I had a conversation recently with someone who misunderstood this project, who happened to ask me, "So, how much weight do you think you're going to lose?"
It took me a second to realize she wasn't joking. After clarifying the focus of this project, her comment has led me to think about the moralizing of food and eating that has happened in America. It brought me back to a night out with friends in my early twenties, when a friend turned to me as we placed our order and said, "I'm being bad: I'm drinking soda." Now, I'll admit soda is not a healthy option for a beverage, but her words implied a punishment was deserved for her crime.
I spent some time thinking this morning about how food moralizing is inflicted on women versus how it is on men in America. Women in this country learn, very early on, that thinness is equated with healthiness and our value as human beings. (This is not to discount the growing fat positive movement, which is awesome.) We are not taught to recognize healthy bodies, or even how to define a healthy body. I actually don't know how to describe what evaluation could be used to describe a healthy body based on non-medical knowledge and only on appearance, other than something like, "No evidence of rash, post-nasal drip or flu symptoms."
Which has led to dieting being a moral act, rather than a healthy choice. Kate Harding has a great post in the Shapely Prose archive about the "Fantasy of Being Thin," and how women are encouraged to diet as a means of coping with depression or saving a marriage, and how women often are convinced that weight loss will grant the prize of the good life. Or inversely, someone who is not thin does not deserve happiness.
Which leds me to food policing. Women do it to ourselves, telling ourselves that by eating the fat-free/low-carb/sugar-free/whatever we are being good, rather than making a choice about what we want to put into our bodies at that particular moment. This is not to criticize someone who is making informed food choices for personal, religious or health reasons, however they are defined by that individual. Instead, it is to clarify that eating a certain way does not equal virtue. The reward for dieting is not angel wings, a Ryan Gosling look-alike, or something else.
Not being a man, I can't claim familiarity with how men absorb America's perception of food morality. Though from the outside, I do think it is less focused on what is perceived as healthy for men and more focused on eating food that is equated with strength and hierarchy over the food chain: meat. Eating meat, by extension, suggests hunting and butchering, activities that are regarded as male. Additionally, the stereotype of eating meat is defined as pleasurable, while eating vegetables is perceived as work.
These concepts, albeit implying heteronormativity and generalizing though they may be, are examples of how our food morals are tied to gender roles - women must preserve their bodies in order to be beautiful (read:pleasing,acceptable, virtuous), men must eat that which demonstrates power.
Which brings me back to the comment about me losing weight. I'm not sure if the person automatically assumed that a woman doing a project about eating a certain way meant weight loss was a goal, but I think it may have been part of it.
So let me clarify: this project is not meant as a judgement on myself or anyone else. This project is not about altering my body or my weight. Not to deny the scientific evidence of the health benefits of a plant-based diet, but this project is to investigate how my carbon footprint and the carbon footprint of others intersect in the food system and food choices.
Click here to read the introduction and description of this project.
