Medical professionals, social policy makers, and the media have all declared that Canada is in the grip of an obesity epidemic. Conceptualizing obesity as a biological condition, these experts insist that it needs to be “prevented” and “managed.”

Obesity in Canada takes a broader, critical perspective of our supposed epidemic. Examining obesity in its cultural and historical context, the book’s contributors ask how we measure health and wellness, where our attitudes to obesity develop from, and what the consequences are of naming and targeting as “obese” those whose body weights do not match our expectations. A broad survey of the issues surrounding the obesity panic in Canada, it is the first collection of fat studies and critical obesity studies from a distinctly Canadian perspective.

Jenny Ellison is a curator of the exhibition on Hockey in Canada for the Canadian Museum of History and Curator of Sport and Leisure at the Canadian Museum of History. She is the co-editor of Obesity in Canada: Historical and Critical Perspectives (University of Toronto Press).

Jenny Ellison's profile page

Deborah McPhail is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba.

Deborah McPhail's profile page

Wendy Mitchinson is a Canada Research Chair in Gender and Medical History and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo.

Wendy Mitchinson's profile page

• Commended, WGSRF Outstanding Scholarship Prize

"Obesity in Canada is a welcome, and much needed, addition to the study of the fat body as a cultural, social, political, historical, and representational artefact…[The editors] offer, as a whole, a powerful "interruption" into more usual ways of thinking about fat and obesity in Canada and elsewhere."

CBMH Vol 34:2: 2016