The Pro-Diet Internet Is Back
Plus: your winter farmers market is calling, the dirt on sanitation ratings, and Reddit’s weird food media burn book.
Welcome to Best Food Blog, a writer-run publication about eating by journalists Ali Francis, Anikah Shaokat, Anna Hezel, and Antara Sinha. You can check out everything we’ve published so far here. Content warning: disordered eating.
The veneration of “skinny” has always been a hallmark of internet life. Fad diet instructions, “what I eat in a day” videos, and photos of mostly women looking dangerously thin are emotionally charged, visually addictive, and designed to metastasize online. For a while, though, thanks to greater public health awareness about eating disorders and the broader body positivity movement sparked in the aughts, it felt like our collective pursuit of the ever-elusive thigh gap had mellowed — or, maybe, it just wasn’t cool to talk about it publicly anymore.
That’s why the recent resurgence and subsequent defense of online diet culture is so shocking to me: Today, under the deregulatory ethos of Trump-era influence, content promoting eating disorders has once again reached an alarming fever pitch.
