Laughing Alone with Salad: Nutrition-Based Inequity in Women’s Diet and Wellness Media

Abstract

Nutritionism creates hegemonic norms for eating and defining subjectivity, but this chapter demonstrates the specifically gendered effects of this ideology. Examining how diet and wellness media communicate stereotypical ideas about gender through salad, the chapter analyses a variety of source material, including the photo essay “Women Laughing Alone with Salad”, the Men’s Health and Women’s Health websites, Instagram images, and numerous food and “wellness” trends. Such sources create nutritionism’s subjects in ways closely aligned with existing dynamics of patriarchy, whiteness, affluence, and bodily ability and size. This analysis demonstrates how the refrain “salad is feminine” endorses and reinforces notions of identity, power, and inequity through specifically nutricentric means that permeate women’s diet and wellness media.