Eating the money: Diabetes and the embodiment of consumer culture

Abstract

My research explores the relationship between metabolic health and the rise of capitalist food and labor systems, through interviews and long-term ethnographic research with Maya peoples of southern Belize. As work has been replaced with wage labor and farm foods with store-bought alternatives, diabetes has begun to affect Indigenous communities in Southern Belize. “Eating the money” earned by paid labor through consumption of commodity foods and accumulation of resources is seen to produce inequality and nutritional disease. The co-occurrence of diabetes with economic success represents the emergent and contradictory risks posed by integration into consumer capitalist economies. Concern over nutritional diseases like diabetes has led to reflexive critique of the deleterious health effects of modern food and labor relationships. Research participants’ narratives emphasize the nutritional consequences of consumer culture as well as the challenges of balancing health and economic concerns in a rapidly changing world. By engaging Maya paradigms of health as embodiment with social scientific literature on political ecology and cultural studies of food systems, this article reveals that diabetes is endemic to the commodification of food and work. These findings demonstrate the integral role of commodification and consumption-oriented cultural practices to the global rise of nutrition-related diseases.

Vignette

Cecilia (62) spends most of her days tending the family store, one of the first and most centrally located shops in the village. Cecilia took over these responsibilities when the shop’s previous manager, her late sister-in-law, Justa (57), became too sick to work. Justa was diagnosed with type II diabetes 8 years prior, when she sought medical care for related complications (retinopathy, neuropathy, and fatigue). Five years later, she suffered her first major infection from a cut on her foot that would not heal. The wound festered, eventually requiring hospitalization, surgery, and multiple stages of amputation. Justa never fully healed nor recovered from these surgeries. She eventually became the first recorded death from diabetes in San Jose, in 2015. Throughout the community, people whispered that Justa got sick and died from “eating the money” earned through the store profits.

Cecilia’s familial story illustrates the multi-dimensional nature of “eating the money” as an explanatory paradigm for illness caused by the social inequality and commodification of food and labor implicit to consumer culture. Because of owning and operating a store, the family has greater access to commodity foods and spends less time on customary forms of labor, such as farming, than many other families in the community. They have also been able to re-invest in modest, but noticeable ways that set their family apart from fellow community members without steady income. When combined with Justa’s misfortune, the solar freezer that allows them to keep and sell treats, and the zinc roof on their block house raise speculative gossip about the spiritual-physical consequences of making out better than their neighbors.

Since the passing of her sister-in-law, Cecilia has been concerned about her own risk for diabetes, as have many in San Jose village who know Justa’s story. In Cecilia’s case, the fear was warranted. During my 2016 research, she discovered through a series of blood glucose tests that she was pre-diabetic. Now she is worried that “eating the money” is coming for her as well, and she will face the same fate as her late sister-in-law.

Introduction

This paper investigates the emergence of type-two diabetes in Indigenous Maya communities of Belize (BZE), Central America (CA). Diabetes is a global public health problem of epidemic proportions. Diabetes currently affects 463 million adults, and 700 million people will be living with diabetes by 2045 (IDF, 2019). Rising diabetes incidence accompanies economic development. Initially, the more economically stable, higher income groups display the highest rates of diabetes (Lieberman, 2003). With increased market integration, diabetes disproportionately affects marginalized populations within and between countries (Mendenhall et al., 2010). Almost three quarters of all diabetes deaths, and the majority of premature deaths (82%), occur in low- and middle-income countries (IDF, 2019).

The national population of Belize has diabetes prevalence rates ranging from 14.9%–32%, and the global Indigenous population has prevalence of diabetes or pre-diabetes nearing 50% of adults over 35 (IDF, 2020; Moran-Thomas, 2012; SIB, 2015; UN, 2020). Maya communities in Southern Belize have thus far defied these trends, with a diabetes prevalence of 2%–4%. The lower rates and later onset of diabetes in San Jose than many other Indigenous groups globally and most of Belize, including Maya people in northern districts, makes it an important focal point for the study of diabetes as an emergent social problem.

Diabetes and other nutrition-related non-communicable diseases (NNCDs) are part of a nutritional transition that accompanies development. Countries replace concerns over caloric scarcity with the host of nutritional diseases that accompany ubiquitous industrial food products (Alberti and Zimmet, 2005; Liebermann, 2003; Wiedman, 2012). This transition is underway in Southern Belize as traditional forms of food and work give way to capitalist food and labor systems and diabetes enters the public health profile. With new diagnoses each year, the condition is starting to make inroads in San Jose and surrounding communities, offering a window into the embodied experience of nutritional/epidemiological transition.

The empirical work presented here responds to a call by social scientists to focus diabetes research on local epistemologies of disease at the nexus of structural forces, cultural practice, and embodiment (Ferzacca, 2012). My research considers diabetes as an outcome of widespread changes in cultures of consumption. I engage Maya perspectives on disease as spiritual-social-material embodiment to consider how capitalist value systems are experienced and internalized through food and labor. My research asks: How do political economic relations and cultural practices shape the embodied experiences of diabetes for Maya people? An ethnographic focus on the embodied experiences of disease from Maya perspectives provides multi-scalar insight on the emergence of nutritional disease.

In Maya communities of Southern Belize, diabetes is thought to be caused by hantik u takin “eating the money,” which is used to describe the emergence of diabetes from complex changes to material, social, and spiritual life. “Eating the money” is a commonly offered explanation for why some in the community, particularly family members of those with a regular source of income, like entrepreneurs, career workers, or laborers, now have diabetes. Research participants describe how working for money results in social-spiritual tensions, decreased autonomy, and reliance on commodity foods. Research narratives about “eating the money” illustrate the role of consumer culture in promulgating diabetes at local and global levels. Through ethnographic research on embodied experiences of health and illness, this article explores how changes in labor and food consumption translate into everyday family and community experiences of disease.

Theory: Diabetes, development, and cultural embodiment

Social scientists and epidemiologists have connected the epidemic rise of diabetes to modernization (culture) and economic development (structure). Social epidemiological studies on rising diabetes incidence have described the disease as the result of acculturation (Zimmet, 1987) and adoption of Western lifestyles (Trowell and Burkett, 1981). Anthropologists contextualize cultural change and continuity in the ethnographic milieu and note the use of culture to evaluate and respond to illness incidence (Garro, 1990). Anthropological literature also examines cultural changes in Indigenous foodways and health practices as features of globalization (Ferreira and Lang, 2006; Garro and Lang, 1994) and colonization (Good et al., 2008; Moran-Thomas, 2012). My research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that uses ethnographic research on embodiment to examine how structural and cultural forces are internalized and experienced as health or illness (Baines, 2014; Guthman, 2011; Hayes-Conroy, 2022; Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010; Jones, 2019). This scholarship understands bodily health as a manifestation of socio-cultural systems of production and consumption.

Sociologists of food and agriculture like Phillip McMichael (2006) and Farshad Araghi (2009) have examined the consequences of global economic development and agricultural restructuring. Negative nutritional health outcomes follow the displacement of traditional, long-established food and labor practices with systems that are incompatible with human metabolic processes (Dragoi and Balgar, 2013; Friedmann, 2005; McMichael, 2000; Wiedman, 2010). Rates of diabetes and other nutritional diseases skyrocket following the shift in Indigenous food-work relationships from primarily subsistence activities to more sedentary lifestyles characterized by institutional time constraints and reliance on subsidized, ultra-processed, imported staples (Jackson, 1986; Joe and Robert, 1993; Wiedman, 2010). My analysis is located at the intersection of this structural perspective on nutritional change and ethnographic experiences of consumer culture.

Some of the most illuminating literatures on nutritional social problems have connected political-ecological analyses of food and labor systems with ethnographic investigations of embodiment and bodily experiences (e.g., Baines, 2014; Hayes-Conroy et al., 2022; Jones, 2019; Guthman and DuPuis, 2006; Guthman, 2011; Wiedman, 2014). I follow Krieger’s (2001) definition of embodiment as the biological incorporation of the material and social world through societal power dynamics and material arrangements (pg. 672). The study of embodiment explores the lived experiences of cultural pathways as shaped by political economic forces (e.g., Guthman and DuPuis, 2006). This perspective on nutritional disease shows how the contradictory tendency of capitalist systems towards crises of overaccumulation and negative externalities (O’Connor, 1991) are absorbed by human bodies, often through changing cultures of consumption (Guthman, 2011: 180). Wiedman (2010, 2012, 2014) argues that, for Indigenous peoples, diabetes represents the embodiment of modernization through the coercive re-configuration of physical routines, foods, psycho-social stressors, and the body itself.

To build on these works, I employ Maya and social scientific perspectives on embodiment to bridge both the theoretical gap between political-ecological and cultural explanations of disease and the ontological gap between studies of food production and consumption practices as they relate to bodily conditions (following Guthman and DuPuis, 2006). I emphasize Maya narratives of diabetes as a commentary on the (im)morality of commodity food systems with consequences for bodily health. This perspective offers an important counterpoint to analyses that focus on materiality to the exclusion of social relationships and diabetes interventions that are focused on individual level diet and lifestyle changes.

Methods: Ethnographic research

This article is based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the southernmost Toledo district of Belize: 9/2010–1/2011, 1/2015–5/2015, and 12/2015–5/2016, as well as recurring (10–14 day) visits in the intermittent years. ¹ In order to understand Maya perspectives on the embodied experience and causes of diabetes, I collected data from two field sites, San Jose village (my residence and primary field site) and Punta Gorda Town (PG), the Toledo district capital. San Jose is a Mopan Maya community (pop approx. 1200).

As part of this research, I conducted semi-structured interviews (n = 112) and the “deep hanging out” of participant observation (Geertz, 1983), with attention to food and health systems from a variety of perspectives. I conducted participant observation research with the 13 largest family groups in San Jose (approximately 48% of the community) and participated in all stages of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption—daily planting, harvest, processing, cooking, purchasing, and selling. I also shadowed the San Jose community health worker (CHW) in fulfillment of his duties.

I accompanied the CHW on home visits, clinical translations, public health workshops, Toledo District Health Council meetings, and enumeration of the 2015 Ministry of Health (MOH) census for San Jose village. The MOH census was a comprehensive, face-to-face health survey that we administered to all 173 households in the community. During census visits, I discussed work, food, farming, and NNCDs with each family. The data collected was analyzed and used to provide descriptive figures for a general community health survey.

I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with Maya community members (n = 53) and people suffering from diabetes in San Jose (n = 20), from which the quotes in this article were drawn. Interview questions focused broadly on social and cultural change (e.g., What are the biggest changes you have noticed in the community over your lifetime) as well as on diabetes specific questions (e.g., What is the cause of diabetes?).

Interview respondents ranged in age from 18 to 84. Ethnographic interviews with Maya people (n = 53) were distributed fairly evenly between male and female respondents. However, illness narrative respondents reflected the gendered demographic distribution of known diabetes cases in the community. I collected illness narratives from all 20 people in the community with diabetes diagnoses, 18/20 of whom were women and ranged from 40 to 78 in age, with one 28-year-old outlier. Illness narratives contextualize experiences of diabetes within larger life and community histories (following Kleinman, 1988). In addition to one-on-one interviews, I conducted two focus groups with community members suffering from diabetes (n = 6; n = 8).

I selectively transcribed, coded, and analyzed interviews using AtlasTi software. I used open coding to name, identify, categorize, and describe trends in interview responses (Lune and Berg, 2017). Codes were considered salient after three occurrences, but all used in this analysis were present in at least 12% (colonization) and up to 100% (food) of interview responses.

Ethnographic context: Diabetes, labor, and commodity food in Belize

Ethnographic literature on Belize has described diabetes as an embodied consequence of pathological political ecologies (Moran-Thomas, 2012) and, for Maya people specifically, the discontinuation of cultural-ecological heritage practices that are essential for good health (Baines, 2014). Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death in Belize, with approximately 8.6%–10.3% of total deaths attributable to the disease (SIB, 2015; WHO, 2018; Wright, 2016). Diabetes did not appear in Maya communities of Southern Belize until the late 1990’s, almost 20 years after the first reported cases in the country. San Jose is one of 23 Mopan and Q'eqchi' Maya villages in Southern Belize. It is a Mopan Maya community of around 1200 residents and is the largest MMR village to remain disconnected from the national power, water, and paved road systems. In 2010, when I began research, there were 12 cases of diabetes reported in San Jose. When I enumerated the 2015 census, there were 17 reported cases in the village and I identified three more by the time I concluded research in 2016. However, rates of diabetes in Maya communities of Southern Belize (1.5%–4%) continue to be well below the national average, which hovers around 15% (IDF, 2020; SIB, 2015; WHO, 2018).

As Indigenous residents of the region, Belizean Maya people have a long and sustained history as peasant milpa farmers rather than wage laborers. ² Contemporary Maya food systems are the legacy of thousands of years of subsistence knowledge and practice (Zarger, 2009). Subsistence farming strategies in the region reflect centuries-old methods of adaptation to (post)colonial global markets as well as continuities with the pre-Columbian past (Cleary et al., 2022; Moberg, 2018; Zarger, 2009). Traditional farming practices and locally grown foods are understood to be integral for good health and well-being (Baines, 2014) and have formed the basis of socio-political resistance to oppressive regimes (Wainwright, 2008). Maya peasant farming practices model many of the aspirations of contemporary alternative food networks, such as local embeddedness, sustainability, and spatial dynamics of care, an ethic that connects people to the countryside through the foods they produce and consume (see Goodman et al., 2012). Community members attribute lower diabetes rates to the continuation of neo-traditional farming practices (Schmidt, 2022).

It was not until the nation-building efforts of the 1980s that Maya people in Toledo came to rely more heavily on commodity foods, rather than local produce. In response to post-independence (1981) civil unrest, the new government adjusted policy towards import substitution and the availability of commodity foods in urban markets. The Belize Marketing Board (BMB) subsidized stable purchasing prices for rice, wheat, and sugar to ensure affordability for the laboring class, at the expense of subsidies to rural peasant farmers (Moberg, 2018; Wainwright, 2008; Wilk, 1997). Production has since shifted from small-scale farms (2–5 acres) typical of Maya peasants to a small group of mechanized farmers, who can produce more cost-effectively and benefit most from preferential markets (Moberg, 2018; Wainwright, 2008). Sugared drinks, confections, chips, and other packaged snacks soon joined affordable staples on the store shelves.

As peasant farming becomes a less viable lifestyle, increasing numbers of rural Maya people are compelled to supplement their livelihoods through local entrepreneurship or finding work outside of their village homes. With national improvements to transportation infrastructure, work cycles have shortened, so men and increasingly, women, can “work out” for less than 2 weeks at a time, returning home in between shifts. Employment options include plantation labor, construction, education, government and non-governmental organizations, tourism, domestic labor, and service industries. Other villagers have begun entrepreneurial ventures that are facilitated by higher levels of community market engagement. The first village stores and regular bus service followed completion of the graded road to PG town in the 1990s. There are now seven family owned stores, three bars, and two bus lines in San Jose.

Work and school, both of which are central to modern citizenship, detract time and energy from domestic food production, necessitating food for purchase in the workplace and at home. A recently concluded quantitative study of food consumption patterns from 1990 to 2018 in a nearby Q'eqchi' village, Aguacate, found increased consumption of purchased and processed foods, including meats and grains (deemed of dubious health properties), along with decreased consumption of locally grown foods such as corn (Cleary et al., 2022). The incorporation of Maya as national laborers, entrepreneurs, and consumers expands opportunities while increasing susceptibility to diabetes.

Findings: Hantik u takin—Eating the money

Research participants locate the emergence of diabetes in “eating the money” (hantik u takin). “Eating the money” is a Mopan Maya colloquialism for the rise of nutritional disease brought by cycles of working for money while consuming store-bought food, rather than foods grown in the local food system. It is an analytic that describes diabetes as a result of complex changes to material, social, and spiritual life that accompany economic integration. Modern lifestyles rely on “eating the money” earned through wages or entrepreneurship. The more that Maya people participate in modern consumer culture, the more risk factors for metabolic syndrome encroach on daily life. New patterns of production and consumption create new forms of contamination (ka’as) in the blood/life force (k’inam) and the social soul (ool) that manifest as nutritional disease. ³ With new forms of entrepreneurship, like family owned stores, bus lines, and wage labor outside of the village, come unprecedented economic inequalities that manifest as social-spiritual contamination of the ool. Eating the money through routine consumption of store-bought foods causes the accumulation of material contamination of the k’inam.

Eating the money as social-spiritual-material contamination

The most direct application of “eating the money” refers to increased reliance on purchased foods, commonly referred to as “shop foods,” rather than foods grown on a local farm according to Maya traditions. Shop foods contain unknown spiritual and material contaminants, including excess sugar. When accumulated in the blood/life force (k’inam), these contaminants lead to poor health. This explanation for diabetes is the most frequently and openly used, even reflexively, when speaking about oneself or one’s family. The moral undertones in this explanation reflect the perception of collective cultural shortcoming, rather than transgressions at the individual or household level. “Shop food” is also an explanation commensurate with epidemiological framing of the disease familiar from sustained public health outreach in the community.

“Eating the money” has also historically referred to greed, embezzling or misuse of group funds, taking more than one’s share, or generally making out better than fellow community members through employment or business. In this case, “eating the money” contaminates the social soul (ool) by creating social tensions. This use of the phrase is often in hushed, conspiratorial tones and accompanied by a pantomimed large girth and directional lip pursing to indicate the subject of gossip. Of the 20 known diabetes cases in the village, 16 were from families with village shops, mills, or an outside source of income, while 4 were from families whose primary income came from farming. Entrepreneurs and people who visibly get ahead (e.g., two story houses, plumbing, and vehicles) are subject to gossip about “eating the money,” and illness as spiritual retribution. The connection of diabetes with the economic “haves” in the community supports Maya views that sickness is a consequence of taking more from the limited whole and that the condition results from greed, opulence, and over-consumption of alienated foods.

For example, a community member whose wife was diagnosed with diabetes following a string of familial misfortunes suspected jealousy and social tensions as a root cause. “With everything that is happening, I have to ask who is doing this to us?” He worked as an agricultural extension officer, which allowed him to invest in improvements to home and farm. Indeed, when people discussed his family in their absence, they suggested “eating too much money” as the reason behind his wife’s illness. Gossip followed a similar script for two other families who were also living with diabetes (and had two story houses), one of store owners and the other of an owner-operator of a corn mill. The use of the phrase “eating the money” in this context connects with cultural beliefs about taking from the limited whole.

Economized food and labor relationships do not properly dispel ka’as (contamination) with sweat and heat (k’inam) of the days’ work. As Francisco (41) told me, “Those sugars and salts, that becomes ka’as in your body. If you don’t work your farm, you never sweat out those bad things.” Farming is a virtuous form of work that purifies the spirit and the body, and cultivates food that is part of a virtuous relationship with the spiritually vested landscape, preventing the accumulation of ka’as. Consequently, even while “working out,” many Maya families continue to keep family farms, “because it is the Maya way.” Cultural continuity is viewed as healthy practice.

Across all ethnographic interviews (53) and illness narratives (20), locally produced foods are universally seen to be both spiritually and physically healthier than store-bought alternatives. Farm foods are part of relationships to community and landscape, and have an essence that purifies rather than pollutes. Local foods are frequently described as kichpan hanal (pretty/clean food) to indicate their superior properties. The descriptor kichpan, encompasses spiritual, cultural, and material properties that contribute to healthy k’inam (blood) and ool (social soul). Village farmlands provide an integrated source of healthy production, consumption, and cultural practice.

In contrast to local foods which have life force (k’inam) from the farmer’s work and local landscape, highly processed, imported foods with mysterious origins are of unknown and potentially dangerous health properties. As Thomas (40) explained. . .

You don’t know where that food came from, how it was grown, or harvested. Maybe the farmer used respect, maybe they didn’t. You just don’t know. That’s why those foods can make you sick. -Thomas

There is a concern, shared by 70/73 interview respondents, that foods from outside Maya farming practices may be contaminated by chemical inputs and disrespectful planting/harvest, which accumulates as ka’as (contamination) in the body when eaten.

When counterposing “good traditional food” with foods from the store, research participants express concerns about contamination. The descriptor “white” is attached to mass-produced chicken, flour, sugar, and rice that come from outside the village food system. “White” describes both the bleached, refined nature of these foods, and the people that produce them.

Madonio (42), principal of the village primary school, takes this descriptor to the next level, referring to white foods as “the colonization of Maya diet.” He argues that the GOB supports imported foods over local production for political reasons, despite the fact that “these foods are not good for us. We Mayas are not used to these white foods so they make us sick.” Madonio explained to me that while people in the US may be used to white foods, Maya people had lived in the traditional way for thousands of years, so these foods were incompatible with Maya bodies in particular.

Modern lifestyles and the perpetual cycle of eating the money

Because of the emergent nature of the disease, and its tendency to accompany developmental “success,” some in the community, like the San Jose primary school principal, view diabetes as one of “the sad side effects of progress. Eating the money is not too good,” he told me with a shrug, “but what else are we going to do?” “Progress” often means further integration into capitalist markets and movement away from Maya culture and farming ways, which create susceptibilities to disease. Virginio (41), the former village chairman, described this pattern with an affirmative nod and a hand moving from waist high, to above his head. . . “As we move to the higher culture, we start to get this sickness. It is the food, the money, and the stress. All of these things are not good for us [Maya people].” Despite prevalent reservations about the health effects of change, there is a sense of inevitability about eating the money. Modern lifestyles necessitate reliance on foods that are bought, rather than grown.

The more that people work, attend school, and pursue other opportunities outside of the community, the less time they have to maintain and participate in culturally virtuous local food systems. These constraints have had disproportionate effects on women who increasingly shoulder work traditionally done by men as well as their customary responsibilities. ⁴ Faced with an ever-increasing repertoire of household responsibilities and time constraints, people incorporate food for purchase into daily consumer and culinary practices. As more money is made through paid labor, more money is spent on commodity foods. The greater demand for shop foods supports more family owned local stores like the Cal’s and Cho’s. Felicia (44), who suffers from diabetes, is a mother of five and wife of a plantation worker. She described to me the difficulties of maintaining a diet rich in traditional foods. . .

Almost every day we are eating money. I used to keep my chickens, my garden, my farm for our nice local foods but those things take time. My husband is at work and the children are at school so there is no one to help me but I still need to feed them. Maybe when the children are grown I can keep my local foods again.

As in the above quote, women with diabetes who had children attending school expressed the difficulties of managing both the food for the household and their own illness. Oftentimes, the dietary programs recommended by health professionals or local knowledge were difficult to maintain when faced with time constraints and the culinary demands of other household members. Young people are especially prone to returning from work or school with a newfound taste for more “modern” foods like barbeque chicken, flour tortilla, and soft drinks. One participant with diabetes explained to me. . .

My children don’t want to see the traditional foods. They only want to eat the soft white chicken, flour tortilla, shop bread and those things. Yes, we have our corn, but we still buy our harina (flour tortilla) every day. . . If you want to have a celebration, it has to be with soft drink. Not the cacao like before. Eustacia (56)

While some of the cultural pressures for dietary change come from the new tastes of younger generations, local foods are not easy to procure even when desired. Many who work out and even some students express a nostalgic attachment to traditional foods that are difficult to access when away from San Jose.

Ohhhhh its lone shop food - white chicken, harina (flour tortilla), and rice out Placencia side. I have to come back here to get my good wah (corn tortilla) and our local cax (chicken). It is fresh, it tastes nice, and it makes you strong. -Bacillio (47)

Paid occupations not only create more cash dependent eating practices, but also alter the physicality of work. Educated and entrepreneurial positions are more sedentary, while movements of those working for notoriously oppressive “bosses” are subject to external control. Younger generations have been encouraged to participate in highly trained sectors of the national economy, such as education, business, NGOs, or the government itself. While these higher status jobs represent professional success, elders warn that even career work comes with consequences to spiritual-social-bodily health. As Lucio (66) told me. . .

We Mayas are getting soft. Not like before when life was hard, we were tough, and we never heard of this sickness [diabetes]. We forget the farm and you can see what it is doing to us.

Research participants suggest that the more sedentary and controlled nature of labor today makes Maya people “softer” and more susceptible to diseases like diabetes. These “softer” forms of labor combined with the “soft” modern foods create nutritional illness. However, many research participants, like the Cal family, find themselves in a health predicament of consumer society: purchased foods are central to paid labor systems, and paid labor to participation in modern society, yet, store-bought food and working for money contribute to a host of metabolic problems, including diabetes.

Research participants describe feeling trapped by the contemporary need for money. Eating the money is often described as a perpetual cycle of making money only to spend it on goods that were previously procured through unpaid work on the homestead.

Yes, we are making more money now, but there are a lot more things that cost money now too. Like before, we used to grow almost all of our own food and it [life] was kind of cheap. Now we just like to buy buy buy and the money goes fast! Everything is more expensive than it used to be . . . sometimes it’s kind of hard to feed your family. When Francisco was out working, he would work hard and make his money, but then he would come home and spend it all to get our corn and our food. When he would go back to work again, it was like he never had that money, never did that work. . . we ate it all! -Lucia (35)

In the above example, Lucia references eating money as a humorous but reflexive commentary on the commonplace hardship of working for money, only to spend it on foods that would otherwise have been grown at home. Research participants describe the cyclical process of making and spending money with sense of futility. As my neighbor Andrea (44) explained, “The money is hard to make, and fast to go!” Francisco further elaborated this point by saying

The thing is, the money is never enough. If you start to buy, you will just have to buy more. Your family will always be hungry. So, you have to buy a next food and soon you have to make a next money again. –Francisco (41)

Food purchases, as in the above quote, are prominent in informants’ descriptions of the perpetual process of making and spending money while never seeming to get ahead. While food is far from the only financial outlay, it is both a symbolic and material illustration of the ways in which participation in capitalist economies coercively transforms Maya livelihoods. Despite widespread agreement that store-bought food has an inferior cultural and material essence to farm foods, families across the community find themselves increasingly reliant on shop food. Eating the money is a cycle of contamination that results in nutritional disease.

Discussion: Diabetes as internalized essence of commodification

The Cal’s store is an example of eating the money in both senses: routinely ingesting store-bought foods and the moralized dimension of taking from the collective whole. For some community members, conditions like diabetes are a moral judgment on the hazards of fully embracing modern lifestyles (also found by Cleary et al., 2022). This perspective on diabetes as a “modern sickness,” is a hybridity of biomedical and public health epidemiology with traditional views on health as the physical manifestation of social-spiritual states. “Eating the money” frames diabetes as the physical embodiment of social/spiritual upheaval the community faces as cultural traditions change in the context of macro political and economic processes. With the rise of consumer culture, money now mediates Maya relationships to food, landscape, labor, one another, and the spiritual-social-material self, with physical consequences.

In the Maya concept of “eating the money,” the spirit of capitalism is embodied as material essence through both commodity foods and social tensions. The long-standing paradigm of viewing the community as a collective (Cook, 1997; Danziger, 2001; Gregory, 1975) is disrupted through engagement with capitalist markets. Money from outside subverts understanding of the community as a limited whole and creates new forms of inequality. The unequal nature of commodity food and labor creates rivalries, jealousy, and stress that Maya informants see as detrimental to physical health.

Researchers in the nearby village of Aguacate also found the juxtaposition of “local” farm grown with “outside” purchased foods, with the latter deemed of dubious health properties (Cleary et al., 2022). The researchers describe this distinction as a reassertion of “the boundary between the moral economy of communal subsistence and the anonymous and depersonalized cash economy” that market engagement works to erode (Cleary et al., 2022: 98). Other studies of health and changing foodways in BZE Maya communities (Baines, 2014; Clearey et al., 2022) also frame the “disease as moral failing” perspective as a metaphor for changes in the capitalist system. Similar observations have been made in western contexts (Guthman, 2011; Hayes-Conroy et al., 2022; Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010; Jones, 2019). My research found that these moral failings are not only a metaphor for changes in the capitalist system, but corrupt the material essence of food as it is internalized, and degrade the body as it forgets traditional forms of work.

Store-bought foods have an inferior essence because they are subject to hierarchical, colonial market dynamics rather than integrated in the relational local food system. In Maya culture, food is not only a commodity-object, but a subject in a complex system of relationships with the spiritually vested landscape. When Maya people talk about “healthy local food,” bodily “health” is inextricable from locality, spiritual purity, farming, and preparation practices (Baines, 2014). Research participants like Madonio and Virginio directly refer to cultural changes in consumption patterns as the result of colonization and coercive culture change. With the political economic creation of the consumer comes changing cultural tastes and perspectives (Wilk, 1997). The “white” shop foods to blame for inferior nutritional health are sourced from outside the village food system, are integral to capitalist economies, and are a corrupting force on Maya bodies. Eating money is often not experienced as a choice but as a perpetual cycle of making and spending that alienates relationships to the landscape and one another. Respectful food production and consumption processes are especially important to shore up community relationships with one another and the landscape, at risk of spiritual retribution (Faust, 2004). However, with more engagement in capitalist labor systems, food is increasingly commodified and thereby categorized as profane, rather than sacred (Wilk, 1997). Routine consumption of objectified foods and alienated social relationships result in spiritual as well as material contamination of the body.

While taken for granted in many advanced consumer societies, the cycle of “eating money” disarticulates the previously integrated realms of production and consumption in Maya livelihoods. Market-based food systems separate work, food, community, and landscape, thus undermining the material, social, and spiritual connections essential for good bodily health. However, local farm work and food are part of greater relationships with the community and landscape, shop foods and paid labor exist outside of this system and only bear an economized relationship to one another. Working for money and paying for food alienate relationships to work, food, the landscape, community, and their own bodies (Marx, 1844). The social-spiritual strains that result from this alienation contaminate the ool, while routine consumption of foods of unknown origins and processing contaminate k’inam. Both forms of contamination become internalized as physical illness.

Conclusion: The illness of consumer culture

Maya perspectives on diabetes and “eating the money” are at the nexus of political economic structures, consumption practices, and cultural values as they are written on the body. The relatively new prevalence of both diabetes and market-based relationships with food, land, and one another makes the spiritual materiality of capitalism more visible in San Jose than cultural contexts in which market logics have greater hold. This research reveals how some of the pathological relationships of commodity food systems manifest as nutritional disease. By focusing on embodiment from Indigenous perspectives, this research reveals the (im)morality of market logics, circumvents the deterministic tendencies of structural analysis, and challenges the individualizing rationalist formulations of contemporary biomedicine, public health, and development interventions.

By centering Maya perspectives on the inherent immorality of capitalist consumption, this research destabilizes the position of capitalist food production as an a-cultural and strictly material structure. As an explanatory paradigm, “eating the money” provides cultural commentary on the underlying social problems of capitalist relationships to food, land, and one another. This perspective subverts the implicit secularization of many political economic analyses of food consumption and production that frame these structural, material relationships as distinct and separate from spirituality (the Weberian critique). The embodiment of political economy goes beyond political and economic control, beyond nutritional deficiency and caloric over-consumption to include spiritual-social-material relationships.

This examination of Maya perspectives on the process of nutritional transition sheds light on how market-based food and labor systems disarticulate production from consumption. The ontological separation of production and consumption that is often mirrored in epistemologies of food is a design feature of global food systems. Commodification is the wedge that divides these previously integrated faces of food systems. Market value supplants socio-cultural and use value, while global market exchange creates geographical distance from productive landscapes and physical distance from productive labor. When production processes are separated from consumption practices, the former can pose as purely structural while the latter is cultural, or even, in Western contexts, individual.

The social scientific emphasis on structure for production side analyses, and culture for consumption practices, masks that political economic structures reflect universalized capitalist cultural logics. These logics: productive culture characterized by alienated labor, consumer culture characterized by alienated food, and social integration rife with inequality by design, are sources of community and individual sickness through social-spiritual-material contamination. While analyses of food systems often focus on the relationship between political economic restructuring and material cultural practices, this research provides needed attention to how the values and ethos of capitalist systems interact with long held, spiritually vested foodways. The absence of spirituality (the deeper cultural read) in political economic analyses of food systems reflects and reinforces the success of capitalist hegemony in positioning market relationships as a-spiritual/amoral as counterposed with more spiritually vested traditional practices and cosmologies.

My research connects changes in consumption patterns to changes in production, and shows how both are deeply cultural experiences in the social and spiritual sense, as well as material. Interpretive sociologists have long emphasized the importance of values in shaping social action. Consumer behaviors are determined by the complex interplay of material access and processes of valuation. While cultural studies of food consumption emphasize the importance of collective tastes in cultural consumption patterns, values are often sublimated to materiality or reduced to individualized sentimentality in social scientific analysis of food production. Consumerism is the result of a major paradigm shift in relationships to food and landscape, represented by widespread commodification of human productive activity and the resources on which life depends.

Studying the embodied consequences of food systems in the midst of the consumer transition shows the impermanence and insecurities of our current global food regime. My research highlights commodification as an incomplete process and allows us to see the physical and cultural importance of alternative forms of valuation, forms that we are at risk of losing with the dominant, reductionist views of food and nutrition that are prevalent in consumer society. While the commodity value of food and labor eclipses and overdetermines its intrinsic and use values in many (post)industrial food systems, this is not the only socio-cultural context in which food consumption takes place, nor has it been the dominant one for most of human history.