Eating dirty, and the morals of weight

Two recent unrelated stories got me thinking. They both illustrate in a strange way the contradictions of our current food culture. Firstly,

Kat Rosenfield

wrote about Ozempic and weight loss for Unherd. Then the New York Times reported the tragic death of a woman after an allergic reaction at a Disney restaurant.

These might seem like two separate phenomena, but I’ve come to realize these narratives twist together.

Rosenfield described how Ozempic seems like “cheating” when it comes to weight loss. (I've heard the same arguments made for gastric bands and liposuction). Weight loss is meant to be hard, and to those who struggle with counting calories, a diet injection seems like an unfair short cut. Looking good is meant to represent effort and discipline. (Not that it always does, it’s just supposed to. Indeed, one of the selling points of “smart lipo” is that it's slow process means you can apparently pass off the effect off as the result of dieting and exercise and so not admit to having had assistance)

Rosenfield writes about her own experience maintaining an extreme regimen for the purposes of bodybuilding and getting down to a very low body fat percentage. She was only permitted to have sugar straight after a workout in a very small prescribed quantity. This was a diet composed by her trainer, to manage macros and calories, to terrifying exactitude.

Few of us have the capacity to maintain such a regime, or a personal trainer to create one. Nonetheless, many people today do have food rules and taboos that they create themselves. Historically, dietary restrictions tended to dictated by religious doctrine. You didn’t eat this, or eat anyting at certain times, because those were the rules of your faith. More recently, with the increase of food intolerances and allergies, some people need to avoid certain foods so as not to die¹.

But aversion/allergy/aviodance/taboo all seem to be blurred. (for example: those avoiding gluten by choice are a much larger number than those who have an actual celiac disease or diagnosed intolerance).

Among people with self-selected restrictions, the foods avoided seem to be (variously): meat, bread, dairy products “processed foods”, refined sugar, MSG, “additives”, “carbs”, “anything that's not organic”. (How any of the above categories are actually defined tends to vary from person to person).

someone following a diet (AI prompt)

Being able to afford to turn things down is a luxury - and being able to afford only organic food is a brag in its own way. Such selective diets also reflect perversely our world of abundance: in earlier generations people didn’t turn their nose up at anything that would add some calories to their day.

The term for this, “Orthorexia” was coined a few years ago: like anorexia, but an obsession with only eating the correct things. If you scratch the surface, these very very specific dietary rules start to look a lot like a cover for an eating disorder.

Which in itself reflects our conflicted and contradictory views on weight loss. Those of us who grew up in the era of supermodels and heroin chic will recall the insane standards pushed out by the press. This is what we were told was “fat”.

Against this we got the “body positivity” movement. Heavier models appeared on catwalks and magazine covers. Fat shaming was no longer acceptable. So nobody wants to admit that they're slimming.

In a psychological pincer movement, we shouldn’t talk about wanting to be thin but we want it still.

A woman in the early 1980s would have ordered a salad or bought slimfast because she was slimming (see my earlier post). Now she just eats only green things because they’re organic, or fit some other convenient definition of permissable in her food cosmology. (She’s still losing 5lbs though).

Admitting that you are dieting, or needing to diet, or want to diet itself is seen as shameful or embarrassing, because diet culture is bad, diet culture is wrong. You're naturally thin. And it’s probably easy to believe that if it just so happens you eat hardly anything for other reasons.

Meanwhile, these obsessive food restrictions get mixed in the public mind with genuine allergies, because often people with their own baroque food regime will tell restaurants for example, that they are allergic. And this contributes in turn to restaurants and other people not taking allergies seriously.

Reddit is full of people posting about the time that someone tried to slip them the food that they avoid, like tricking vegetarians into eating meat (or George Costanza putting lobster in the scrambled eggs of a woman who kept kosher). In some horrifying cases, even giving dangerous allergens to people as some sort of test.

Meanwhile, people do suffer from actual allergic reactions (sometimes fatal), often involving restaurants, who it seems in a lot of cases, were fairly cavalier about the notion of allergies altogether.

Sometimes it seems like they don’t believe allergies are a real thing, and this can be cultural (in parts of the world where peanuts are in everything, peanut allergies don’t exist to the same extent as the do today in the West).

I lived for a time in Southeast Asia and regularly encountered “vegetarian” meals which I would then query and be told “It’s just a little bit of pork” (!!). Or worse, the dish rojak, which is fruit-based, would be listed as a “vegetarian” option, when it is made with a shrimp-based sauce. I’m not allergic to shellfish (fortunately) but this kind of flexible use of the term vegetarian is also the vagueness around allergen-free.

Thinking allergies are some kind of Western affectation (rather than something that could be fatal) seems to be one piece of what’s going on. People who have whole rafts of “dietary restrictions” that are more like preferences than actual allergies seems to muddy the waters.

In another way this has been a mixed blessing for those with genuine need for special diets. The numbers of people avoiding gluten for whatever reason have grown, thus increasing the market viability of gluten-free products. The allergen-free section of supermarkets has expanded from a tiny shelf to whole aisles. Partly this is obviously due to a rise in childhood allergies, but also due to a lot of other people selecting their diets around exclusion. The downside of course, is having much of the public regard allergies as a lifestyle choice, not a medical need.

And labels like organic and “fair trade” have turned out to be another nexus on which people can judge their moral righteousness in what they choose to eat. A newer version of ascribing moral values to food (I’m sure you’ve known people who talk of chocolate cake as “naughty” and eating salad as “being good”). I meet people who are “eating clean” (rather than what, eating dirty?), a spectacularly hazy concept that just means “better than you”.

It’s just a total coincidence that clean = thin.

Updates:

You may recall the Crooked House pub fiasco, which I discussed here

Now these vandals are being forced by the courts to rebuild the pub. Brick by crooked brick.

HAHAHAHAHAHA good.

Where else I’ve been:

Writing about condensed milk for JSTOR Daily.

1. It’s true, allergies are more common than they used to be https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/research/podcast/food-allergies-on-the-rise.html