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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Big Talk: Narrative Discourse Around Obesity in the Mississippi Delta

Big Talk: Narrative Discourse Around Obesity in the Mississippi Delta

Ulmer, Amy

Hardcover

Series: Ingrid G. Houck Food and Foodways

Public HealthAgricultureGeneral Sociology

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 14, 2026

ISBN10: 1496864808
ISBN13: 9781496864802
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: Oct 14 2026
Pages: 222
Language: English
Popular and clinical discussions of obesity in the Mississippi Delta often highlight the region's unhealthy food culture and lifestyle as explanations for what is considered a severe obesity epidemic. In Big Talk: Narrative Discourse Around Obesity in the Mississippi Delta, author Amy Ulmer examines how these narratives about obesity in the Delta obscure the region's deep structural inequalities by framing poor health as the result of individual choices. Ulmer names this discourse Delta obesity talk and traces its circulation through media coverage, clinical literature, and public health campaigns targeting the Lower Mississippi River Delta.

By centering such individual behaviors as diet, exercise, and lifestyle, these narratives redirect attention away from systemic issues and onto individual bodies. Ulmer demonstrates that Delta obesity talk regionalizes, moralizes, and racializes national obesity narratives by stressing personal responsibility, threatening escalating health care costs, blaming modern fast food and technology, and framing health in terms of access to resources. Within the Delta, these themes are further inflected by stereotypes of Southern and Delta culture, including notions of a slower pace of life and a tradition of unhealthy cuisine, which work to naturalize and obscure longstanding social and economic inequities. Offering a regional perspective largely missing from existing scholarship, Ulmer's analysis reveals how health narratives are never just medical, but also cultural, historical, and political, shaping how we understand bodies, blame, and inequality in America.

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