do you despair?

I just learned that Trader Joe's labels some of its food as "Reduced Guilt." There's a brand of popcorn called "Lesser Evil." I had to see an ad on Tumblr for a popular yogurt brand with the tagline of "Less sets you free." I read the back of a food product once that described the food as "sinless."

People literally choose a bag of carrots based on the calorie count. I've had to hear multiple people claim that fat people shouldn't be allowed to eat fruit. There was a water brand at the grocery stored that advertised itself as having "zero calories." A woman saw me next to some diet culture smoothie products and made small talk with me about how she didn't understand why the diet culture smoothie made out of fruits and vegetables she was using to replace an entire meal with had a whopping 300 whole calories.

A man talked to me at the store about how he was there to buy a snack, which consisted of two hardboiled eggs and a packet of black pepper. He then told me about his weight loss dreams while being average-sized and thinner than I am.

I saw a post on Tumblr of someone praising a "bread" made out of tree bark that ancient Finnish people ate as a last resort during times of starvation, and they praised this "bread" because it had a fourth of the calories of regular bread—calories that would have saved the lives of countless Finnish people during those famines who instead had to die.

People on here passed around a video of some diet culture soup that promised a loss of 15 pounds in a matter of days, and all of the comments were people laughing at how it did so by making anyone who ate it shit their brains out for a week, yet the people who did were still satisfied with the diarrhea-induced weight loss.

There are so many accounts fat people can give you of thin people who did nothing to obtain their skinny person genetics physically taking food out of the fat person's shopping cart because "You don't need this." And what the thin person decided a random fat stranger didn't need was a fucking melon.

I've talked about this stuff before, but diet culture has legitimately become a cult that destroys lives and kills people by the hour. And yet public outrage isn't about all of this. What people are so worried about is the fact that fat people merely exist. And that is apparently so horrible that we gotta make sure to tax sodas until us fatties go away, which people genuinely think will work.

What really adds insult to injury is how we have known for decades and decades that dieting has never worked from the beginning. But that doesn't make corporations billions of dollars nor one group of people higher on the social hierarchy, so none of that research makes headlines like the next fruit that causes cancer or the new diet that pinkie promises it'll work this time.

Unfortunately like many things I feel this is also related to the media literacy and critical thinking crisis happening right now. The majority of people have NOT been taught how to evaluate or interpret information/pieces of media put in front of them. They've been trained instead to pay attention only to the biggest, snappiest headline or soundbite (which is often something that's wildly exaggerated, taken out of context, or a straight up lie to garner as many rage- or fear-clicks as possible) so when someone goes on TikTok and posts "oh my God guys if you see a chalk mark on the sidewalk outside your house you're being targeted by human traffickers" they panic (as intended), immediately amplify this message, and do not look into it with a critical eye whatsoever. (Like, they dont even check this unfamiliar TikToker's account to see if it's labeled "joke account" or covered in swastikas and racist rhetoric that might, you know, indicate some of the possible motives this person might have to say things.)

This is how people get sucked into conspiracy theories and get launched straight down the funnel which almost invariably leads to horrific bigoted ideas (transphobia, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc.). And since no one is looking for context or any deeper meaning than the basic words in front of them, they don't realize they've ended up in Nazi-town.

"Oh no! Evil (foreign, minority, outsider) people are kidnapping our (white, Christian) children to do horrible things (trafficking, murder, blood rituals) to them? We should watch out for the Bad People, who obviously aren't Us (are in some way marked as not members of the dominant local culture)? Oh no, and the Elites ( (((are you recognizing the dogwhistles yet?))) ) are Secretly Controlling Things to get money from this???? Of course They are, that's what They do!!!"