Politics of Consumption ... Literally

Okay, so this isn't (strictly speaking) about "film, media, and culture," but I think it's a relevant item in looking at the turn in our cultural politics.

According to a recent article in Scientific American, a new Mississippi law mandates that restaurants refuse to serve customers falling within the legally prescribed limits of what the legislature deems "obese":

We kid you not. The controversial measure (state House Bill 282) would prohibit eateries from serving food to "any person who is obese based on criteria prescribed by the state health department." The department would monitor compliance and have the power to revoke violators' permits. (Pity the poor waiter with the thankless task of denying corpulent customers service, leaving them with the humiliating dilemma of either twiddling their thumbs as their less hefty chums chow down or slinking (storming?) out and slogging to a supermarket or over the state line for sustenance.)

I find it appalling on a number of levels. The most obvious implication to me is that this is an extension of the kind of legislative policy dictated by concerns for "public health" that have been cropping up everywhere. When a smoking ban was enacted on campus at Indiana University, for instance, it made me wonder whether this was indicating a fundamental change in how our legislative policy would be dictated: after all, if even the existence of smoke on a public university campus could be a health hazard, then wouldn't the existence of Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Chik-Fil-A on the same campus pose a similar (and less scientifically suspect) health threat?

The other destructive implication, hinted at in the article itself, is the manner in which this law targets specific kinds of consumers. According to the article, the law has already drawn protest from the Coalition of Fat Rights Activists as discriminatory against larger folks. And while it undeniably is discriminatory in that manner, I'm more concerned with the shift in the manner of legislating consumption. In the past, laws like this would target the product (Prohibition, although not really justified by heath concerns; laws in cities about the use of butter in restaurant kitchens; even local or statewide smoking bans). But the Mississippi law targets a specific set of consumers of indistinct products. The laws of consumption have evolved from a supply-side to a demand-side legislation, meaning that our laws have finally undergone the kind of shift in attitudes toward consumption that corporations have by now exhibited for several decades. In this sense, this one law (if it becomes representative of a general trend) signifies a shift from a government that recognizes the so-called "culture industry's" exploitation of a monolithic public to one that recognizes how corporations are dividing up the public into particular audiences with specific social identities through particular kinds of consumption habits.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. In some ways, if we're assuming that a government's role is to protect its citizens from certain kinds of exploitative behaviors domestically or abroad, this is a good development: it can operate as a counter-measure against the kinds of narrowcasting enacted by corporate logic. However, the more likely possibility (and this particular law seems to embody this problem) is that legislation which operates on this kind of logic merely reinforces the kinds of social identity created by corporate logic in the first place, and continues to allow the most culturally disadvantaged categories among them to remain culturally disadvantaged in legally sanctioned ways.