The Kardashian Era: Queen Kim’s appetite suppressing, flat tummy lollipops. Credit: Sarah Rogers, The Daily Beast.
What does a healthy relationship with food look like?
What do you do when your friend tells you she’s proud of herself because she’s eating one meal and a couple of raw, fresh-pressed juices a day? How can you tell someone that in between whole-foods and FOD-maps they’ve lost their direction with food? While Anthony Warner may not think that there is such thing as good and bad foods, there is most definitely such thing as good and bad relationships with food.
But the problem is in these relationships, these polygamous three-ways between us, our food, and multi-national corporations.
In a society where food is used to shame and pressure us to conform to an image projected by the media, an economic relationship with food looks like influencers, models, SkinnyTea sponsorships, hair vitamins, weight loss lollipops… Perhaps these relationships with food starts when a young girl looks in the mirror and for the first time, sees herself as fat, or less than for being more than. You are a dollar sign and you are ripe for the picking by multi-million dollar corporations capitalising off your insecurity.
Warner’s approach to weight as a mostly inheritable trait, much like height, is a reality that we’re told to ignore. Because without this three-way, well how is the economy going to profit off us?
A healthy relationship with food begins the moment you realise that health is not an aesthetic, that it is a lifestyle, and that doesn’t always look like it does on Instagram.
I really love what you said about health being a lifestyle rather than an aesthetic. Somewhere along the line health became synonymous with the rhetoric of ‘bikini bodies’, and lost its true meaning as simply looking after BOTH your body and mind. Health doesn’t look the same on everyone, and its dangerous to pretend it does.
For thousands of years our ancestors existed as hunter-gatherers, before progressing into expanding agrarian societies. In both instances, survival depended on favourable weather conditions and freedom from diseases that could decimate an entire harvest. Under these natural pressures, to simply have the sustenance to survive was a daily blessing.
As this blog shows, the advent of modernity has caused a fundamental shift in our relationship with food. Food is now available at the click of a button, pre-packaged and ready for our consumption. Yet there is a unique contradiction – at a time where food is more accessible than ever, our relationship with food has arguably never been worse. A culture has been built in which socially constructed notions of beauty tell young girls that to fit in they must deprive themselves of their most basic needs. As you point out in the blog, this has only been furthered by ‘influencers’ who portray an idealised version of themselves to their impressionable fans, and reinforce the unhealthy habits that underpin this problem. Exploitative companies thrive within this ecosystem. To challenge them requires a real effort to educate youth about the dangers of social media – and for those in positions of influence to truly appreciate the social responsibility that they hold. Things such as ‘Body-positive’ movements signal the beginning of this necessary change, but there is a long way to go to break through the socially-engineered barriers of normative beauty standards and false ideas of ‘healthy eating’.
This is a really intuitive post! What first caught my attention about it was the image, which fits into the ironic atmosphere of your blog post. Kim Kardashian probably became famous for all the ‘wrong’ reasons… including releasing a sex tape. Despite this, people thrive off her promotions. Why? Perhaps because, as you explained, females are made to feel worthless; and are constantly sexualised. This is something we avoid discussing in New Zealand, which, quite frankly, is disgusting. Food has become more about insta-worthiness and sexual worthiness than it has about health and lifestyle. What Anthony Warner had to say about these ridiculous diets is incredibly relevant in ways that people do not realise. It took me years to make the discovery Anthony was talking about. It took me years to realise that food, diet, and health, are much more personal than we think. To master health, we first need to master ourselves: our minds and our self-love. Without these values, we regard diets as trends and square posts. We regard diets as a fashion and place our values in someone else… like Kim Kardashian.