Race, Class, and Culture

How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism? Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest...

I've started and scrapped and restarted this essay several times. Imagine the camera zooming in on a wastebasket filled with crumpled typewritten pages, my thoughts written in red pen across the top. Too mean , this introduction about how teaching people a new recipe won't help them eat more vegetables. Too accusatory , this one asking if the skills you are teaching were requested by the people you teach. Be more human . Because the desire to teach is at the core of being human. We want to...

From making comfort food to speaking with ancestors, immigrant families across the U.S. are turning to cultural traditions to cope with the isolation and stress of quarantine. Latino communities have been affected disproportionately by the virus. In Texas, Latinos make up almost 40% of the population but account for 53% of the state’s COVID-19-related deaths, according to CDC data from December 2020. During a challenging pandemic, comfort food has helped many of us sustain ourselves, whether...

"From Houston, Texas , and Atlanta, Georgia , to Birmingham, Alabama ; Baltimore, Maryland ; Nashville, Tennessee , and Jackson, Mississippi , the long, treacherous history of redlining in this country aligns with where food redlining (or food apartheid) is prevalent today—and that is unambiguously state violence. “Just looking at food alone, hunger, the inability to feed ourselves,” Cooper tells ESSENCE. “ That’s violent . To be hungry and malnourished is a very violent phenomenon. ...

New research out of Drexel University finds that racism can be a catalyst for food insecurity. Released Monday by the school’s Center for Hunger Free Communities, the report shows that people who experienced discrimination firsthand struggled with hunger twice as often as others. When — or where — that discrimination occurred didn’t matter. However, food insecurity was more likely the more someone had experienced racism. [For more on this story by Aaron Moselle, go to...

"For Gladstone, upholding Indigenous food is partly about healing from a history of trauma. The processes of colonialization and the genocide of Native peoples across North America was mirrored by the devastation of the plants and animals that Native Americans had long relied on for sustenance and spiritual companionship........ Gladstone believes that the trauma of genocide and the devastation of food-giving landscapes had a large impact on driving poor health outcomes in her community, as...

Migration and cultural dislocation may not only have emotional impacts, but it can change body's susceptibility to diet related disease. When thinking about how we address health disparities among different communities, understanding heritage and culture may have an important role. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/health/immigration-gut-microbiome.html?action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12743

In this Opinion article, we review compelling evidence that weight stigma is harmful to health, over and above objective body mass index. Weight stigma is prospectively related to heightened mortality and other chronic diseases and conditions. Most ironically, it actually begets heightened risk of obesity through multiple obesogenic pathways. Weight stigma is particularly prevalent and detrimental in healthcare settings, with documented high levels of ‘anti-fat’ bias in healthcare providers,...

A podcast discussion of the article shared below "Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong." What is the best way to address health issues that are connected to overweight and obesity? Share your thoughts! http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/10/03/obesity-overweight-weight-loss

This article blew me away... " Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path. ....... 'A lot of my job is helping people heal from the trauma of interacting with the medical system,' says Ginette Lenham, a counselor who specializes in obesity. The rest of...

Often, when I serve watermelon in a program or workshop, there is at least one African American person who looks askance at this fruit. On many occasions, people have declared definitively, "I don't eat watermelon." I have always known that this food has a racially-charged meaning for the African American community so I never try to convince them to try it. This essay, gets to the difficult and painful history of watermelon and its use, like so many things, in the oppression of African...