Critical Perspectives on the Microbiome

Chronic metabolic conditions disproportionately cohere along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Despite overwhelming evidence that racism, gendered violence, social and economic disparities, trade regulations, lack of food sovereignty, and land and livelihood dispossession play the biggest roles in chronic disease, and biomedical explanations given for why people become sick are often firmly rooted in personal behavior or "lifestyle." Mainstream discourse and public policies continue to center the individual in discussions of something they have insisted on labeling as "diet-related disease." Health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, and other metabolic conditions are positioned as failures in an individual's knowledge, habits, self-control, diet, and exercise.