Food, Fatness and Fitness

Everybody enjoys ice cream. When spring arrives, sunshine fills a city’s streets. As temperatures rise, summer is in sight. This blog post offers a historical perspective on ice cream. It reflects on an account that observes conditions of living and practices of food consumption in the Hanseatic middle class—while talking about ice cream. In 1801, the medical practitioner Johann Jakob Rambach published the book Versuch einer physisch-medizinischen Beschreibung von Hamburg (trans. Essay on the Physical-medical Description of Hamburg), writing about ice cream consumption as a rather new gastronomical fashion that affluent bourgeois people celebrated: In this blog entry, I use Rambach’s account of the alimentary, physical and socio-topographical urban landscape of the city of Hamburg around 1800 to offer a…

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Lunchboxes are more than just a meal; they are a way for family and loved ones to show their care. However, lunchboxes also expose individual food practices to public scrutiny and judgment, creating “lunchbox shaming” that leads to marginalization and discrimination. The rise of lunchbox-packing as a trendy social media content has further reinforced this phenomenon, perpetuating public evaluation, mostly negative, to create self-distinction and other-abjection. In this blog post, I explore comments on a video of Mama J Rae’s lunchbox-packing for her husband, posted on Instagram, to understand the role of lunchbox commentary in expressing food loathing online. By criticizing Mama J Rae’s lunchbox-making practices, commentators distinguish themselves from her, perceiving her family’s food practices as inferior and undesirable.…

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In July 2024, after 14 years of conservative Tory rule, the British Labour party won a general election. Shortly after their landslide victory, in October, an interesting case study on fat politics played out in the UK. Keir Starmer, the party’s newly elected prime minister, announced he wanted to get fat, unemployed people back onto the job market with the help of free “weight loss injections,” a new turn of the screw in dystopian diet culture. In this piece, I want to reflect on the larger politics and consequences of this policy proposal and ask: What are progressive fat politics and what role do fat politicians play in shaping fat policy-making? According to British Health Minister Wes Streeting, the “widening waistbands” of his…

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Food is one of the most common and intimate ways of expressing care, which is particularly evident in how adults relate to children. Feeding children is a biological act filled with cultural meanings and expectations, an expression of love and care. But do we, perhaps, care too much about children’s food? During my ethnographic research on the politics of children’s food in Poland, one of the participating fathers told me: “When I was at the food market the other day, I saw a mother with her 2-year-old child in a stroller, and that child was holding in her hand a huge Snickers bar and eating it. A 2-year-old child! It’s sometimes outrageous what people give their children to eat, how…

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As I was reading the Sunday newspaper, a colorful full-page advertisement caught my eye. At the bottom sat a juicy burger. Two buns encased a thick patty stacked over arugula and topped with fresh onion rings, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. Behind the burger sat the phrase “Beyond Meat, Serve Love.” Over everything hung a headline declaring “The Next Generation of Beyond Meat is Here and It’s Not Just Loved by Those Who Have Tasted It.” As a historian who has written about food politics in Germany, I’m always curious about food politics in other places. In this case, that other place is the United States. Caught by the color, two mentions of “love,” and, let’s admit it, that mouth-watering burger, I…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Ice Cream in the Belly: Johann Josef Rambach’s Alimentary Topographies of Hamburg around 1800

Food Loathing Online: Lunchbox Commentary and Social Othering

Leftist Politics and the “Significant Burden” of Fatness

The Politics of Children’s Food (and Mothers’ Feeding)

“Beyond Meat” Takes a Historian Back Then