Ren Lind
IWC 100
Prof. Scott Olsen
14 December 2022
The Oppressive Beginnings of American Diet Culture
Eating “bad foods” is treated like an offensive plague in American society. The claws of diet culture are dug deep into the structures of society and the mention of healthy eating is as recurrent as taking a breath. Alongside this, every ad portrays body beauty standards. But how did body standards become integrated into our culture? Healthy bodies and dieting have a complex history in America, and the consequences of these ideas have had a spiderweb of effects. While some early-day scientists had good intentions to heal sicknesses with healthy eating, many American science writers in the late 1800s to early 1900s used dieting to morally shame bodies and perpetuate racism, sexism, classism, and almost any “ism” you can imagine.
Firstly, the very idea of food and its consumption has a lot of connotations. The book Political Gastronomy: Early English Atlantic World helps examine this idea from a historical perspective. It’s written about the early American settlers and voyagers from the first 1621 Thanksgiving. It emphasized that since the early formation of the United States, food has been used as a source of power, and ideas were formed about the morality of certain foods. It provides key examples of how there were “good foods” and “bad foods.” Settlers always wanted to eat familiar foods because they had “fears rooted in humoral theories of climate, diet, and health that English bodies would be changed by foreign foods” (LaCombe 51). Though this is a different take than healthy eating, it’s essential to realize that the start of American white society had eating habits that comforted the white community and discouraged foreign bodies. This idea would fuel much of the Western diet science in the early 1900s up to modern-day beauty standards.
Food also organizes much of society. The book Food, Power, and Agency explains the use of food as a source of power, whether that be used to define cultures or oppress people. Countries will have different cultures and practices surrounding food, but without fail it “shapes relations, rituals, and reality, and individuals, identities, and bodies, and it challenges all of these categories and ways of thinking” (Martschukat, Simon 3). So many of our routines, ideas, and perceptions are based on food. Every day is structured around meals. There are breaks during work for lunch and some cultures will have adolescents go home from school to eat lunch, to name a few examples. It’s intertwined with everything, including the way we look at ourselves and others. How often have you judged someone for their body type? How often have you seen people on the internet write comments about a figure’s weight? America is obsessed with food, but also counting calories, analyzing the components that consist of each meal, and judging others’ food choices.
The beginnings of mass diet culture in America were in the early 1900s. Diet books were being published and ideas started to spread through pop culture and word of mouth. However, even in the early stages, dieting increased the amount of sickness and encouraged self-consciousness in the Western world (Mackert 105-106). While people were trying to help their bodies, it was having the reverse effect. Physically they were getting sick, and mentally it was creating a sickness of body image consciousness. This consciousness is still ever-present in modern times.
Diving deeper into the reasons for diet culture booming, the dietary sciences combined “science, economic efficiency and racial uplift” and the specific science was described as a “supplement to eugenics” (Mackert 109). Eugenics has been used as a justification for horrible actions for decades, and the origins of dieting reveal similar justifications. The racist ideas attached to healthy eating thrived in the white racist population of America and helped dieting establish itself. There was a widespread fear that white people were going to become the minority in America, so the white community used dieting to increase their lifespan and justify their self-believed superiority. It only furthered the divide between the white and black communities.
There’s a multitude of racist thoughts tied to the history of dieting. For instance, the founder of Kellogg cereal, and famous 1900s food reformer, wrote that not eating meat would “keep one’s blood free from toxins and impurities” (Mackert 109), but this argument was used “to understand ‘pure blood’ as a metaphor for racial purity . . . it shows that racial progress was among the main objectives of the food reformers” (Mackert 109). The primary motivation for avoiding meat was not for health benefits, but to fight the fear of the white population declining in the United States. Many food reformers had a pattern of using food to hurt people of color and create an aurora of white supremacy, rather than fight against unhealthiness and sickness. For example, vegetarianism was used by the Nazis. They believed “eating meat meant impurity, inability to reach the highest level of knowledge and wisdom and, finally, how all dictatorships refer to their enemies, which is, inferiority” (Evans 136). While this doesn’t focus on America, it reveals how widespread it was to take advantage of diets for personal gain and use them against people to attack their characters. Both of these examples had malicious intentions and used their authority to gain credibility. The health components of food were used as weapons.
Fatness has also been used as a justification for racism. In the 1800s, there was a popular hierarchy of society that described the rankings of traits like race, gender, and body types, among others. There are words that describe each ranking which was often hurtful and prejudiced if it was a “lower” identity. The words that described fatness were eerily similar to the descriptions for races other than white, and the conclusion was that “fat was not white” (Farrel 60). Undoubtedly, this was to emphasize that white people were “above” being fat. Fatness was put onto people of color as if it was a disgusting trait, and it added to the mocking of people of color. It also marked more importance on dieting. Fatness became a shameful, morally incorrect act. Weight was a matter of morality, and to be fat was considered unconditionally wrong. White people began to be afraid of being labeled as fat because then they were disgracing their race. Fatness was something to mock, not something to be.
Fatphobia and dietary racism were most prevalent in the case of a South African Khoikhoi woman named Sara Baartman. She was a typical black woman, but she was overweight with her weight receding in her breasts, buttocks, and labia. For this reason, she was sold into an exotic display in London in the early 19th century for European men to view her. Europeans treated her like an object, and her appearance was treated as if it were something abnormal and wrong. She was scrutinized. She, unfortunately, died young, but a curious scientist took her body and started to examine it, focusing on the sexual parts that had more fat and using those as “‘definitive’ evidence of her low-level status on the scale of civilizations” (Farrel 65). Her buttocks were created into plaster for a museum display until they removed it in the 1970s when she finally received a proper burial. The scientists fixated on this woman’s sexual parts and reduced her identity to her body. Alongside this, her body was classified as disgusting because of the added fat. If women, especially black women, gained weight in their sexual parts, then they were seen as disturbingly promiscuous, yet completely undesirable. Every museum viewer got the idea that her natural body parts, and ones that look similar, are meant to be on display for decades as if they’re a public spectacle.
The sexism in the story of Baartman reveals a larger picture of the sexism in this time period from diet culture. The book Fate Shame: stigma and the fat body in America examine the many ways that fat was stigmatized and insulted from the 1800s-1900s with an emphasis on the 1900s. It focuses on the stigmatization of women’s bodies, particularly fat ones, and the ways it negatively affected the American feminist movement. The author analyzes key writers of the time that spread sexist notions, such as Dr. Leanord Willaims. The author summarizes a portion of his writing as saying, “men of savage tribes preferred women who were fat and round; in England and the United States, however, William noted approvingly, women were fighting their ‘endocrinal’ tendency to gain weight because they knew that fat women were ‘repulsive sights, degrading alike to their sex and civilization’” (Farrel 59). Willaim implies that women are not allowed to be overweight unless they want to be the embodiment of a disgrace. Not only does this increase the unrealistic beauty standards for women, but it takes away women’s autonomy over their bodies by limiting what their physical appearance can look like. Note the use of “savage tribes” compared to the white countries that are a part of the “civilization.” This doesn’t relate to sexism, but it does reveal more racist dictation. Europeans described people of color as “savages” in history, while the white acted differently and were able to represent a “respectable society.”
Feminist movements were bombarded with anti-feminism cartoons that depicted women as fat and ridiculed their fight. A cartoon seen in Judge magazine has an overweight woman accompanied with the caption, ‘Speaker of the House,” to mock this woman for suggesting she deserves rights since her weight is taking away from her womanly beauty. The author of Fat Shame argues “the cover says: it has turned her into a primitive, coarse beast, too ugly, too big, too fat to be a woman” (Farrell 82). Women were characterized by their appearance- if they didn’t fit the ideal of a skinny white woman, then the hope for rights was out of the question. It wasn’t even a possibility. This portrayed to women across the United States that they needed to be skinny and diet if they wanted to get taken seriously. A cartoon published in Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Press emphasized being skinny to get noticed. A skinny white woman was drawn with “soft, curly hair. She is leading a suffrage parade. Clad in white gloves, her dainty hands hold her ‘Votes for Women’ sign, while her coat shows the outline of a slender figure. Young men march behind her, transfixed it seems, by her beauty” (Farrell 82). Here the skinny woman is being seen, but the men are only focused on her physical appearance. These cartoons reveal that fat women were not seen as beautiful. Overweight women did not get noticed unless they were being mocked, and no one cared about their opinions. However, if a skinny woman marched for rights, men’s heads would turn to assess her appearance, but even still, they did not listen.
Religion also played an important role in uplifting skinny, dieting bodies. White protestants, a very influential group at the time, connected being Godly to being skinny, “at the end of the 19th century, white protestants began to see a fat body as a ‘deficient’ body, due primarily to its associations with gluttony, and a thin body as one closer to God, as evidenced by the control and constraint one presumably had to demonstrate to maintain that body” (Farrell 60). Protestants viewed one’s body as God’s gift, and what that person does with it is a testament to their relationship and dedication to faith and God. Religion was a huge part of the early United States, so it was important that everyone demonstrate a faithful relationship to God, and to them, this meant being skinny. To be fat was now a sin against God. This struck fear in people’s hearts and convinced them that dieting was a necessary part of life.
Furthermore, dieting was tied to nationwide economics. A study revealed the amount of money lost from illnesses and overweight deaths, “The national annual unnecessary loss of capitalized net earnings is about $1,000,000,000. This amount of money lost by ‘preventable deaths,’ would add up, with the costs of illnesses, to ‘at least a billion and a half of preventable waste’” (Mackert 110). “Preventable deaths” blame individuals, but it doesn’t acknowledge that some people are naturally heavier or healthy and overweight. Nonetheless, businessmen found this idea astonishing and pushed dieting into the economic-focused community, giving them a factual, non-social reason to justify the importance of diets.
Relating to money, healthy foods were only available to select middle and upper-class citizens. “The emphasis on a specific, expertly planned diet to improve health and fitness was basically a white, middle-class and, thus, exclusive ideal– symbolically as well as financially” (Mackert 110). Hiring a dietary planner was expensive, along with the healthy foods, and having access to fitness materials all added up financially. The only people in America that could afford this and have time for it was the white middle class. This is problematic considering that being skinny was “superior,” but if a majority of people could not afford to live this lifestyle, are they supposed to accept this? The class divides grew, and the poor were frowned upon for not dishing out money to accommodate this new fad. Once again, diet culture became a way for middle to upper-class white men to use this to raise their status in America.
Demonifying fatness has been used to popularize diets and discriminate against groups of people. Women’s bodies were scrutinized, and people of color were called inferior, all while the white middle to upper-class men thrived and enjoyed power. Modern-day dieting is extremely different from the 1900s, as it’s now backed up with peer-reviewed studies and genuine nutritional facts that can greatly benefit individuals. In the present, dieting can positively change someone’s life, if used correctly. Knowing the origin doesn’t make dieting any less important, but it’s important to critically evaluate the beauty standards that stemmed from the 1900s. When you judge someone’s body, particularly a women’s or a person of color’s, ask yourself: is the root of your judgment justified, or is it a result of 1900s diet culture?
Works Cited
Evans, Bryce. “Nutritional Reform and Public Feeding in Britain, 1917-1919” Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Gentilcore and Smith. pp. 125-136.
Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, New York University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cord-ebooks/detail.action?docID=865462.
Food, Power, and Agency, edited by Jurgen Martschukat, and Bryant Simon, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cord-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6033983.
LaCombe, Michael A. Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cord-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3441872.
Mackert, Nina. “Making food matter: “Scientific eating” and the struggle for healthy selves” Food, Power, and Agency. Edited by Martshukat and Simon. pp. 105-128.
Martshukat, Jurgen, and Simon, Bryant. “Introduction” Food, Power, and Agency. Edited by Martshukat and Simon. pp. 1-9.
Proteins, Pathologies and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century, edited by David Gentilcore, and Matthew Smith, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cord-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5611784.