This book explores the personal value of healthy behavior, arguing that our modern tendency to praise or blame individuals for their health is politically and economically motivated and has reinforced growing health disparities between the wealthy and poor under the guise of individual responsibility.We are awash in concerns about the state of our health and recommendations about how to improve it from medical professionals, public health experts, and the diet-exercise-wellness ind...

Food and Everyday Life provides a qualitative, interpretive, and interdisciplinary examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Edited by Thomas M. Conroy, the book offers a number of complementary approaches and topics around the parameters of the “ordinary, everyday” perspective on food. These studies highlight aspects of food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the discourse on food.Chapters discuss examples ranging from the cultural m...

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty offers new insights into our understandings of health and illness, ability and disability, and the scientific and cultural practices that both enable and limit our capacity for diverse experiences.Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work draws our attention to how the body is always our way of having a world and never merely a thing in the world. Our conception of the body must take account of our cultures, our historically located sciences, and our in...