The Atkins Diet and Philosophy: Chewing the Fat with Kant and Nietzsche (Popular Culture & Philosophy) by

The Atkins Diet and Philosophy: Chewing the Fat with Kant and Nietzsche (Popular Culture & Philosophy) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780812698114
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2013-11-13T16:00:00+00:00


Need It, Want It, Got to Have It

The Atkins Diet is actually not exactly one commodity but several, a set of co-ordinated products manufactured and sold by a privately-owned commercial company called Atkins Nutritionals. According to Hoover’s, the company began under a slightly different name in 1989 and now sells 250 “food products” such as power bars, nearly 100 nutritional supplements (such as essential oils) and “information products” such as books. These products are available at more than 30,000 stores,6 and are also sold on the web. At present, the future of Atkins Nutiritionals is uncertain. On 5th December, 2004, the New York Times had a lengthy article about the slowing down of the low-carb business. The article pointed out that Atkins Nutritionals is feeling this slow-down—its revenues declined from $87 million in January of 2004 to $29 million in August—leading to speculations about the possibility that the company may have to default on debts, a fate which it had been trying to avoid by laying off 40 percent of its workforce.7

The decline in the sales of Atkins products points to customers’ disenchantment. There are fewer people entering the market with an interest in acquiring this specific commodity. This may be because, like all fabricated diets, the Atkins Diet fails unless people actually change their lifestyles, and people have begun to realize this. Alternatively the decline is a function of critics having convinced people that the diet cannot deliver on its promises long term and may actually be unhealthy.8 These explanations suggest that consumers, while having the same needs (for food and drink) and desires (for health, looks, and youthfulness), are not finding in the Atkins Diet the value they thought it might have. They do not perceive it as accommodating them, so it does not have the same value, utility, or “use-value” for them.

Commodities are assumed to have a “use-value.” This is what perceiving them as able to respond to some need or desire means. So, when a commodity accommodates it has a “use-value.” It not only has a “use-value,” in Marx’s terminology it is a “use-value,” since a commodity accommodates because of its qualities (for example, a healthy diet has items that are indeed healthy to eat, like olive oil). A commodity’s failure to accommodate means that it is lacking in “use-value” qualities, the qualities that make it useful. But then, something paradoxical happens since the item in question is not a commodity any more: it no longer meets the criteria for being a commodity. It does not accommodate. It is merely a product manufactured for a market with the hope that it can be sold and thus become a commodity. Or so it should be.

There are several reasons why the unsold product may still be, or at least may still appear to be, a commodity. For Marx this is the case because of a chain that begins with the familiar, namely the fact that “[a] commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants.



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