Sweetening the “war on obesity”

Using the UK context as a case study, this chapter asks what the elevation of sugar to dietary enemy du jour can tell us about the contemporary “war on obesity” and the social context within which it continues to make sense. I argue that, while the contemporary attack on sugar shares many continuities with earlier iterations of the “war on obesity”, it also constitutes a “crisis” of its time, eliding with changing understandings of the body, the intensification of the moralisation of health and the social and political context of austerity. This elision shores up public consent not only for the attack on sugar (and by extension, obesity) but also for the widening inequalities within which a “war on obesity” continues to make sense in spite of its ongoing failures to warrant its core empirical claims (Gard, 2011). As such, the “war on obesity” should be understood not as a fixed phenomenon but as flexible and adaptable, reconfiguring itself in line with the social and cultural environment in which it needs to remain meaningful and revivifying itself in the face of its own failures.