Is diet the new slavery?

For something that is meant to offer freedom and happiness, the diet has a habit of taking an initial number of people prisoner.

Now that 200 years have passed since the abolition of slavery in Britain, a movement that strangled the great wave of stolen African Americans in the New World and began the countdown to the eventual outlawing of slavery in the United States, perhaps now it’s time to take proper stock of the real reasons behind this more modern scourge.

While no one should push the metaphor too far and fully equate the visceral agonies of slavery with the emotional imprisonment of lifelong food problems (that would be an insult to those who suffered and died in a foreign land), neither should we ignore the pain. and the indignity of anguish over one’s own image.

And the fact is that following a diet is not a simple choice or a self-chosen misery for which individuals can simply take full responsibility for the cause, or therefore full responsibility for the cure. Knowledge and techniques are in this case a prerequisite for freedom.

Historians can always argue over which came stronger first, the sense that non-European races were inherently inferior, or whether economic forces, driving an insatiable desire for cheap new labor, in turn drove dehumanization.

Whatever it is, just as the grand themes of social theory resonate at the heart of slavery, classical and modern social theories underlie today’s food desperation.

Cultural power, as in racial rule, is at the root of slavery, along with economic power, as in the Marxist analysis that capital will develop its own ways, means, and methods wherever the opportunity is felt. There is always the fear that utility will trample on humanity.

But that model of analysis obviously doesn’t fit neatly just on top of the current obesity crisis and diet-intertwined existence. What forces are at play and how to recognize them, so that the unhappy obsessed with food and image can regain their serenity and balance of mind and body, free from obsessions with fat and body fat itself?

It could be argued that it is the power of gender dominance that is at stake. It is true that for centuries women have been hard pressed by the masculine vision of optimal feminine beauty and sexuality. But surely this still cannot be the whole picture after the accumulation of several decades of female rebalancing of gender scales. In fact, it is very clear that not only obesity but also the associated failed diets are becoming both male and female problems. Obviously, there are still gender power issues at play, but we need to look further to get a fuller picture.

Social theory over the last thirty years or so has been taking a closer look at culture itself through the lens of consumption and consumerism, and these perspectives have perhaps much to inform a better understanding of the problems of obesity and weight loss. weight.

Researcher and theorist Pierre Bourdieu developed a post-Marxist theory that linked aesthetic taste with class positioning. Through his notion of cultural capital, there are always options in all segments of the social spectrum. In the case of diets, there’s everything from ridiculously expensive famous colon irrigators to the tackiest fad diets in supermarket tabloids. You can spend a fortune or practically nothing, but still the diet has you trapped.

There is a sense in Bourdieu’s work that echoes the Frankfurt School theorists of earlier decades, namely that cultural aspiration is a set of fixed limits and unlikely to provide deep or lasting satisfaction. Dieting can be seen as a cultural artifact. It has become so controversial and challenged because it is a cultural construct that intrudes on the much more concrete territory of physical health and because, in this very clearly illuminated territory, it has abjectly failed in its stated intentions.

This is one of the key points that dieters can learn to take. Our attitudes toward food and eating and diet, no matter what is said or written, rarely have simple life-sustaining nutrition as their primary goal. Class, gender, culture, and power are inevitably wrapped up in every morsel we put or don’t put in our mouths.

Those who wish to achieve permanent, painless and natural weight loss would do well to launch their own individual campaigns against diet slavery. Hundreds of years of struggle and violence are not needed. All that is required is a simple, clear, and highly satisfying shift in perspective. The big difference this time is that otherwise it is we ourselves who are being enslaved.