for those tensions are varied, but mostly revolve around criticisms of the neoliberal agenda and the capitalist/extractivist/colonialist agendas and ideologies.

The ‘lifestyle’ argument is disingenuous and obfuscates the limited decision making architecture that individuals have. It also serves to distract from the systems and infrastructures of neoliberalism. And, as you note, can be misinterpreted as ‘lifestyle choice’ blaming and shaming. 

As the saying goes, ‘every minister is a health minister’. Dennis Raphael has been especially critical and vocal (in Ontario/Canada) of the lifestyle argument for health in mainstream media, and many community advocates are gearing up for the seasonal onslaught of guilt-assuaging poverty charity through foodbanks that distract attention from social policies and government obligations and expands inequities through corporate power imbalances.

Take a look at some of the work of Richard WilkinsonMichael MarmotDennis RaphaelKate PickettRon LabonteTed SchreckerFran Baum and the WHO Commission on SDoH, and of course many others 

Very much related is the growing work within the psychological and related disciplines linking overconsumption (and inequity and [social] health determinants) of the dominant infrastructures and systems to mental illnesses, with some startlingly and alarmingly provocative and arresting results, such as Gabor Mates’ The Myth of Normal, and articles directed at the general public.

I think you’ll find a lot of intersection with sustainable consumption, but rarely framed as ‘sustainable consumption’. The degrowth literature also makes a lot of these connections but again does not always use common language.

The networks could use further development and elaboration of the intersections and connections.

As for communication strategy, I don’t believe we have been hesitant to draw out the fact that the prevalence of obesity, overweight and other illnesses are manifest symptoms of unsustainable consumption – a sick population derives from a sick society. 

Craig Harris

Why is it either the lifestyle decisions of individuals or the systems and infrastructures of neoliberalism ? Why not both individual decision making  and systemic structures?

Ashwani Vasishth

When action is urgently needed, surely we must look—first—for the “biggest bang for the (triple bottom line) buck. If speed is of essence, then the gradual accretion of many individual choices cannot be our preferred first move. 

As Annie Leonard tellingly points out—in her seminal Theory of Stuff—“for every one barrel of recyclables we put out to the pavement, there are a hundred barrels being put out upstream.”  

Craig Harris

I disagree with your logic . 

Precisely because action is urgently needed, we need to work on both/and . 

Robert Rattle

This debate has plagued public health and policy for a long time – the upstream downstream parable and dilemma for instance. Ultimately, it comes down to societal resources allocation. 

If you review the transportation budget in parallel with prevention, it would make more sense that most resources are best allocated upstream, which is both contrary and antithetical to the prevailing paradigm of neoliberal capitalism.

 (That’s why we see so much ‘green growth’ and related rhetoric – an effort to frame unsustainable values as sustainable actions). 

Psychologists are also now arguing for this. As the former Minister of Health in Canada noted: “What good does it do to treat someone only to send them right back to the same environment that made them sick in the first place.” 

Lifestyle choice and foodbank narratives centre on the individual, and do little to reduce inactivity, unhealthy diets or food insecurity. The work around mental health in relation is strikingly more relevant, as our environments affect genetics, especially in early years (a determinant of health noted in the 1976 Laqlonde Report on health determinants) that can cause adaptations that harm health and (health) behaviours immediately to many years down the road. Not too many children can choose their parents or the neighbourhood they grow up in, for instance, but those environments are fundamental to defining their life opportunities and outcomes (look into ‘death by postal code’ [zip code] for instance). It really is the environments we construct that affect behaviour and are terribly difficult for the 99.9% of people to escape those environments such that they may make healthier/more sustainable choices (similar to how meritocracy – class mobility – is largely a myth, but aspired to by many). While it’s not entirely an either/or, in many cases, especially when the problem is framed around health, and especially personal/individual health (‘individual’ being a particularly relevant value to neoliberal capitalism…and political polarisation), systemic barriers and facilitators (which are more often than not focused to facilitate unhealthy choices) do show that insurmountable barriers for the individual, whether health, transportation, energy or other consumption ‘choices’ are very real. For instance, everyone wants and needs access; very few wish to have excess mobility. How do you improve access? Not through individual (inequitable) private automobility options, such as (elitist) EVs, but through collective solutions such as public transit, urban design and community relocalisation projects – all choices not available to individuals by definition. Privilege and normalising to ones culture conceals those barriers which have very tangible impacts on consumption choices. While individual choices are certainly important, they are elitist in most cases and militate against collective/social choices (think about taxing the wealthy here and the push back, or populist political movements that leverage these arguments for increasing [polices that support] inequities).

So perhaps we should be arguing for individual choices for the wealthy and powerful, as a means to redistribute wealth for expanding social policies for the majority to make sustainable consumption choices. More wealth shaming; less lifestyle shaming.

Julia Steinberger

We need individual actions which are connected to larger efforts for systemic change. Indeed, to state a tritely obvious fact, there is no such thing as “collective” change on its own. Ultimately, all big social shifts consist in a web of multiplied, communicated and interconnected individual actions, each rippling out and amplifying the others. It is essential that we understand how these ripples and amplifications occur, so that we become potent forces of change for the flourishing and survival of our communities.

Published in a blog a few years ago.