Food Writing Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

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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“Can you imagine my mom’s reaction?” [Abby asks]. “Eat Healthy with Norah!’s Norah suspected of having a fat kid!” —Amy Spalding, The Summer of Jordi Perez (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles (91) This quote from the well-received young adult novel The Summer of Jordi Perez (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles) by Amy Spalding vividly captures the essence of the novel: The main character’s (Abby Ives’s) striking line pictures the tensions between her mother and herself that are based in their different approaches to how to live a good life—and the good life is immediately connected to a healthy and slim body. While Abby stridently points out that her fat body visibly contradicts her mother’s lifestyle, the name of her mother’s…

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John Egerton writes in Southern Food: On the Road, at Home, and in History that “the [U.S.] South, for better or worse, has all but lost its identity as a separate place.” However, Egerton quickly turns to food as one of the last distinct markers of Southern identity: “But its food survives — diminished, perhaps, in availability and quantity, but intact in its essence and authenticity — and at its best, it may be as good as it ever was” (3). For many folks who identify as Southern, cuisine is all that remains that makes Southern culture unique after cutting out all the problematic elements of an economy and culture built on enslaved labor, a history of racial violence and poverty, and other regressive…

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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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In May 1891, the London Vegetarian Society held a meeting in Portsmouth. Present were not just English, but also two Indian members, T.T. Majumdar and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, both students of law in London. For Gandhi, later one of the leading figures in the Indian independence movement, membership in the London Vegetarian Society was a formative experience. It allowed him to discover vegetarianism as an ethically motivated choice and integrate it into a philosophy of non-violence. The encounter was not a singular instance. It was part of a larger entanglement between European vegetarianism and India. In order to buttress what was then a fringe lifestyle, vegetarians in Europe made frequent reference to meat abstention in other parts of the…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Food Writing:

Appalachian Food: From Denigration to Veneration

The Business with Postfeminist Healthism: Tensions between Thriving Mothers and Rebellious Daughters

Keep Southern and Cut the Fat: Negotiating Identity and Authenticity in Diet Cookbooks

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

Vegetarianism Between Europe and India: An Entangled History