Two of the five acts defined as genocide by the United Nations’ Genocide Convention of 1948 are causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The material erasure of foods, foodways, and food systems under colonialism and the representational erasure of those same foodways and food systems from the historical record serve as genocidal elements designed to destroy the culture of colonized populations.
Article
Genocide and Food in Postcolonial Narratives
Jonathan Bishop Highfield
Article
Fat Stigma in the United States
Amy Erdman Farrell
Fat stigma has deep roots in US and Western cultures, dating back centuries. Whatever leniency or even valorization given to a fat body for its sign of wealth or healthy fecundity was largely replaced by a colonial abhorrence of fatness linked to processes of racialization, white supremacy, and the legitimization of slavery. Fatness became a powerful signifier of an “uncivilized” body, one unfit for modern life. These ideas continue to resonate in the early 21st century, fueling a $90 billion diet industry, causing discrimination in every institution and organization, and creating untold harm in the lives of fat individuals and communities. Significantly, however, these ideas are not uniform. Not only are there varied perceptions of fatness (the idealization of a fat baby’s body, the enjoyment of fatty foods, the pleasure in the curves and flesh of a lover), there is also an organized and decades-old fat activist and fat studies movement that challenges fat stigma on every layer.
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Proteins and Meat
Laura-Elena Keck
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Proteins held a special position in 19th-century nutritional debates: “Discovered” in the mid-1800s, they were thought to be the source of muscle energy and seemed to offer solutions to many of the problems and challenges of the industrial age. Meat, in particular, was praised by doctors and nutrition experts as a protein-rich food that could help to combat malnutrition, shape more efficient human bodies, and enhance industrial and military performance—serving not only the needs of the individual but also the interests of the nation state. Meat consumption was also associated with normative concepts of masculinity and “civilization” and was frequently cited as a reason—and justification—for colonialism. In this new equation, meat equaled proteins equaled strength. This attitude slowly started to change in the early 1900s: A growing number of nutrition experts joined early critics—vegetarians and nutrition reformers—in advocating the use of more “efficient” protein and energy sources, while excessive meat consumption increasingly came to be identified as a risk factor for disease. Nevertheless, today we can see many of the 19th-century preoccupations with proteins, meat, “civilization,” and masculinity lingering or re-emerging in dietary trends like the “paleo diet,” protein-enriched “functional foods,” or books written by vegan bodybuilders. Transcending nutritional debates, these phenomena are symptomatic of broader attitudes toward eating, health, society, and the human body.
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Food and Nationalism in India
Benjamin Siegel
The imbrication of food and nationalism in India and South Asia was an implicit concern in early anthropological literature on primarily Hindu foodways. In time, this theme became more explicit in historiographic work on colonial encounters and culinary resistance and in political economy of domesticity. It was also increasingly overt in and the emergence of food and hunger as a locus for nationalist claim making. The Bengal famine, coming at the crux of the freedom struggle in India, helped move these claims to more central positions in postcolonial Indian politics. An emerging body of work has seen culinary identity as central to both diasporic politics and questions of marginalization in Indian political life.
