The clean-eating conspiracy

In today’s day and age, it is rare to come across a grocery shop or restaurant that doesn’t offer gluten-free, vegan or banting-friendly meals. Social media has provided dieting with a fresh coat of paint, and we seem to be increasingly obsessed with pursuing the healthy lifestyles portrayed by wholesome Instagram posts boasting sunlit yoga sessions and brightly coloured smoothie bowls. Ruby Tandoh’s very insightful and personal article for Vice, a Canadian-American print magazine, entitled The Unhealthy Truth Behind ‘Wellness’ and ‘Clean Eating’ talks about how dieting has been rebranded as ‘wellness’, and that everyone wants a bite.

A dietician interviewed by Tandoh highlighted the fact that diet culture is perceived as black or white – if you’re not dieting, you’re not caring for your body. The polarization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods has resulted in a society obsessed with a pursuit of health, which ironically results in many people ignorantly following diets and lifestyles that are not healthy at all. Supermarkets and restaurants have bought in on the illusion, offering carb-free, sugar-free and gluten-free options for everything. It must be remembered that while many consumers suffer from allergic reactions to these foods, not everyone will necessarily derive benefit from cutting products such as couscous and rye bread out of their diets. While I am not suggesting that all dietary lifestyles are fads (there is value in a well-balanced, well-informed diet), the demonization of so called ‘bad foods’ has created a gastronomic minefield of dietary options. Tandoh talks about orthorexia, a fixation with the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ foods, which can be to the detriment of one’s social and physical well-being. Clean eating as a food culture has unleashed a scourge of insecurity and obsession in society, and is exacerbated by the overwhelming amount of content on social media that pokes at these insecurities by portraying perfect wellness and health. According to Tandoh, this double standard is reflected even in today’s cookbooks: “the very same ones that tell us to locate our self-worth not in how we look but in who we are and how we feel – there is a consistent, entrenched fear of fatness.”

Tandoh’s article first appeared in 2016 but still has relevance today. Despite the huge movement for body positivity and self-acceptance, the underlying pressure of unrealistic standards still lurks beneath the surface of Instagram posts and cookbooks. Tandoh asks the question, “when we advocate, and even insist upon, a diet so restrictive, moralising and inflexible, and market that diet to young women, and then dress it up as self-care: just how responsible is that?” According to her, wellness allows people to rationalise their food insecurities under the façade of health-consciousness. I am in complete agreement with these sentiments, as not only have I observed this food culture spiralling out of control in my own social space, but I have also occasionally fallen victim to such thinking. In particular, Tandoh’s reassurance that “the rumble of your belly is not a saboteur”, struck a chord with me. One of my friends skips lunch if she’s had a slice of cake for tea. Fellow students deprive themselves of breakfast because of a previous night’s drunken McDonalds meal. I too am no stranger to making an enemy of my stomach, and will turn down an innocent ice-cream because I know I will feel guilty afterwards. This culture of elimination diets and deprivation has become a constant and ominous presence, leaking out from social media into the realities of many.

Tandoh leaves her readers with this statement; “eating well is eating intuitively, with pleasure and without shame”. To me, healthy eating is exactly that. My grandmother always reminds me, “everything in moderation”, which I think ties in with Tandoh’s ideas. Without being irresponsible about it, I believe that eating healthily is simply a matter of respecting your body enough to give it what it needs, when it needs it. Social media has made it difficult to portray realistic expectations for young people, and too often, we are sucked into the vacuum of conformity.

Tandoh’s article gave me a lot of food for thought (pun intended). In Trends Untapped, I am trying to pull the plug on popular preconceptions, and the concept of clean eating certainly ascribes to that. By demonizing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, we allow our perceptions of food to be polarized to black and white. In turn, a culture striving for perfect health develops, and completely takes over the lives of those who succumb to it. I would be fascinated to explore deeper into this subject; healthy eating is such a multi-layered topic, and the number of fad diets that we are tricked into trying is countless. Society has placed wellness on a pedestal, but according to Tandoh, we already have the secret to wellness.

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I wrote this piece in response to a blog post that I read.