Junk: The Neuroscience of Food Addiction and Obesity

Abstract

Can food be understood as a kind of drug? This depends on the way in which the notion of the ‘drug’ is itself defined. Drugs can be seen in terms of Mary Douglas’s definition of pollution — as matter out of place (Keane 2002). In this sense, the category of drugs is an entirely political one: it contains all substances the consumption of which attracts social opprobrium at a given time. Indeed, foods such as sugar, fat and even staples such as bread are coming to be described as drugs in some contexts. Due in large part to the current climate of fear about obesity (Campos et al. 2005; Monaghan 2005; Stephenson & Banet-Weiser 2007), but also reflecting a much longer concern about obesity and addictive eating (Parr & Rasmussen 2012), some foods are no longer just foods; they are increasingly framed as illicit substances, especially for people classified as overweight. As Eve Sedgwick (1993) has noted, anorexia, bulimia and obesity are all now open to definition as dysfunctions of control, as addictive behaviour. How are these new concerns about junk food, health and compulsion remaking realities of drug use and addiction? Categories of overweight and obesity capture so many individuals, pathologise so large a portion of the population, that their association with compulsivity and addiction must surely demand some drift from margin to centre for those concepts.