"Clean Eating", Masculinity, AI, and the history of how anxiety epidemics lead to authoritarian political movements
And how we can learn about the present by learning about the past
As humans, we have an unfortunate affliction that often undermines our intelligence: the compulsion to believe that anything new to our consciousness is new to humanity. One of those beliefs being clean eating.
We’ve been on this track for a while- even before Whole 30 and wellness culture dominated Weight Watchers & friends in popularity. But as with other trends that gained momentum in 2020, the pandemic seemed to catapult the “clean eating” trend, and frankly “clean” anything. Hygiene (and then lack thereof), skincare, water, make-up, clothes. Now, five years later, non-toxic leggings are regularly being advertised.
Unlike some other anti-dieters, I don’t completely reject the idea of prioritizing safer consumption. We have too many chemicals in our food, clothes, and household items. Yes, it is possible to accept this reality AND reject the idea that our material consumption characterizes us (cognitive dissonance baby!) But rather than creating more products to mitigate consumer anxiousness, we should be pushing regulatory agencies to prioritize health and safety across all industries. America has a long history of capitalizing off of folks fears and using this consumer-producer relationship to shape the political landscape.
Americans have been anxious before too
It’s no doubt that our younger generations are being crushed by anxiety. With the threat of climate change, school shootings, limited economic opportunity, and a housing shortage, I’m pretty anxious too! Tack on the insane amount of stimuli that devices bombard us with and it must be impossible to focus as a young person. But Americans have experienced an epidemic of overstimulation and impending doom before too (although I think our futures are much gloomier…. or blazing…. than their lives ended up being).
At the turn of the 19th century, urbanization and industrialization shifted the socioeconomic landscape, especially for middle-class Anglo-Saxon Americans. The common held Puritanical value that one was responsible for their material needs was threatened by the mass production of goods. Middle-class white Americans became distanced from production, making them feel a loss of agency over their “material destinies”1. Their work shifted from physical labor to mental labor, which in his book American Nervousness, George Beard considered to contribute to neurasthenia, a 19th century diagnostic term for general affliction of the nervous system.2 The use of electricity lengthened work schedules and created nocturnal work shifts. As productivity increased, so did environmental stimuli that the average city-folk was exposed to. Americans had such a difficult time adjusting to urbanism and industrialization that an anxiety epidemic developed.
During this urban-boom, the country also saw a shift in immigration. In years prior, many immigrants came from Nordic nations and assimilated into American culture. But at the turn of the 19th century, an increasingly large number of immigrants started coming from Southern and Eastern Europe, and Asia. Cities developed diverse cultural landscapes, forming some of the neighborhoods we’re still familiar with today. Booming cities became filled with squalor, and as eugenics rose in popularity, new immigrants were often inappropriately blamed.
In his article, “Our one great national malady”: Neurasthenia and American Imperial and Masculine Anxiety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Yoensik Jung suggests that the changing social, labor, and economic landscape helped fuel a loss of agency among middle class Anglo-Saxon men. What do people tend to do when they feel insecure and anxious? Find someone else to blame.
Preserving white masculinity with the pursuit of purity
As middle-class white Americans tried to hold onto their social power, many turned to practices that validated and reinforced their social supremacy. Consequently, a range of spiritual movements focusing on purity came out of this time period. Some Christian-based movements, such as New Thought, were founded on the idea that everything created by God is ‘good’ and ‘pure’, and that God created the body in it’s baseline state to be ‘healthy’. Therefore, ‘healthy’ = ‘good’, ‘pure’, and ‘Godly’. But because illness is ‘bad’, it was not created by God, but rather fabricated by the individuals mind.34
New Thought doctrine also promoted the idea that the power to create social change comes from change within ones body. Therefore pure thoughts and behaviors, particularly pure consumption, would maintain a pure body. The prioritization of pure consumption can be found throughout magazines from the late 19th and early 20th century. In her heavily researched book, Each Mind a Kingdom, Beryl Satter notes that New Thought principles were shared in a range of publications such as Arena, Success, Atlantic, McClures, the Ladies Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. Food and cosmetic companies such as Knox Gelatine advertised their product as “pure”, “real”, and a perfect product for “dainty” dishes.56 The terms clearly reflected values of the time period as usage was absent from Knox advertisement by 1950 as evidenced in both Good Housekeeping7 and Farm Journal.
In Ladies Home Journal August 1911 publication, there are several mentions of treating “nerves” and “nervousness”, and recommendations that “pure food is a direct aid to pure thoughts”8. Deep breathing was encouraged to promote “pure blood”9. In this issue, an article on nutrition suggests that eating difficult-to-digest foods diverts energy and blood away from the brain and to the stomach. “Therefore the human animal must plan to conserve its nervous energy and physical powers so as to enable it to successfully perform in the theatre of society and commerce.”10 Although this belief is not inherently oppressive nor scientifically inaccurate, this rhetoric was used to advance racist theory.
Some good came out of the purity movement, such as Dr. Harvey Wiley’s contribution to foundational food safety laws and public health education. But many used its principles to justify oppression. During this time period, many Theosophists, Christian Scientists, New Thought leaders, and evolving Christian denominations used the pursuit of purity to assert social, intellectual, sexual, and physical dominance over non-white, lower class Americans. In their eyes, ‘pure’ dietary practices promoted their intellectualism, helping them gain proximity to God. They saw any social groups with diverging behaviors as animalistic and inferior. Thus the practice of ‘pure’ behaviors reinforced their belief that white Christian’s were a superior race.
The Dietetic Reformer, a 19th century magazine that educated the public about nutrition, frequently encouraged plain pure foods to support ones intellect and quell primal physical desires. Vegetarianism in particular was often promoted by these groups to achieve purity and assert social dominance over omnivorous groups. In an article from The Dietetic Reformer in 1883, the author blames the omnivorous diet of Native Americans for their perceived barbarism.
Many other purity-based food trends came out of this time period, such as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. John Harvey Kellogg, a follower of Sylvester Graham, promoted foods that were easy-to-digest and unstimulating. For many food reformers of the time period, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fibrous foods, and meat were discouraged from consuming in order to promote the ‘intellectual’ nature of White Christians and assert their distinction from the ‘physical nature’ of non-white and working class Americans.
A flicker of the past, today
The entirety of this post thus far was written before the 2025 Inauguration, RFK Jr’s hearing, and DOGE’s coup. My intention was to shed light on how history has a tendency to repeat itself, so that we can learn from our mistakes. But since then, the rate at which history is unfolding is alarming.
In the past several decades, we’ve experienced massive technological advances. Machines continue to replace the physical labor of men for the sake of “efficiency”. AI is threatening the work of both the poorly educated and highly educated. We’ve experienced shifts in immigration patterns, increased rights for marginalized groups, decreased physical labor force, overstimulation from devices, and skepticism over the safety of our food. It is normal for societal shifts to create anxiety, but it is important that we make peace with uncertainty rather than divert blame. We can learn to understand the trajectory of social issues today by looking at social trends of the past. And it is quite obvious that we are on a very scary path.
Since our country was built on the prosperity of white men at the expense of the marginalized, any social shift inherently makes the ignorant white man feel threatened.
What does a person typically do when they feel threatened?
Blame someone else.
Unfortunately, us humans don’t like to be scared nor full of fear. Lack of understanding is terrifying. When we are fearful, finding a reason makes us feel validated. Fighting the reason makes us feel in control. Denying our feelings makes our reactivity feel justified. And for the white man whose identity is founded on social superiority - the easiest people to blame are people who don’t look like him. The easiest systems to blame are those that they don’t understand. Consequently, we get Elon Musk and RFK Jr., two men who are so in denial of their own personal fear, they’re are holding the rest of us hostage. God, can’t megalomaniacs be forced to see a psychiatric and DBT-based therapist like the rest of us?
I detoured, but yesterday I had a panic attack after reading the news. Please forgive me.
When normal everyday peoples agency is stripped by larger social institutions they have a tendency to focus on what they can control. When an organism has little control over their environment, they have always count on the one thing they have unlimited access to: their body.
As our country has spent the past several years creeping toward this full-on fascist oligarchy, it’s no wonder that we’ve also seen a rise in purity-based food and consumption trends. Water must be crystalized or filtered with charcoal. All food must be organic. Sugar is the enemy. Clean eating. Clean food. Clean cookware. Clean water. Clean. Clean. Clean. Of course, none of these food trends are exclusively used by white supremacists. Heck, many white supremacists are only eating meat (likely an alternative response to the perceived lack of agency). But the undertones are the same: your health is your individual responsibility, even when the governments limited environmental regulations are destroying your health in the first place.
It is normal and healthy to be concerned about what one eats. It’s normal and healthy to want to be healthy. It’s also normal to engage in practices that preserve or benefit your health. But when we read information about health and nutrition online, it’s worth questioning what’s the intention of the information being presented to you. Is it to educate you? Inform you? Or to frighten you? Make you feel morally just? More desirable? More powerful? Does it make you feel less “othered”?
What can we do?
Emotions are valuable tools that can help us understand ourselves. But when we choose to shut them down or ignore them, they stick around, coloring our thoughts and leading us to believe that our completely irrational line of thinking is completely “reasonable”. Sit with them. Feel them. Ride the wave. Then pay attention to how those feelings impact the factual information you have about food.
When you engage in certain trends it’s also worth questioning, at what aim? Why do you want to be healthy? Who would you be if you weren’t? How do you think others would perceive you? How would you perceive yourself? And is this choice accomplishing what I want to accomplish? Does it make me who I am? Or who someone else wants me to be?
And guess what? It’s okay not to know. Sometimes we need the space to be unsure and uncomfortable in order to discover what we really need.
I hope this post shed some light on how race-based spiritual movements impacted historical dietary trends to help us understand modern trends. Of course, no text is exhaustive. If you learned something from this post, had questions, or have more context to add, I’d love to hear from you by leaving a comment.
Jung, Yeonsik. “‘our One Great National Malady’: Neurasthenia and American Imperial and Masculine Anxiety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” PubMed Central, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Aug. 2021, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10556408/#:~:text=That%20is%2C%20neurasthenia%20was%20a,amount%20of%20stimuli%20brought%20on.
Beard George M. American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, a Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 1881.
Satter, Beryl. Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920. University of California Press, 2001.
Tumber, Catherine. American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2002.
Knox Gelatine. “Knox’s Gelatine.” Good Housekeeping, vol. 90, no. 2, 1930, p. 209.
Knox Gelatine. “Knox’s Gelatine.” Good Housekeeping, vol. 32, 1901, p. 145.
Knox Gelatine. “Knox’s Gelatine.” Good Housekeeping, vol. 130, no. 5, 1950.
Ladies Home Journal, vol. 28, August 1911, p. 36.
Ladies Home Journal, vol. 28, August 1911, p. 18
Ladies Home Journal, vol. 28, August 1911, p. 36
I appreciate your thoughtful take on the historical basis for "clean" eating, and on how the current wellness culture might be a repeat/reflection of the same underlying issues. Plus ça change, I guess?
"When normal everyday people’s agency is stripped by larger social institutions, they have a tendency to focus on what they can control."
So true. Even in my small individual life with my small individual problems, I've noticed that times of uncertainty tend to result in a more intense urge to control my diet; detailed meal planning and novel-length grocery lists somehow become self-soothing behaviors. It makes sense that this sort of thing could translate to wider human behavior, wherein whole groups of people become dedicated to things like bland cereal or alkaline water or unpasteurized dairy — and weirdly judgy towards other people about it, too.