I hadn’t even entered my brief, early-pandemic bread baking phase when other people’s fears about “pandemic weight gain” became unavoidable. I have been fat for my entire life, and as a fat person who does not diet I have become very skilled at avoiding conversations about other people’s fear of weight gain that might cause… Read more →
Tag: dieting
Why Sad Salads Are No Laughing Matter: An Interview with Emily Contois
Whether you’ve seen The Hairpin’s 2011 “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” or not, you’re in for a treat. Emily Contois analyzes this well-known photo essay in a recently published chapter, “Laughing Alone with Salad: Nutrition-Based Inequity in Women’s Diet and Wellness Media,” as part of Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning, edited by Simona Stano… Read more →
Alvenia Fulton, Soul Food, and Black Liberation: An Interview with Travis Weisse
For the first annual Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article, honorable mention went to Travis Weisse’s excellent and groundbreaking “‘Alone in a Sea of Rib-Tips’: Alvenia Fulton, Natural Health, and the Politics of Soul Food.” Known as the ‘Queen of Nutrition,’ Alvenia M. Fulton was a Black alternative health practitioner and health food promoter… Read more →
Diet Books as Utopian Manifestos: A Conversation with Adrienne Rose Bitar
I moved across country this summer, a process that necessitated packing and unpacking all of my books, including titles other academics might find odd: dozens of cookbooks (like my microwave cookbooks!) and a number of diet books (yes, some for men). Luckily, Adrienne Rose Bitar, a postdoctoral associate in history at Cornell University, can relate… Read more →
Not a Day for Salads: The Football Food Rules of the Super Bowl
Super Bowl LII will soon be upon us, along with its super-sized spread of snacks, an American meal as iconic as Thanksgiving. Matching debates over what to serve on the fourth Thursday in November, food rules guide what supposedly pairs perfectly with the nation’s favorite sport. Super Bowl party menus most often include foods like… Read more →
The Cultural Logic of Calories and Body Types
We were promised calorie labels. New York City has required them in chain restaurants since 2008 and California since 2009, but the Affordable Care Act mandated them nationwide. In April 2016, the FDA issued a “final rule” on the calorie-labeling requirement, resolving questions like whether movie theaters and alcoholic beverages were included (they were), and… Read more →
Real Men & Real Food: The Cultural Politics of Male Weight Loss
When 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… Read more →