Eating and Identity

By Karen Sternheimer

An acquaintance recently told me a joke: “How can you tell if a person is vegan?” “I don’t know,” I responded, “how can you tell?” “Don’t worry, they’ll let you know.”

The food we eat is a core component of culture; our customs, celebrations, and restrictions shape and are shaped by our shared values, beliefs, and our resources. It also helps shape our sense of self and identity by the groups that we belong to and who we are as individuals.

Food—and how we construct our identities from the foods we consume— has been on my mind a lot as I have made an effort to eat healthier, mostly by including more vegetables and legumes into my meals. I have also started searching for new recipes in order to diversify the foods I eat and to educate myself more about healthy eating.

“Clean Eating” is a phrase that kept appearing in articles and blog posts about healthy food, and I found the inclusion of the word “clean” rather interesting. As Sally Raskoff recently blogged, naming is an important tool in the meaning creation process.

“Clean eating” generally refers to food that is mostly plant-based and minimally processed. It also often means limiting one’s sugar, salt, and saturated fat intake, but it can mean many things, from eating only organic food to eliminating all grains, dairy, or whatever other type of food that might be deemed “unclean.”

This is not a food or diet blog, so my intention is not to make arguments about what is healthy or unhealthy to eat. But instead the implications of the naming some types of eating “clean” itself bears examination. If some food—and some eaters—are clean, does it make the rest “dirty” and somehow worthy of pity, stigma or shame?

Whether intentional or not, using the word “clean” bears religious connotations, as several passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy explicitly refer to food that must not be eaten as “unclean” in the English translation. (But these foods, like pork and shellfish, are not necessarily considered “unclean” in the “clean eating” books and other guides I have seen.)

As religious scholar Alan Levinowitz details in his book, The Gluten Lie and Other Myths About What You Eat, eating trends and diet fads are peppered with religious language. Authors of diet books are often considered gurus, the book itself might be thought of as a food bible, and “converts” to the diet describe the personal transformation that they experience, often encouraging others to “repent” and join their way of eating.

Those who do not follow the path of eating enlightenment might be considered “sinners”—I once had a stranger tell me jokingly that I was “sinning” when I ordered a pastry at Starbucks—or people in need of “salvation.” I have to catch myself not to lecture friends and family about all the added sugar they are drinking in a can of soda or how much better I felt once I stopped snacking on sweets when I see someone in the office reach for the candy bowl early in the morning.

As The Guardian recently reported, “clean eating” taken to an extreme can be dangerous, particularly among people with eating disorders who strive to only eat “pure” foods and eliminate all but a few types of food from their diet. Internet-era stars become seen as deity-like figures, and when licensed dietitians and scientists challenge their often-unsupported claims about diet and health they are seen as blasphemers, shouted down by supporters whose commitment to a way of eating seems to transcend just personal choice.

While social media has given anyone with Internet access a platform to promote their particular way of eating, the connection between limiting one’s eating and transcendence is not new at all. Monks regularly go on spiritually driven fasts, and fasting is part of the most important Jewish holiday of the year. Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s book, Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia Nervosa, details how young women who withheld food from themselves were seen as spiritually pure and even miraculous in the nineteenth century.

The old cliché “you are what you eat” does not just apply to our physical selves; in many ways it applies to our social selves. How else is eating linked with identity?

Comments

[Benjamin]

The entire basis of the concept that some food is healthy and other food is unhealthy is based in diet culture/food marketing. Is celery healthy? Are doritos unhealthy? If you only ate celery, or you only ate doritos, you would live a longer on the doritos. But nobody is suggesting you do either. That is because both represent unhealthy diets. Any food can have a place in a healthy diet, and what is healthy for one person can be unhealthy for another, so you can't even totally classify a particular diet as entirely one or the other.

I was surprised you didn't mention orthorexia. Which is disordered eating based on an obsessiveness about the "goodness" or "cleanness" of one's food. Orthorexia has become not only normalized in our culture, but praised and promoted. It is of course yet another front in the never ending juggernaut of the diet industrial complex trying to convince every person to spend more for less and hate themselves all the while.

[april 2018 calenar]

nice

[Persianas Valencia]

Good post. A very relevant information

[Donna]

Useful Information.

[Frank T Furio CRNA]

Nice article. It is also becoming popular to Fast as part of a healthy diet.

[Gladys Misigo]

Very educative and detailed article for maintaining a health lifestyle

[Mars Champagne]

I think the concept of "clean eating has less to do with religion and more to do with the cult of international beauty standards projected onto EVERYONE globally through social media and other large scale marketing platforms. Yes some people do partake in fasting for religious purposes but, in many religions its to feel the hunger and suffering that is happening around the world- not to indulge the progress of ones self image. I consider myself to be a "clean eater". I am 5ft 1in and weigh 125lbs which is average weight for someone my height. I believe that clean eating should be measured on an individual scale. People of African descent have a lower tolerance for certain than others may have from different countries and even if you are from the same country diabetes might run in your family even if it's not statistically high for that region. My whole family eats meat and I have been a vegetarian for 3 years because that's what works for my body regardless of what anyone else thinks or is doing.