Charlotte Biltekoff

“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.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

“…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.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health