Body Politics Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

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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This essay by Thomas Cousins originally appeared on Somatosphere on October 8, 2023. It is reposted with permission by the author and the editors. I start with the question, why was it necessary, from 2008, for Mondi South Africa to spend R50 million (USD 8 million) a year on a nutrition intervention for 10,000 timber plantation labourers in KwaZulu-Natal province? The simple answer, to improve labour productivity, belies the dark histories of colonial conquest and apartheid exploitation, on the one hand, and the developing science of fatigue, nutrition, and infectious disease over the 20th century. The question opens out to a critical look at the way in which these working bodies were understood to metabolise calories and other substances, and suggests a…

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Hey I keep seeing that most of the gays in the gay community are well-toned. Are you not accepted as a fat person in the community or do they just not find that attractive? In spring 2020, an anonymous user turned to the collective intelligence of the German Q&A platform gutefrage.net expressing his personal concerns: “I’m overweight myself and afraid of not being accepted.” Responses from the online community depicted mixed sentiments: While some users affirmed the societal rejection of fat bodies, others countered by asserting that within the gay community, specifically for so-called “bears,” there is a designated place for fat male bodies. The “gay community” comprises social networks and places where homosexual men interact with each other and manifest shared…

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Darya, a 35-year-old PhD student in Florida who was born in Iran, shares a painful memory with me. At a New Year’s party, after she hadn’t seen her cousin in Tehran for three years and after an accident that had her gaining weight, “instead of saying hi and how are you doing,” Darya explains, “she tells me, ‘Darya you’re exploding!,’ or let me say it in Farsi, ‘Darya, Natereki!’” Darya responded by justifying her body: “I said, ‘yeah, I’m gaining weight but I will be okay soon.’” After the party, Darya was very upset that she didn’t defend herself; she didn’t want to upset her mother. As she told her mother, “I didn’t answer her [cousin] and next time, I’m…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Body Politics:

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

“Beyond Meat” Takes a Historian Back Then

Metabolism and Capacity: History and Labour in Post-apartheid South Africa

“No Fats No Fems”: Fat-Shaming in the Gay Community

“You’re exploding!”: Sizeism among Iranian Americans in the Diaspora