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“For those of us who can and do choose to 'eat right,' understanding the cultural politics of dietary health presents a particular kind of call to awareness and accountability. Given its social and moral freight, eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege. It is not unlike and is clearly connected to other forms of privilege that usually go unnoticed by the people who possess them, such as whiteness and thinness. Choosing socially sanctioned diets makes subtle but very powerful claims to morality, responsibility, and fitness for good citizenship. We who are lucky enough to have eating habits that align with dietary ideals or inhabit the kinds of bodies that imply we do may think that our shapes or healthy preferences are a sign of our virtue, the result of will, or perhaps nothing more than a lucky twist of fate, but history shows that there are cultural mechanisms that produce the seemingly natural alignment between ideal diets, ideal body sizes, and the habits and preferences of the elite.” — Charlotte Biltekoff

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For those of us who can and do choose to 'eat right,' understanding the cultural politics of dietary health presents a particular kind of call to awareness and accountability. Given its social and moral freight, eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege. It is not unlike and is clearly connected to other forms of privilege that usually go unnoticed by the people who possess them, such as whiteness and thinness. Choosing socially sanctioned diets makes subtle but very powerful claims to morality, responsibility, and fitness for good citizenship. We who are lucky enough to have eating habits that align with dietary ideals or inhabit the kinds of bodies that imply we do may think that our shapes or healthy preferences are a sign of our virtue, the result of will, or perhaps nothing more than a lucky twist of fate, but history shows that there are cultural mechanisms that produce the seemingly natural alignment between ideal diets, ideal body sizes, and the habits and preferences of the elite.
— Charlotte Biltekoff