what we consume, what consumes us

consequences of food-adjacent wellness and digital food culture

Photo by Vitalii Pavlyshynets on Unsplash

If taste denotes class, gender, and nationalities, the body is symbol for establishing this visually—displaying taste for all to see.

Postpartum, I sit between two worlds within digital food culture: the world of resistance to the wellness industry, where I bite back at the idea that my body must be optimized, my hair slicked back, my juice green. And then there’s the world of the fracturing, where I claw at the idea of my original body, struggling with stretch marks and softness I didn’t have last year. Wellness haunts me across my digital homes: postpartum teas, pills, detoxes, corsets, and exercise programmes to bounce back. I know these demons, and I know to avoid them.

And yet, because of these hauntings, I think about the idea of consumption differently. The message playing out quietly through the digital food media following many of us is the need to optimize body, soul, and algorithm.

To fit the self within the digital landscape, a state of consumption is needed.

digital food consumption

How do we value food? Or rather, what values get infused into our foods, and what do we become as a result? Deborah Lupton describes digital food cultures as places where sharing features help build digital communities—like cross platforms, reposts, or sharing to stories. Together, these forms of sharing frame data are inherent in these interactions. Datifying food practices shifts value further beyond taste and sociocultural meaning toward commodification and performative identity.

Digital landscapes transform our food values in quiet ways. For example, my podcast is a place where food is discussed, dissected, spoken of plainly or profoundly. There are no warm, ambient sounds or visuals to shape the conversation as if it played out beside onions crackling in hot oil. The digital economy around food is entirely that of the audiovisual, depending on performance, plating, and symbolism to infuse value and meaning into what foods are discussed or ignored. No tastes, smells, or textures – value becomes total listens, food descriptions, and the ability of myself and my guests to share their stories widely to build meaning, importance, and community.

Sociologist Bridget Conor looks at how digital food culture plays out, particularly in wellness, or what she calls cosmic wellness. How years of using Instagram (and now TikTok) to promote products and display clean eating regimens, physical fitness, slimness, and accompanying lifestyles have linked health and food together through restrictive practices. Self-discipline remains an umbrella for all the values bestowed upon our foods in North America, and the advents of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy only further this agenda.

Years ago, I read about Julie Guthman’s concept of the yuppie, the young professional middle-class (presumably white) person who seeks identity-carving through food and body performance. Guthman links yuppies to spring mix in a paper I revelled in when I was younger. She argues that this is a display of reflexive consumer, who “pays attention to how the food is made, and that knowledge shapes his or her ‘taste’ toward healthier food. That this consumer has a ‘healthier’ body is only implied.” This runs in contrast to common tastes: mass-produced palates that are salted and sugared and can travel long distances.

Within this version of America, reflexive consumers craft their taste and, subsequently, their bodies, with class and gender embroiled in crafting health identities. As Guthman so bluntly put it back in 2006, “this dichotomy not only suggests that ‘good’ food is out of the economic and cultural reach of non-elites, it fails to bring scrutiny to the labour conditions under which such food is produced.” To further that distinction, what we define as edible is culturally informed—I always think of the prescribed “ick” that Westerners feel around consuming insects, forgetting that this taste is shaped by colonialism and an urgent need to separate white appetites from the countries being invaded or ecosystems being stolen.

But what of the appetites that transcend the physical? When we’ve contained ourselves into such ascetic bodies that we no longer wish to eat physically, and instead digitally?  

ingestibles & food-adjacent consumption

Items that are not food can be ingested all the same. These can look like detox pills, crushed rock crystals, vitamins and herb supplements. These are items the FDA classify as foods (supplements, vitamins, powders, dusts) but are, as Conor argues, “food-adjacent”—whereby they offer more than just nutritional properties, like beauty, glow, and “mighty cosmic flow.” All unmeasurable realms, but aspirational nonetheless.

Conor points to the importance of cosmic spins on wellness and how it’s necessary to make wellness items look less like food and more immaterial. In doing so, any conspicuous wealth or over-consumption critiques can be pre-emptively blocked or diluted. After all, there is spiritual power in ingesting, and spiritual health is vaguely motivating enough to inspire a consumer to action. Sociologist Nikolas Rose speaks to how wellness illustrates that “technologies of life ‘are no longer constrained, if they ever were, by the poles of health and illness.’” Far from being a tangible, medical, or economic necessity, tuning into wellness to meet spiritual and body potentials means optimization is a moral pursuit.

Expanding digital food cultures to focus on restriction means that food-adjacent items, like ingestibles, work better online than in person. Flat lays of ingestible wellness products may be out of style, but on TikTok, it’s simple enough to hold an amber glass jar full of a mysterious pill to the camera. Viewing these pills and powders through the screen makes the immaterial accessible, albeit for ephemeral consumption (as long as the dopamine hit lasts). The format of these fast videos has also meant bodies aren’t needed for sales to the same extent as 90s infomercials. The use of stop-motion for stacks of cookbooks, adding ingredients to a bowl, or kitchen hauls against a bland backdrop makes us invisible and inseparable from our consumption.

The sentiment of removing the body from our digital food consumption runs in parallel to broader political efforts to maintain industrial food systems. Devin Kate Pope writes of this in “Against Fearing Home Cooks,” where government and industry loathing of hands touching homemade bread or tamales is wrapped under the guise of “safety” to change homemade food laws in Arizona. As Pope says, “Our hands are clean of flour, but at what cost?”

The moral pursuits of body optimization are based on entangling oppositions, as rhetorician Colleen Derkatch argues. Restoring the body can be a nourishing process, or it can be like fixing an old car – easily mechanized. Optimizing to be the most efficient version of yourself may be one of the goals of a capitalist economy.  Yet combining these two forces, restoration and optimization, means that wellness will forever be a moving target. It’s genius, and it’s evil.

consequences of optimization

Clare Michaud of Le Beurrage identifies the consequences of optimization:

“The longer we’re able to live, the longer our bodies are maintained as able-functioning, the longer we’re able to work, selling our bodies. Under capitalism, the encouragement to lengthen our lives is not for the sake of spending time with our loved ones, but for the sake of profit.”

If you trace their contours back to the beginnings of industrial-focused well-being, the intersection between workplace and wellness is unsurprising. Sociologist Stephanie Baker reveals that the American workplace was a site where well-being was born in its modern capacity. Historian Shelly McKenzie documents the rise of “executive health” from the 1940s onward, where medical concern about company executive heart health was prioritized to reduce healthcare insurance expenses (mind you, this was when people stayed at companies for their entire career). But through linking the performance of well-being to insurance, worksite wellness commodified it, ensuring productivity, profit, and capitalism kept ticking.    

Digital consumption is a form of eating that remains accessible, even when not buying products. You can scroll endlessly, consuming swaths of information about what supplements, crystals, smoothie recipes, and detoxes will help craft you into your idealized self. However, the idealized self is maintained by conscious and unconscious imagery as much as it is purchased. New veins of wellness find us at home, linking cosmic spirituality with websites “saturated in white.” The minimalist approach to wellness product sales very literally bleaches out and minimizes the complex histories and labours that have shaped wellness in America.

But wellness never tells you who that self might be these days, operating the same as an unconscious vision board. Culture studies scholar Raka Shome considers this approach to white wellness a “borderlessness,” where healing becomes vaguely non-Anglo: Indigenous, Black, and “Asian-inflected therapeutic practices” used to link planets, internal health, and self-actualization.

In speaking of America’s national identity, Tembe Denton-Hurst of Extracurricular looks to Toni Morrison, saying, “If, as she says, cultural identities are informed by a nation’s literature, then we must accept that literary notions of Blackness are intentional, even when unconscious.” Through analysis of Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby, Denton-Hurst demonstrates how Blackness is situated in contrast for the protagonist to understand her whiteness: “Blackness is a specter hanging out on the edges of the work, waiting in the wings to be called up and teased out.”

The same can be said of digital wellness, which is structured in ways that inform a national identity: bleached-out websites and social media, minimalist design elements, cosplaying a rustic homestead in a mansion. All of these keep Black identities at the margins, ignoring race and asserting whiteness in health identities carved around visual wellness. Some of the earliest American practices of wellness were led by white supremacists, like John Kellogg and Irving Fisher, who simultaneously created food-as-medicine practices for the white mid-to-upper class while funding racial segregation efforts.  

kiwis and language

I chose a stock photo for this essay because it shows a kiwi—a fruit I only recently realized I was allergic to. It reminds me that even in what our eyes consume online, there is power, politics, and responsibility.

I shouldn’t eat a kiwi in real life to avoid an allergic reaction, fuzzy tongue and throat closing. But there are digital kiwis, too: the wellness language that shapes powders into snake oils and ingestibles. Wellness isn’t merely a fad, nor a simple repackaging of diet culture in a more minimalist bow. To assume this is to ignore that consuming wellness online has been a longstanding tradition built off passive consumption of the empire’s wordplay. Of the language that shapes mainstream media, Apoorva Sripathi of Shelf Offering writes that:

“It chooses to maim, it chooses to ignore the horrors right in front of it. It sanitises and penetrates and awards a fated quality to knowledge, to what we know collectively as true. It erases the oppressors and denies the structure of empires. As fi there could be no turning point, no transition, no moments seen in retrospect. As if colonisation is a thing of the past and not the present.”

There is such slipping power in being assuaged by language that feels calorically empty, the passive headlines, that the politics of genocide are ever too complex for the feeble-minded masses to understand. For the New Yorker, Andrea Long Chu challenges the idea of being a “good reader” in the time of genocide, arguing literary sensibilities become weaponized to obscure violence: “The Israeli occupation of Palestine is clearly threatened by a certain act of reading, one the Israeli state is eager to suppress”

These efforts of consuming and reading still craft identities, albeit ones that are complacent, pacifist. In The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that while “it may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words,” these stories must be told, because a story told is “one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.”

I started thinking about what we consume in a digital food culture and how intangible it is. In its intangibility, there is a consumption being crafted, a message through the medium. My Internet diet feels like one of making sense of wellness-as-industry, dissecting how it operates to dull our senses towards the violence of genocide, the language of colonization, and the story being told again and again.

Thank you for reading! You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out AnthroDish podcast on iTunes and Spotify. If you enjoyed this and would like to support my work, please consider becoming a subscriber:

This newsletter covers issues around food, health, identity, and environment, with topics like if groceries should be considered a splurge, the morality issue with ultra-processed food dicsussions, and how Mormon mommies have dominated the health space on Instagram. It is updated biweekly and includes two additional posts for paid subscribers (a monthly interview transcript from popular AnthroDish episodes and a round-up of book recommendations that usually comes with a podcast sneak-peak).

AnthroDish News:

Season 9 of the podcast is in full swing, with some great guests so far:

• Investigative journalist Alice Driver on her book Life and Death of the American Worker, on Tyson meatpacking industry’s exploitative workplace, and the immigrant workers who took a stand against it

• Food writer andrea bennett on the art of substitution, and the complex factors that make food hearty

• Registered dietician Shana Spence (of The Nutrition Tea) on her new book, Live Nourished, and how to make sense of nourishment in more realistic ways

• Mother-daughter cookbook duo Chloé Crane-Leroux & Trudy Crane, on the art of the plant-based table and their new cookbook, The Artful Way to Plant-Based Dining

• Horticulture professor and Planthropology Podcast host Dr. Vikram Baliga on olive tree production in Texas and water-use considerations for drought-tolerant species.

Paid Subscriber News:

This month’s paid subscriber interview will be with Boyede Sobitan, who founded OjaExpress, and speaks to the idea of cultural food security and making foods more accessible for immigrant families in Chicago, out on October 20th.

A round-up of October’s reads, watches, and a podcast sneak peak for November will be out on November 3rd.