Food, Fatness and Fitness

Weight Watchers first launched an online program “customized just for guys” in 2007, one of their advertisements proclaimed, “Real men don’t diet.” This counterintuitive declaration evoked the questions that animate my current research. I’m analyzing how the consumer culture constructs notions of “real men” through depictions of food and the body, particularly during moments of intense social change and anxiety. As you might have guessed, commercial weight loss programs, developed for men in the early decades of the new millennium, provide ample evidence. Men have made up a small but consistent 10 percent of the Weight Watchers membership since the company’s founding in 1963. Throughout the decades, program materials, cookbooks, and magazines have each addressed men. For example, the 1973…

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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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Fat bodies are not en vogue. In current advertisements, films, books, magazines, etc. we hardly find fat children’s bodies at all or depicted in a positive way. In her recentbook Fa(t)shonista, the German fat activist and feminist Magda Albrecht describes her childhood and her weight as a permanent occasion to comment on. The ideology of childhood seems to be one of lightness, friendship, joy, and normative bodies. Fat children or even fat heroines remain almost invisible, they are ”missing bodies” in a discourse in which certain bodies are of higher value than others, as Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore pointed out. Moreover, when fat children are depicted, they are often shown without heads or from the back. Psychotherapist…

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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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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Real Men & Real Food: The Cultural Politics of Male Weight Loss

Money for Your Fat! Health, Moral and Capitalism

Of Whales and Monsters: Visual Fat Politics in Contemporary Children’s Picture Books

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

Cypork: German Bodies and Designing Pigs for Consumption