Chronic metabolic conditions disproportionately cohere along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Despite overwhelming evidence that racism, gendered violence, social and economic disparities, trade regulations, lack of food sovereignty, and land and livelihood dispossession play the biggest roles in chronic disease, the biomedical explanations given for why people become sick are often firmly rooted in personal behavior or “lifestyle.” Mainstream discourse and public policies continue to center the individual in discussions of something they have insisted on labeling as “dietrelated disease.” Health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, and other metabolic conditions are positioned as failures in an individual’s knowledge, habits, self-control, diet, and exercise.

As we finalize this collection for publication during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are yet again witnessing discursive efforts by mainstream media and elected officials to depict the unequal infection and mortality rates as sequelae of differing lifestyles. Racialized groups and those facing disproportionate exposure due to working in the riskiest and least-protected jobs are advised to boost their immunity through lifestyle improvements such as better diets and more exercise, even while they are already dying at higher rates. Preexisting metabolic conditions are a risk factor for severe cases of coronavirus—but bodily risk factors are themselves nested within social risk factors of racism