4 June 2024
In an effort to tackle an obesity ‘crisis’, the Westminster government now requires calorie information to be displayed on menus in larger food businesses. Such ‘calorie accounting’ seeks to prompt the consumer to make menu choices consistent with public health ambitions and to encourage food establishments to reformulate lower calorie menu offerings. Drawing on the concepts of technologies of government (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992) and biopedagogy (Harewood, 2009; Wright, 2009), their paper suggests that calorie accounting operates as a technology of biopedagogy which seeks to discipline and govern the body in contemporary neoliberal society.
Read the paper: Calorie accounting: The introduction of mandatory calorie labelling on menus in the UK food sector.