Abstract
In Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America, Anthony Ryan Hatch examines how race is socially constructed via metabolic syndrome, whereby both race and metabolic syndrome serve as mutually reinforcing vehicles. Initiating this analysis is Hatch’s own experience with metabolic syndrome, facilitating an expansive conversation regarding how African Americans are recipients of pharmaceutical targeting. Blood Sugar brings into astute focus a lack of sociologically relevant attention to how metabolic syndrome intersects with state-oriented biopolitical boundaries. Similarly to Roberts’s (1999) seminal text Killing the Black Body, Hatch poignantly illuminates how medical technological advances can serve as pathways for heightened racialization processes. The guiding research questions of the book are as follows: (1) How did metabolic syndrome gain its presence as a new topic within the politics of metabolism? (2) Within the studies of metabolic syndrome, how does race take meaning and how is race constructed? and (c) What are the connections between metabolic syndrome and race, and how does this help us understand how race is constructed within metabolic biopolitics?
Beyond these dynamic questions, Hatch forces the reader to grapple with how metabolic syndrome has been racially weaponized and societally manufactured, providing a detailed engagement with a biopolitical racial color line. In achieving this, Blood Sugar centralizes how food and pharmaceutical companies driving economic interests are precarious racial bedfellows, ultimately demonstrating racist undertones that are disastrously used to link African Americans with metabolic syndrome.
The book is organized into six chapters. Of special interest to this review are two of them. The relevant themes from the chapter “The Scientific Racism of Metabolism” are that scientific racism is connected to how metabolic syndrome gets racialized, and population studies represent areas in which race was attached to metabolic syndrome, as early as 1940. In the chapter “Sugar Stained with Blood,” the author posits black bodies and the emergence of enslavement and forced labor on sugar plantations as a launching pad to explain the introduction of sugar into African descended people’s lives. Such systems of racial subjugation affected “foodway” systems of people of African descent by introducing sugar into the African diet in the “New World.”
The Food and Drug Administration helped shape and racialize the language of metabolic syndrome. Additionally, the author devotes a chapter to highlighting the scientific racism inherent in the biomedical industry that exacerbates the problem, and another chapter on how African Americans have been funneled into the “nutritional science industrial complex” (p. 102). Moreover, in this chapter, the author notes that there is debate over whether sugar actually causes metabolic syndrome. Using a discourse and power analysis methodology that seeks to destabilize “epidemiological evidence”, the author grounds his study in what Michel Foucault termed “genealogy” (p. 12). The author uses a group (African Americans) and institutional level of analysis (the Food and Drug Administration) to this end.
The major theoretical frameworks of this book are critical race theory, biomedicalization, and biopower. Critical race theory is a framework concerned with explaining how “race and racism are institutions that structure global, national, and local social formations and shape the life experiences of people living in racialized societies” (p. 22). Biomedicalization, the second framework of this book, deals with the ways “medicalization has been transformed by an increasingly biological and technological approach to medicine” (p. 29). Foucault’s “biopower” is the final theoretical framework of the book. The first premise of biopower is that “disciplinary power” and “regulatory power” are separate places of power. The second premise of biopower states that it was essential to the evolution and victory of capitalism as a process (p. 35). One of the limitations of critical race theory, as deployed in this book, is its failure to engage historically with biomedicalization and biopolitics.
Overall, I was thoroughly impressed with how Hatch merges science and technology studies with postmodern philosophy, but I was looking forward to more gendered discussions about how metabolic politics affects black women in ways different than black men. Additionally, are there any benefits for African Americans who participate in the metabolic complex? This book has implications for institutions seeking to locate correct messaging in reference to African Americans and metabolic syndrome and the limitations of nongrounded theories in understanding how the above group is served/underserved by the metabolic industry.