Eating the Other Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

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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Like today, in the 1940s and 50s plenty of people in Appalachia—a mountainous region in the eastern United States—enjoyed eating ramps, a pungent wild onion that reaches its prime in April. But that consumption meant something very different in 1950 than it does in 2023. In the mid-twentieth century, foraging for the first wild greens of the season was a sensible, healthy thing to do, even if it meant you smelled like ramps for several days. Yet that lingering scent indicated a lower-class status, since it implied an inability to access and purchase fresh vegetables. Conversely, in 2023, eating ramps signals insider foodie status: they are the height of trendy eating for many Americans, Appalachian or not. This April, University…

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Originally published on Geschichte der Gegenwart and republished here with their permission. No drink represents the 21st century as fully as coffee – stimulating, omnipresent and “to go”. Yet it was also hailed as the drink of the 18th century – the sober middle-class drink of the Enlightenment – and later as the drink of the industrial revolution. Since the 18th century, worldwide coffee consumption has continually risen, and in the 20th it became, through new developments in production and preparation, like the patenting of the first espresso machine and the spread of the recently invented instant coffee, truly global. Coffee has now penetrated the last formerly non-caffeinated parts of the globe; today more than two billion cups of coffee…

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“Tacogate” is what actor Mishel Prada calls it. Thanks to the way Prada’s character, Emma, eats a taco in the very first episode of the STARZ show Vida (2018), the series immediately caused a stir. In a scene set at a Mexican restaurant in the East LA neighborhood Emma grew up in but has long not visited, she douses her carne asada taco in Valentina hot sauce and brings it to her mouth straight on, rather than tipping her head and biting it from the side, letting pieces of meat fall all over the table as she tears the tortilla with her teeth and then with her fingers. Her way of eating and especially her choice of condiment took people to Twitter to share memes of shock and…

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[I]t looks as though […] McKay has set out to cater for that prurient demand on the part of white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying—if enjoyment it can be called. W. E. B. Du Bois, Review of Home to Harlem, June 1928 (359–60) In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois, sociologist, author, and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, published a review of the younger Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay’s first novel Home to Harlem. He didn’t like it. He believed that the novel catered for white readers who wanted to see the wilder side of Harlem life:…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Eating the Other:

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

Appalachian Food: From Denigration to Veneration

The Colour of Coffee: Racism, Gender and Coffee Consumption in 19th Century Algeria

How (Not) to Eat a Taco – Queering Mexican Food Practices in VIDA

“An Utter Absence of Restraint”: Race and Food Cultures in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem