Big Talk: Narrative Discourse Around Obesity in the Mississippi Delta

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.