Diet Practices Archives - Page 7 of 10 - Food, Fatness and Fitness

In recent years, body, health, morality and the neoliberal capitalist economy have become caught up with each other in a major way in both the public discourse and public policies concerning fatness. Against the backdrop of the dominant neoliberal rationale, the fat body has been ranked as an “expensive” body, but not just that; the fat body is constructed as a kind of “anti-neoliberal” body that is unproductive, ineffective, and unprofitable. Thus, fatness, health, and the economy are bound together materially, symbolically, and morally. This is particularly visible in the so called obesity epidemic discourse that has dominated public discussion of fatness over the past fifteen years. In the spring of 2010, an unusual weight loss campaign ran in…

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The heated debate on the European “Nutella divide” that hit the news in 2017 only corroborated long-established East European beliefs: After the fall of the Socialist regimes, people did not get the much longed-for western quality products. Instead, substandard goods were shipped eastwards: Adidas trainers that would not sell, Swiss knives with dull blades, expired foods with new sell-by dates. Finally there was official proof that in the East, Nutella was less creamy (smooth), Coca Cola tasted flatter and fish fingers held less fish. The offended Visegrad states complained that they were abused as European dumping ground. The manufacturers first attributed this to adjusting recipes to regional taste preferences, and also – after some probing – to lower spending power.…

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Women at the Butcher’s The German weekly newsreel, the Ufa-Wochenschau, opened their program on 23 November, 1962 with a sequence from a West German butcher’s shop, portraying a group of women shopping. Examining the meat at display, they all shook their heads expressing their dissatisfaction with what was available: “That’s too fat! No thanks, that’s too fat!“ they chorused, shaking their heads. Their voices marked an ultimate turning point in the relationship between food and health in modern German history. For the first time changes in the labor market and the growth of prosperity led to worries about excess in society as a whole in the 1960s, instead of the previously known worries about scarcity. Less physical work, less need…

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The understanding that women are more likely to be fat than men and need fewer calories is common sense and counts as a truism in today’s nutritional discourse. Yet it has a relatively young history, one that shows how nutritional science contributes to shaping gender difference and ultimately putting women in their place. In the late 19th and early 20th century, nutritional research legitimized an unequal access to food for men and women and created fatness as a problem of passive women unable to keep up with modern times. Dietary Studies and Women’s Food Needs In the late 19th century US, nutritional science emerged in a society shaped by the belief that scientific expertise—especially on bodies—was key to individual…

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Bachelorette Chow is one of several recipes posted by users of the platform “Complete Foods,” formerly known as DIY Soylent. Like many other websites dedicated to sharing homemade variations of commercially available nutritional substitute products like Soylent, it began with attempts to imitate as closely as possible the composition of Soylent. But meanwhile, the platform offers a variety of recipes which often aim to provide additional taste value, or claim to be targeted towards a particular purpose or target group–in the case of Bachelorette Chow, that group is obviously women. Few recipes on the platform are specifically targeted towards women. In fact, Bachelorette Chow presents an alternative to “Bachelor Chow,” a recipe which contains similar ingredients but in different quantities,…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Diet Practices:

Money for Your Fat! Health, Moral and Capitalism

Nutella Divide, Chicken Angst, and Ice-Cream Nostalgia: Fending Off Impurity in Post-Soviet Food Discourse

Cypork: German Bodies and Designing Pigs for Consumption

Women Are Cooler. On the Feminization of Fat

Bachelorette Chow and the Contested Nature of Nutritional Knowledge