Food, Fatness and Fitness

“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?” This tagline from Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 body horror film The Substance is a powerful but mostly redundant question for most women. Which woman hasn’t been (or should I say isn’t) obsessed with the quest for eternal beauty because of – if nothing else – sheer volume of social messaging that to be a woman of any value, one must be slim, young, and aesthetically pleasing, according to received cultural standards? In The Substance, ageing Hollywood superstar Elisabeth Sparkle embodies this pursuit to grotesque extremes. In the film, she engages a mysterious medicalized protocol known as “The Substance,” which allows her to produce an unidentical ‘clone’…

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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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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Rotten Women in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024)

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)