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In the face of the ‘obesity epidemic’ public health has largely failed to engage with the human pleasures that surround eating. Pleasures are often linked to vulnerabilities and frailties that are part of being human. We argue in this paper that leaving human vulnerabilities and the pleasures that haunt them under-acknowledged and under-examined within public health contributes to the problems that public health tries to solve. While in some quarters debates revolve around the best ways of encouraging people to become responsible for and modify their own behaviour, the well-documented centuries of struggle with managing human vulnerabilities and pleasures helps to explain why this is no easy task. The mantra of restraint, reason, and rationality is very limited in the face of the importance of some pleasures, even small ones, in human lives. In unequal societies, people have unequal access to pleasures. People are presented with a landscape of temptation, encouraged to consume, and then unequally admonished for indulging according to their means. Understanding and democratising pleasures will involve public health grappling with pleasures, and all those concerned with health inequity asking hard questions about ethics, morality, and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food security is an evolving concept with various definitions and associated meanings. The way food security is understood by policy-makers impacts on how it gets addressed in public policy. This research uses an interpretive approach to uncover how food security is represented by stakeholders. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 stakeholders in South Australia between June and September 2010. The findings reveal four dominant representations for food security that locate responsibility for the issue across different stakeholders, namely individuals, governments, communities and private enterprise. These representations hold different underlying assumptions about the role of government in addressing the issue; the neo-liberal perspective supports a reduced role for government whereas the social determinants of health perspective calls for greater government intervention. Food security activists may need a greater awareness of how they represent the issue in order to change public policy action in this area. The approach taken in this research is relevant to other public policy problems and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses on drug use and public health show a relative neglect of the study of pleasure. We argue that work on the social, cultural and historical specificity of bodies and the emotions can be usefully drawn upon to study the pleasures of drug use. This article reflects upon the nature of pleasure and its under-representation in public health approaches to drug use and methodologies. It considers four varieties of drug pleasures: carnal pleasure, disciplined pleasure, ascetic pleasure and ecstatic pleasure drawing upon historical work on drugs and related areas. Some observations are made on the pre-eminence of certain drug pleasures today and some tensions and contradictions, which reflect broader contradictions in social values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Focuses on the importance of food policy to public health. Regulation of food supply for a population; Protection of public health.

International research demonstrates diminishing trust in the food supply associated with food scares which undermine trust in expert advice. Even though Australia has not experienced major food scares, there is evidence of diminishing trust in the food supply. Interviews were conducted with 47 South Australian food shoppers from high (n = 17) and low (n = 16) socio-economic regions of Adelaide and from rural South Australia (n = 14) about food governance and trust in the Australian food supply. Participants display a high level of trust in the food supply associated with a perception that Australian food is safe; a lack of exposure to food risks; and trust in personal food safety practices. The media was the only factor which created distrust in the food system. Other participants express confidence in the food supply where confidence is understood as a lack of reflection. Contrary to concepts of reflexive modernisation which presume an increasing awareness of risk and placement of trust as a means of reducing uncertainly, participants adopt an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ approach displaying little knowledge or interest in knowing about food regulation relying instead on routine food safety practices as a means of managing uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Single parent households experience periods of food insecurity more frequently than other Australian families. Despite elevated risk, many single parents achieve food security with limited means. This article applies and evaluates the utility of the livelihoods framework approach as a tool for understanding food insecurity in this population and generating relevant policy recommendations. The approach is adapted here to provide insight into the skills, strategies and resource individuals use to attain or strive for food security. The framework incorporates these individual capabilities into a model of the social, economic and political structures and processes through which individuals navigate to attain food security. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with single parents living in rural and urban South Australia. Transcripts were analysed in an effort to populate a food security livelihoods framework for single parents. The livelihoods framework is found to be capable of reproducing the types and levels of capabilities reported in previous findings. Furthermore, it provides novel insight into the relationships that form between classes of capabilities and between capabilities and the structures and processes in which they are utilised. These insights are considered in terms of relevance to policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]