White Supremacy in Diet and Wellness Culture
*photo credit: the new york times
TREND CENTRL's YouTube series 'Blue Therapy' was a wild ride from start to finish for many reasons, yet the scene that will forever stay with me is Paul exclaiming that he won't eat the food his partner Chioma cooks because it is 'too fattening'. For context, both Paul and Chioma are Nigerian and the food in question is home-cooked traditional Nigerian food. From the moment you set eyes on him, you can tell that Paul is the type of guy who cares A LOT about the way that he looks – he dresses well, he is clean-shaven and spends a lot of time working on his upper body. These are not bad qualities; however, my issue is the way these qualities were used to justify some problematic ideals. The main place where Paul and I differ [on the topic of food] is that I am not convinced that food has to be bland, unseasoned or Caucasian to be healthy. He, unfortunately, is. I don't blame Paul for the conclusion he arrived at because all the messaging I have ever been surrounded by has attempted to tell me the same thing.
Society and the media have destroyed my relationship with food so as I have grown older, I have made a concerted effort to engage with qualified and knowledgeable dieticians on the internet. I believe wholeheartedly in surrounding yourself [online and in person] with voices that work to lift you up and not bring you down. As I have made progress towards healing my relationship with food and my body, I have become better at calling out the problematic ideas I still hold onto – ideas of what healthy food looks like or consists of. Ideas of what unhealthy food looks like or consists of.
A lot of food education will say you shouldn't have multiple sources of carbohydrates on the same plate (an idea that is heresy to all Africans), or that oil and fats should be limited. There's a focus on salads, eating vegetables raw and using lean meats. There has come to be very little variation in what 'healthy' looks like. To be quite blunt, a lot of the wider society's views of what healthy food can be are meals that are mainstream for the white, non-immigrant portion of the population. 'White is best' seems to be what is preached in the majority of diet messaging, heavily implying that other cultures' foods are unhealthy or bad for you.
white supremacy | noun
the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, in particular black or Jewish people.
In a blog post for Self Magazine, Tamara Melton, a registered dietician of Trinidadian heritage discussed how the extent of education in cultural competency she received during her studies was very limited. "If a patient was Mexican, we should teach them to sub out the potatoes... with a tortilla. If a patient was Asian, swap a serving of pasta for a serving of rice." As 'inclusive' as those suggestions believed themselves to be, the notion of trying to make the way people eat resemble a 'white' plate is not the way to go. Instead of an attempt to acknowledge how different people prepare their meals, source their ingredients or think about food, the focus has essentially been on making the swaps necessary to shove a person's culture into the mould of a Eurocentric diet.
I would like you [the reader] to take a moment and see if you can remember a time when the healthy meal suggestions you were presented with included a significant percentage of ethnic foods. When was the last time you saw tacos, burritos, noodles, curry, daal or anything similar presented as being a viable 'healthy' food option? Aside from all the uncomfortable racial messaging behind this phenomenon, I am worried about how this perpetuates the concept of 'good' and 'bad' foods. I have spoken before about how you can't moralise your eating habits but I think it needs to be said again. Food is inherently neutral. Nothing makes a food 'bad' – not the calorie count, macro breakdown or portion size. As my favourite internet dietician Abbey Sharpe says, unless you stole it from a baby, all food should be guilt-free. Unless you have an intolerance or allergy to a food or you just do not enjoy it, that food is not and cannot be 'bad'. I'm saying this for current me but also for younger me who used to limit her portions of the dinner her mother had prepared her because it contained both rice and potatoes. I wasn't kidding about those double-carb meals.
There's this unspoken understanding in the west that getting Indian, Chinese or Mexican takeaway is unhealthy which is not only untrue, it demonises an entire culture's eating habits. It is not uncommon for someone to refer to a takeaway pizza or taco or noodle dish as a 'cheat meal' - you know, as in cheating on your restrictive diet. Isn't it funny that we will use a westernised version of another culture's food to judge the 'healthiness' of that entire culture's foods? In most other arenas we understand that an original cannot be judged on the quality of its imitation so why is food any different? Whilst there is nothing wrong with those foods i.e. they aren't bad or bad for you, it's worth noting that all those cultures have more to offer us than what's readily available on a delivery app. I don't think any culture exists that doesn't include meals that showcase fruits, vegetables, grains and protein in all their glory. Regardless of that, we have for some reason convinced ourselves that there is only one way to do healthy.
Another thing, I don't know who needs to tell you this but seasoning is not the enemy. You can dress your salad. You are allowed to have chipotle sauce. Your Instagram pictures of boiled unsalted chicken and raw broccoli don't leave me impressed by your self-control. They make me sad. So very very sad. For you. It would be one thing if traditionally white foods were the best of the best and so full of flavour and nutrition and excitement. But they're not. Think about it like this; at a time when humans believed that if you sailed too far towards the horizon you would fall off the edge of the earth, some men risked it all in the pursuit of spice. They committed a lot of crimes and wrecked a lot of cultures but still, they risked an unimaginable death in the pursuit of some all-purpose-seasoning. I don't know about you but I find it pretty disrespectful that you could be aware of all that and still not even bother to use the spice. Like, come on people!
Let's look at Paul from Blue Therapy as an example [again]. His refusal to eat the cultural foods his partner was preparing was one of the major points of contention in their relationship. He is also an egotistical person who would unironically call himself a 'high-value man' but that's beside the point. Whether we realise it or not, food goes hand in hand with community and connection. Numerous studies have confirmed that families/ groups of people that share meals tend to be more emotionally connected. The person that feels detached from their cultural foods or tries to avoid them, is then put in the situation of having to separate themselves from other members of their community. Food can serve as one of the strongest tethers someone has to connect them to their heritage. This has been true for me. Severing that tether could do irreparable damage to someone's sense of self and once again, their connection to their culture.
Finally, another thing we can be sure of from years of diet-related research is that the key to long-lasting weight loss (if that is a goal of yours) is sustainable dieting. The reason restriction doesn't work long-term is due to the detrimental effects on your metabolism coupled with the bingeing mentality that's sure to be adopted somewhere down the track. That's the reason why most dieticians don't recommend having cheat days. If you tell yourself that you only get one day a week of eating "unhealthy" foods or "cheat meals", you're almost guaranteed to eat more of those in that one day than you would have in an entire week without having that restriction in place. Something that I also class as an unhealthy restriction is cutting off culturally specific foods and meals. Not just for the reasons I've listed above but also because it's not sustainable. Inevitably, an individual who has been abstaining from their cultural comfort meals will one day reach a breaking point and go back to however they were eating before. There might not be anything inherently bad about this but for the person, it will feel like a failure or like there's something wrong with them. Though communities on the internet may be trying to promote intuitive eating, society as a whole loves to assume that anyone who fails at a goal they set simply lacks the self-control or stamina to see it through. Ending up in a failure mindset is not any better either.
"What is considered healthy is often associated with thinness, and thinness is often associated with whiteness," says Tamar Samuels, a registered dietician. "We need to redefine what healthy looks like to include different body shapes, colours and sizes." In this same way, we need that new definition of healthy to include foods from other cultures.
