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A review by otterhayes
The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America by Virginia Sole-Smith
4.0
There's some really fascinating stuff in here about how people eat and why, and about how fraught with judgment all of it is. The only part I dislike is the end, where the author tries too hard to wrap everything up in a tidy way. She advocates for a move beyond judgment, which is great when you're talking about not viewing larger bodies as worth less than smaller ones. But she wants (or feels like she needs to, to make a tidy ending?) to also conclude that food from the convenience store isn't necessarily worth less than food from the farmer's market, which seems patronizing in its wrongness. There are negative consequences -to your health and the environment - to eating a Ho-Ho from 7-11 that aren't there if you eat a piece of locally-grown fruit. Most of the book recognizes that it's more complicated than that, that it's okay to eat some of the 'less good' stuff, and that some of us have vastly disproportionate access to the less good stuff. It's only in the end that she wants to throw that complexity out the window.