Dawn HaneyFatties, especially white fatties, have more to resist than diet culture at big “celebratory” gatherings like US thanksgiving.
The american love/hate relationship with food on thanksgiving is not just fat hating, but rooted in and serving colonialism.
At thanksgiving, we revere eating and food, a strange tack for diet culture. Why do we get to love food so much, on this day designed to build false narratives about settler and indigenous histories?
Our take: consuming food on thanksgiving is designed as a modern day performance of the genocidal consumption of land and resources. And to complete the show, diet culture throws around all shades of shame, distortedly about our bodies rather than legacies of stolen land.
We fill our plates with delicious dishes, while preoccupied about what this food will do to our bodies. (This *is* the history: Early colonizers panicked that eating North American foods would give them fat Indigenous bodies.) We shamefully obsess over our consumption, incorrectly focused on our bodies rather than colonialism.
What if this Thanksgiving, fatties said no to food shame. But instead of papering over shame with platitudes of gratitude or insistence on body freedom, we redirected any attempts at personal diet shaming toward the collective shame and grief of this holiday?
“Are you sure you’re gonna take a second plate?” >>> “FOR SURE! But I have been questioning how many resources early settlers just took and took from people native to this land. Have you heard how people call this holiday ‘Thangstaken’?”
“Wow, I’m gonna have to eat salad for the next two weeks to make up for all this.” >>> “I’m excited to eat the leftovers! But I have been learning to make up for settler colonialism by paying my local land tax to indigenous communities.”
“You really should put back that dessert.” >>> “I don’t see why. But I have been wanting to get #LandBack to local Indigenous communities.”
We’re still eating all the food we want. We’re just changing the subject to the real shame of this colonial holiday.
#WhatIsFatLiberation
#FattiesAgainstFascism
#FatThanksgiving
This originally appeared on Instagram at @fatlibink