Home > Author > Charlotte Biltekoff
1 " ...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. "
― Charlotte Biltekoff , Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
2 " 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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " …we as a society owe it to ourselves to engage in a critical reappraisal of the results of our obsession with diet as a proxy for health. I am not sure that we are talking about the health that we really want when we talk about eating habits; diet talk too often obscures structural and environmental stresses, constraints, exposures, and inequities, while naturalizing the dubious redefinition of health as an individual responsibility and imperative. "
