Food, Fatness and Fitness

At the age of sixteen, Benjamin Franklin, the first dreamer of the American Dream, turned vegetarian after he had read one of Thomas Tyron’s books, probably his masterwork The Way to Health that was first published in 1683. Tyron, an English vegetarian, moralist, and author of many self-help books and pamphlets, had convinced Franklin of the many benefits of a “vegetable diet,” and so the latter, according to his autobiography, made himself familiar with the preparation of vegetarian dishes. In going vegetarian, Franklin was not primarily motivated by health issues. Rather, he found that doing without meat would help him save half of the wages he earned as an apprentice in his brother’s print shop. “This was an additional fund…

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Labels are useful. They offer a shorthand view of what lies beneath. When applied to people, they encapsulate identities, worldviews. When applied to packaged foods, they convey nutritional quality, expiration dates, an origin story. But, as we know, labels can also be harmful. They elide complexity, collapsing what is multifaceted into something flat. Canned foods, as the first packaged foods, have a long history of labels—both useful and, potentially, harmful. When canned foods first came on the scene in the early nineteenth century, there was huge variation in how they were labeled. There was no standardization, and individual canneries put just enough on the containers to indicate what was inside. The development of lithography in the 1880s brought changes. While…

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The tasting room is full of the heady smell of fermented apples and alcohol, and the sound of good-natured conversation and laughter. The tasters, who are in various states of inebriation having been drinking now for a good couple of hours, are huddled around worn wooden tables upon which sit multiple plastic cups filled with amber liquid of varying levels and hues. Marking sheets, with scribbled notes denoting flavours, balance, and sweetness, litter the table and, after taking a mouthful from their cups, each taster marks a number on the matrix – giving the cider they have just drank a definitive mark out of ten against key pre-defined characteristics. This is the judging room of a U.K. regional cider festival…

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In 2015, Whole Foods Market earned $536 million in net profits. By late 2016, the natural foods behemoth operated more than 450 stores. But in the summer of 2017, Amazon purchased the company for a whopping $13.7 billion. Now the organic supermarket pioneer is owned by one of the most brutally efficient and standardized retailers in the world, a corporation with a relentless focus on selling things cheaper and faster. Whole Foods has forever changed the natural foods business in the United States. But how did all this happen? The company launched in 1980 in Austin, Texas, in a very different time and place for natural foods than today’s Seattle where Amazon is based. Austin had carried the unofficial title of countercultural and progressive…

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Food and eating are everywhere: in the blogosphere, in bookstores, on TV and streaming platforms, in social media such as Instagram. Nearly all newspapers, large and small, have cooking sections or extra food editions, and the portion of food-related print magazines has expanded hugely over the last years. The “foodie” has even become a characteristic social figure of our time, much like the “flaneur” of the emerging urban metropoles of modern society at the turn of the 19th century, or the “nerd” as the prototype of the emerging digital revolution during the 2000s. What does the “foodie,” then, stand for? Is it a coincidence that we seem to be somewhat obsessed with food, eating, and cooking? I don’t think so.…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

How Not To Eat Each Other. Reflections on Vegetarianism, Self-Improvement and Benjamin Franklin

A Window into the Can: The Mediated Story of Canned Food Labels

Sensing the “Oomph”: Human and Nonhuman Bodies in Craft Cider-Making.

How Whole Foods Market Made Natural Foods Mainstream

Staging Cosmopolitanism: Food, Differences, and The Chef in Cooking Shows