Food, Fatness and Fitness

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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Vincent makes sure his voice carries far enough for me to understand that I need to push through thirty seconds longer, even with all the background noise. In fact, I am hardly aware of my environment. Or was, until I identified a moving object in the corner of my eye. When I strain my head to look left, I see a toddler watching me with a strange expression on his face. I am focused on the burning sensation in my abdominal area and my mind telling me that I should just give up. But Vincent’s reference to time gives me a new surge of willpower and I manage to uphold my body in plank position, supporting my rigid body on…

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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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The decision, whether taking stairs or the escalator is the better choice, has been charged with a new socio-political dimension lately. Both speed and convenience do hardly matter, yet it has turned into a question of fitness and health. As the Fitbit advertisement points out, “fitness is the sum of your life.” It can be found between beginnings and endings or between high and low ends of the exercise spectrum. Gone are the times when physical activity was confined to particular spaces reserved for heavy exercise—like gyms. Today we live in an almost endless sea of fitness opportunities, called your daily life. Of major importance in this change is the popular trend of logging one’s activities with digital tracking devices,…

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“I know you’re sick. It’s all that whiteman junk food we eat,” the elderly Aboriginal protagonist Charlie remarks towards his terminally ill friend. The Australian drama Charlie’s Country (directed by Rolf de Heer), which had its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2013, presents a fictional engagement with community life in the Northern Territory after the implementation of the Intervention. De Heer’s film emphatically addresses Indigenous people’s disadvantages—especially in relation to food and health issues. Since healthier options are inaccessible, Charlie and his community rely on the unhealthy food they can buy from the general store of their community and are consequently made ill by their diet. Charlie would prefer to hunt rather than consume the “whiteman…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Bachelorette Chow and the Contested Nature of Nutritional Knowledge

Navigating Bootcamp and Beers — An Urban Wellness Economy

Vegetarianism Between Europe and India: An Entangled History

Stairs or the Escalator? Ask Your Stepcount!

“There’s Lots of Food in the Bush”: Food and Self-Determination in Indigenous Australian Films