“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”

The [late 19th century dietary reformers] believed that teaching people to eat right would keep them away from alcohol and labor unions, and improve their character and morals. Drunkenness was seen as a “disease of ill-feeding.” … Good meals provided in homes were bound to be more attractive than the street and the saloon, and would mitigate the allure of “rash movements” and protect workingmen from falling prey to “demagogues and partisans.” One woman writing about the relationship between diet and “labor problems” explained, “Not only man’s physical and mental but his moral well being also depends upon the kind of food he eats.” She went on, “by using every possible means to educate the wives and daughters of working men to be more intelligent homemakers, we can do more towards the solution of the labor problem than all the anarchists, the communists, the socialists or even the labor organizations … have ever been able to do.”

“Beyond their energizing subjective change, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us, and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see, hear, taste, or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus, and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful, and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness.”

“The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

The BMI scale was invented by a white Belgian mathematician in the 1800s and is a crude formula which divides weight by height squared to determine a person’s “health status.” Europeans are the tallest people in the world. The BMI is a meaningless measure of health in any population, but it especially pathologizes populations which tend to be shorter, and sometimes stockier in build than tall white Europeans (e.g. many indigenous groups in Latin America, Alaska, the Pacific Islands, etc.). All populations on earth have internal diversity of shape and size, but certain phenotypic patterns are prevalent in certain regions. The BMI is an ersatz health measure based on a European standard which is imposed via colonization (an ongoing process) in regions where indigenous people have been violently murdered, displaced, forced to assimilate, stripped of autonomy, etc. by Europeans. 

Jay DeFeo is best known for this monumental painting, entitled The Rose, which she started in 1958 and completed over the course of eight years. The piece consists of white and gray paints layered so thickly onto the canvas that, in some ares, the paints are almost eight inches thick. She used so much oil paint that she called it “a marriage between painting and sculpture.”

all these books examining diet culture’s historical development from rigid puritanical rules about correct eating to all-pervading mandates around a “””healthy lifestyle””” are like *gif of lady prancing thru the door onto stage but w foucault’s head superimposed on hers* bc those particular institutionally imposed punishments of the body went out of vogue and were superseded by the disciplines that run much deeper and wider in our lives–not a mere diet but a commitment to constant vigilance, anxiety, and enjoyment of whatever is sanctioned as healthy at a given time. 

you will look at this picture of moomin holding two ice cream cones now

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like