By engaging with our communities we can nurture ourselves—and each other—in ways no diet ever could achieve.
For millions of women, the new year rings in a commitment to dieting. With the recent headlines that three quarters of Americans are now overweight or obese, we can expect surging spending on diet products targeting women this holiday season—adding to the estimated $33 billion that Americans already spend on commercial weight loss products each year.
As an anthropologist who studies how people make sense of nutrition guidelines, I’d like to propose a feminist alternative. Forget dieting: Make a commitment to become involved in collective action—anything that involves joining others in your communities to work for change. It is by working with others that lasting health benefits will come about.
Abundant research and scholarship, including my own, documents that food should be integral to building community. Consider “companionship”: In Latin, com means togetherness and pan means bread. Across cultures, sharing meals has always been fundamental to nurturing social bonds. Historically and today, women are at the heart of this work. Their skill in preparing food is inseparably connected with their skill in building community.
Meanwhile, modern-day dieting disrupts this communal connection. Much of our knowledge about nutrition in the United States comes from laboratory studies of male bodies in isolation. U.S. dietary guidelines, derived from these studies, typically offer nutrient recommendations for a solitary individual who is not also caring for their kin and community. Advice such as “eat less” and “exercise more” directs individuals to manage themselves, as a personal discipline. In nutrition counseling, the unhealthy patient—not an unhealthy society—is the target of treatment.
Not everyone thinks of the relation between food and health in this way. Over the last 20 years, doing fieldwork in Guatemala, the feminist scientists I’ve worked with have voiced concern that focusing on individual nutrition misses the bigger picture. Since the 1990s, they have shown that environmental contaminants ranging from microbes in dirty water to heavy metals from pesticides cause harmful cellular inflammation. Their work teaches us that eating well requires caring for the environments where our food is grown.
The way we grow food is just one piece of the story. How we eat also plays a central role in our health, which involves much more than simple nutrients. In Brazil, for example, food guidelines advise eating with loved ones and sharing in the labor of meal preparation. In contrast, U.S. dietary guidelines ignore the work of hospitality and the importance of social connection.
Rising rates of diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure? Cut down on sugar or fat—that’s what U.S. nutrition guidelines promote. But we should ask instead: Are we getting enough sleep? Is life stressful? Are we overworked without adequate time the enjoy our meals? Are our children well? After all, health is shaped not just by what we eat but by our broad conditions of labor.
It’s a truism that most diets fail. But let’s consider what diets actually achieve: They focus our attention on our own bodies and eating habits, diverting attention from the social life that shapes so much about whether we feel healthy or not. Dieting culture propagates the lie that each person is personally responsible for what’s consumed, undermining the expertise that women have long had in creating community through food. I have often heard from women that trying to control their diet leaves them feeling hungry, ashamed and isolated. This self-focused approach to nutrition parallels an epidemic of loneliness, as the U.S. Surgeon General recently characterized a pattern of widespread social disconnection.
This brings me back to the suggestion to replace the popular New Year’s Resolution to diet with a commitment to collective action. Americans are taught from a young age that “you can make a difference,” but, in fact, there isn’t much we can do to change our social systems by ourselves. This is an opportunity, not a drawback, since it is by working together that we can bring about lasting change in our communities and for ourselves.
To be sure, breaking free from the individualism of diet culture can be challenging, given how ingrained it is in American life. Fortunately, many organizations are already working to build better societies.
Start local: Attend a community garden meeting, support a farmworkers’ rights movement or get involved in a local campaign for reproductive rights. Small steps can connect you with others engaged in collective action. If you get stuck, ask a friend to brainstorm ideas—if nothing else, this will be good practice in reaching out.
Fortunately, collective action doesn’t require personal willpower to resist cravings or buying new weight loss products. Unlike dieting, collective action feeds something deeper: our connection to one another. By engaging with our communities we can nurture ourselves—and each other—in ways no diet ever could achieve.
