Quotessence
Home / Topics / Diet Culture Quotes

Diet Culture Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Diet Culture.

Diet Culture Quotes

“...despite seemingly scientific origins, dietary ideals are cultural, subjective, and political. While its primary aim may be to improve health, the process of teaching people to ‘eat right’ inevitably involves shaping certain kinds of subjects, and citizens, and shoring up the identity and social boundaries of the ever-threatened American middle class.”

FoodHealthNutritionDiet CultureFood Politics
Book:Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
Create image

“By 1980, the economic theory of neoliberalism, with its faith in free markets, property rights, and individual autonomy, had begun to reshape cultural notions of good citizenship. The good citizen was increasingly imagined as an autonomous, informed individual acting responsibly in his or her own self-interest, primarily through the market, as an educated consumer. Dovetailing with the new health consciousness, the ethos of neoliberalism shifted the burden of caring for the well-being of others from the state to the individual and recast health as a personal pursuit, responsibility, and duty. As the burden of solving social problems and preserving the health of individuals shifted from the public to the private sector, alternative dietary ideals reinforced the increasingly important social values of personal responsibility and consumer consumption.”

PoliticsHealthUs HistoryNeoliberalismDiet CultureFood Politics
Book:Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
Create image

“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.”

HealthDiet CultureFood PoliticsBody Politics
Book:Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
Create image

“The pursuit of health became a means for professionalizing middle class of he late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to know and identify itself and to stake claims to responsibility and authority. Health became a key marker of middle-class morality and identity, but its utility as such derived in large part from the way it could distinguish members of the responsible middle class from those beneath them in the social hierarchy who failed to achieve the goal of health.”

HealthDiet CultureClass Politics
Book:Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
Create image

“I don't want to die, go to heave, and when St. Peter asks me if I had fun, have my answer be, 'No, but I tried really hard to make sure everyone else did”

InspirationHappinessAcceptanceBody PositivityDiet Culture
Book:The Clothes Make the Girl (Look Fat)?: Adventures and Agonies in Fashion – A Hilarious Memoir and Self-Help Guide for Curvy Women on Body Image and Style
Create image

“Aida swung by with cookbooks, dietary stipulations, menus. To nouvelle and classique French fare we added Neolithic recipes free of dairy, medieval Italian recipes heavy on squash and almonds, early agrarian recipes so crammed with husky, fibrous grains that they would, in Aida's words, Make you shit till you see god. Modern additions included a vegan diet beloved of the world's best cricket player, astronaut supplements for bone density, foods charcoal-infused and nitrate-free.”

CookingVeganSupplementsFiberDietaryDiet Culture
Book:Land of Milk and Honey
Create image