This trend isn’t really about food or health. It’s about performance

April 17, 2024 12:28 AM

Hosting a lavish banquet or ordering lobster is no longer a sufficient signifier of status; today, a sign of true wealth is the ability to forgo food entirely. Eating essentially betrays a person’s most basic human needs; in an era obsessed with ‘self-optimisation’, not eating suggests that a person is somehow ‘beyond’ needs and has achieved total mastery of their body with a heightened capacity for efficiency and focus. from Why don’t rich people eat anymore?
posted by chavenet (47 comments total)

Wealth is wasted on the wealthy, even more so than youth on the young.
posted by Dysk at 12:53 AM on April 17 [37 favorites]

I mean, this isn't exactly a new phenomenon; the wealthy stayed pale when the working class was out in the fields getting sunburnt and started tanning on the beach when workers moved indoors. Wealthy homes were stuffed with decorative tchotchkes and fine china when such goods were expensive; now that everything's cheap, giant empty minimalist homes are a status symbol. The only constant seems to be the gendered way in which people following these trends are described: when men change their bodies and environments to fit the current fashion, they're just striving for health and efficiency, but when women do it, they're vain, shallow, and disordered.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 2:11 AM on April 17 [86 favorites]

Funny how trends change. Thirty years ago when I was in school I fasted 23 hours a day (or alternatively, I was doing the "OMAD" thing) simply out of necessity. I was in class or working for the majority of my waking hours then would eat something when I got home at the end of the day. I honestly never felt deprived doing this so I just continued eating like this long after I didn't need to. In those days I remember a friend of mine telling me how unhealthy this was, that I should be eating a bunch of small meals, etc. He was also deep into the Pritikin diet (which was ultra low fat, low protein and higher in complex carbs) so, once again, it's kind of amazing how these food trends have changed.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:35 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

If you're really rich, you don't need a body at all. hint, hint
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:36 AM on April 17 [28 favorites]

When poor people are able to be obese, rich people need another way to show they're not poor.
posted by Brachinus at 5:13 AM on April 17 [17 favorites]

I can’t read the article yet as I’m about to leave for work, but I will note that eating disorders are one of the most heritable mental health conditions (nearly as much as schizophrenia) and modern research has determined they’re far and away caused by genetics and brain development more so than anything about the environment, society, or culture. You can exacerbate an existing eating disorder through those factors but you cannot create one in someone without the specific biological and genetic makeup that predisposes a brain to disordered eating.

I’ll come back after reading the TFA and see if it’s useful to discuss more in that context but want to have that out there as the conversation is getting started.
posted by brook horse at 5:14 AM on April 17 [11 favorites]

Ozempic chic.
posted by BigBrooklyn at 5:18 AM on April 17 [5 favorites]

After two years of therapy 2013-2015, I regained my sense of smell and taste. A deep seated neurosis caused my loss of smell and taste. My therapist voiced this belief several times during the course of my analysis. He was very gifted and a walking talking book of dream symbolism amplification. I was relieved and and so thankful. Then in late 2019 an ear infection eliminated my sense of smell and taste (anosmia) once again. I was devastated and am back in therapy. I so wish that I could swallow a pill in place of a meal. It would be different if I did not love to eat, drink wine and cook. I can not erase my DNA which is Calabrese and Siciliano. The first thing my grandmother and aunts would say whenever I visited them was "Do you want something to eat?"
posted by DJZouke at 5:26 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

But . . . but . . . they'll all be skin and bones when we eat them.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:50 AM on April 17 [18 favorites]

considering all of the garbage and poison additives added to most cheap consumer foods in the US (non-fresh preservative loaded etc) I'm not really surprised by this. Just following doctors orders requires one to eat less sugar, trans-fats, preservatives, nitrates, on and on...

in the end it's actually very expensive to eat super healthy for every meal, and eating out means eating a ton of delicious fats and sugars. (which I adore)

I mean, Lunchables have goddam lead in them.... ALSO wellness industry, see all things related.
posted by djseafood at 6:01 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

I guess the desire to show off their thin bodies is Why Rich People Don’t Cover Their Windows. I wonder what other unusual behaviors the wealthy exhibit. Perhaps an anthropologist could study them.
posted by TedW at 6:06 AM on April 17 [5 favorites]

The most important thing to the conspicuously rich is to be visibly different from everyone else. So when the world was starving, they ate in excess. And now they appear to not eat at all.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:17 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

TedW--- thanks for that link!

I used to hate-read Dwell mostly to see this sort of thing. Bedrooms and baths with huge windows and no blinds or curtains facing populated areas. It made me wonder if wealthy people all have exhibitionist tendencies?
posted by drstrangelove at 6:34 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

It won't be long before Ozempic becomes affordable, and they'll have to invent something else to make them stand out. I wonder what that will be? Well, they'll always have the private jets.
As nanny's striped stocking wrote, this is hardly news, but it may be exaggerated now because of the drugs. Anyway, I have mixed feelings about this, because I'm thinking a lot about how eating differently (not less) could be made aspirational, for the purpose of reducing CO2 and methane from the livestock. Eating disorders should not be aspirational, but perhaps there is a balance somewhere?
posted by mumimor at 6:37 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

A lot of “poor people’s idea of rich people” going on here. Actual rich people love to eat and spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about eating. Rich women may limit their calories. Rich men don’t, and if they’re a little less fat than average it is due to metabolism or exercise.

Also, an odd lack of talking to people on Ozempic or other GLPs. I’m not, but know lots of people who are (rich and middle class) and they are mostly obsessed with good food because they just can’t afford to waste their very limited appetites. Was with someone the other day who got visibly angry with himself for having a second piece of bread because he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do more than pick at the seafood risotto he’d ordered. He’s also a somewhat alarming 150 after having been a ruddy 210 for the two decades I’ve known him.
posted by MattD at 6:55 AM on April 17 [11 favorites]

You know who else is rich, pale, into expensive real estate, and is never seen eating or drinking? Count Dracula.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:58 AM on April 17 [8 favorites]

You know who else is rich, pale, into expensive real estate, and is never seen eating or drinking? Count Dracula

Nonsense, there's been plenty of scenes of the Dracula having a meal 😀
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:12 AM on April 17 [7 favorites]

I found the article itself to be a bit on the thin side. The adage “You can never be too rich or too thin” is more than sixty years old; you have to go back more than a century to find rich gluttons like Diamond Jim Brady. How long has haute cuisine been associated with overengineered food in tiny portions?

Also, I am on Ozempic, and while I don't find my insurance to be exceptionally generous, it's quite affordable (about $25 for a four-week supply) and is really doing the trick to keep my blood sugar low, which is pretty important for a diabetic. What it's also helped with is cutting down on the compulsion to snack, which has been a chronic problem for me, since snacks tend to be either relatively expensive (nuts, beef jerky) or carby (practically everything else).
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:12 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

I used to hate-read Dwell mostly to see this sort of thing. Bedrooms and baths with huge windows and no blinds or curtains facing populated areas. It made me wonder if wealthy people all have exhibitionist tendencies?

D.C. is full of condos built in the last decade or so that have these, many aimed at younger people that are probably doing OK, but aren't wealthy, especially by local standards - when they first appeared, my wife and I called them 'millennial vitrines'.

I do wonder if there is some kind of lifestyle display aspect to them as a selling point, but it mainly seems to lead to watching people eating cereal while watching TV or running from one room to another in their underwear because they forgot to close the blinds the night before.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:40 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

Also I've seen it asserted many times that "Fatness used to be a symbol of wealth...and therefore desirable" but I've never really seen much evidence for it.

For instance, Dr Eleanor Janega has several good articles on idealized female bodies in the medieval period. They had different body standards. Large breasts were considered unattractive. A rounded pot belly was considered supremely attractive. But arms and necks had to be slim. Body standards were similar to our own in that you had to have an arbitrary fat distribution in some places but not others.

With men, I see plenty of portraits of men who were presumably actually fat depicted as fat. But in art when you have heroes, saints, kings, knights and gods who are exemplars but don't have to resemble a particular person, they usually seem to be fairly lean or muscular. If being fat is so desirable, shouldn't they be fat too? Can't the people writing these illustrate it with a few fat Sir Lancelots or whatever, if they exist?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:44 AM on April 17 [6 favorites]

Lumping in Ozempic with random woo influencer supplements that are probably laced with lead and disordered eating practices seems a bit strange to me. Let's stipulate that it's important to keep an eye out for long-term negative consequences. But Ozempic controls blood sugar levels. It's dramatically decreasing cardiovascular risk in those who take it. Medical practice right now is to vigorously scold everyone over a BMI of 25 to lose weight--and that's probably the vast majority of the U.S. over 35, including rich people--so how is it weird or vain or whatever to take a drug that helps people reach that goal? It's fine to let the affluent be the crash-test dummies on this one, but if the drug was free and a bit easier to administer, I bet there'd be a huge uptake among the middle class and lower, and it would probably be for the best.
posted by praemunire at 7:46 AM on April 17 [7 favorites]

Most of the rich people I know, and I know quite a few, are thin, and that was so prior to Ozempic. What really sets them apart, IMO, was how impeccably clean their homes are. I mean, not a speck of dirt anywhere, no clutter, and many of the homes are packed with antiques that need lots of dusting. Maximalism! They surely must have cleaning people come in every single day, and that is a lot more expensive than Ozempic.
posted by waving at 7:54 AM on April 17 [5 favorites]

Re medieval male beauty standards, this Skallagrim video Knights: Muscle-Bound Hunks or Skinny Manlets? has a bunch of depictions of medieval knights, and tiny waists but muscular calves seems to be the desired look.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:11 AM on April 17 [3 favorites]

I didn't get very far into the article because it starts off talking about a TV show and, well, TV is not real life.

Anecdotally, I don't know any super rich people but I do know a few multimillionaires. I don't see any of the vaunted minimalism here. They eat at restaurants all the time. They order and eat burrata and steak without a second thought. I've seen more eating disorders among my poorish than among my rich friends.

So when people claim that the rich tend to be genuinely minimal (rather than just talking about minimalism) I'm going to need a bit more evidence than a TV show.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:20 AM on April 17 [11 favorites]

People think that Succession is a drama, but (based on the two seasons I've seen so far) it's really a dark, dark comedy. We don't base our analysis of the rich on Arrested Development.
posted by praemunire at 8:41 AM on April 17 [5 favorites]

Who said "You can never be too rich or too thin"? Wallis Simpson?
posted by DJZouke at 8:52 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Quote investigator dates the earliest "You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin" they can find 1963 but the attributions vary so they give it to "anonymous".
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:05 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

My boss in NYC was nouveau riche...When she had guests in for a little gathering, it was luxurious cheeses, and little sandwiches with crusts cut off and then cut into triangles. Some of her clients were old money rich. Whenever I had to deliver product to them...my boss was a jewelry designer...they would offer me something like ritz, crackers with cheese whiz, or maybe room temperature cocktail weenies. Most of them were very nice folk actually, to me anyway.
posted by Czjewel at 10:28 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

Wasn't the off-label usage of Ozempic causing a shortage of the product for patients taking it to manage their diabetes? Is that still the case?
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 10:48 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

Back in the day, America sprouted - the Fat Men's Clubs.

Membership in the American clubs required a hundred pounds avoidupois. The French raised the stakes to a hundred kilos. You can see the latter setting off from Paris by bus here.

Competative eating contests were not far behind.
posted by BWA at 11:13 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

This has been a successful PR campaign by the wealthy. The stats don’t bear it out. There are also so many high end restaurants with generous portions and decadent preparation methods in each major city.
posted by Selena777 at 11:14 AM on April 17 [2 favorites]

This is more recent.
posted by Selena777 at 11:20 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]

Mod note: One deleted. Wishing for someone to die goes against our Content Policy.
posted by loup (staff) at 11:37 AM on April 17 [4 favorites]

(Not vouching for anything in the original article, so not directly contradicting your point, but those stats/charts top out at discerning those above a mere 3.5x the federal poverty line, so they really can't be said to speak to the level of wealth the article is discussing.)
posted by nobody at 12:30 PM on April 17 [2 favorites]

Wasn't the off-label usage of Ozempic causing a shortage of the product for patients taking it to manage their diabetes?

I don't know if this is still an issue, but it's worth keeping in mind, again, that this "off-label usage" would be, for the most part, for people who would be considered to have a medical condition by their doctors (being overweight). I'm not saying you specifically mean this, but the underlying rhetoric on this topic has been very much "it's not enough for fat people to subject themselves to a regular regimen of injected drugs to get the weight off! It only counts if they suffer! After all, we're deeply concerned for their health! How can their health get better if they don't suffer???"

One would think that if there was a shortage of a prescribed medication being used in a prescribed way, one might criticize the drug manufacturer, rather than the patients using it for its intended purpose.
posted by praemunire at 1:42 PM on April 17 [6 favorites]

>People think that Succession is a drama, but (based on the two seasons I've seen so far) it's really a dark, dark comedy. We don't base our analysis of the rich on Arrested Development

In my experience, comedies are far more true to life than dramas. If you want to know what practicing medicine is like, start with Scrubs.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 1:45 PM on April 17 [4 favorites]

@praemunire: I am fat. I don't want to suffer, and I don't want other fat people to suffer. I'd argue that I and many other fat people would be suffering if we were forced to take Ozempic because the doctor assumed that our size was unhealthy in and of itself. I don't care for the continued assumption that, contrary to all evidence, BMI is a valid metric of health.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 2:32 PM on April 17 [7 favorites]

Well that'll certainly make it easier for the wealthy and powerful to quietly take Covid precautions.
posted by MrVisible at 2:40 PM on April 17 [3 favorites]

I'd argue that I and many other fat people would be suffering if we were forced to take Ozempic

Okay...but literally no one said that you should be.
posted by praemunire at 4:38 PM on April 17 [3 favorites]

The effects of weight on health are largely bullshit but there are physical limitations imposed by a certain amount of fat on the body that affect how easily people can engage in activities for their health, particularly regarding building strength. This is something we see even in infants—there is a period in which infants stop engaging in a particular movement because they gain weight so rapidly that the limbs involved become too heavy to lift compared to their muscle development. This asynchronous growth suppresses their ability to complete this movement until a spurt of muscle development brings things back into alignment.

Many fat adults have weight and muscle development that is in sync, and have excellent quality of life. They are able to build strength and live their lives fully without difficulty. However, there are others who do not have the functional physical strength they need and it impairs their functioning. In particular, for many of the people I know on Ozempic, this was the primary motivation for taking the drug—not nebulous improvements to heart health or whatever else is claimed to be linked to obesity.

In this case, physical therapy for functional muscle strength should absolutely be recommended and offered. However, for fat individuals whose muscle strength and weight are so asynchronous, this will be simply physically much harder than it would be for a thinner person. As a currently fat person who has been through many courses of physical therapy in my life on each end of the spectrum (as in, from medically malnourished to obese) I think it does a disservice to ignore that being fat can mechanically impact health—it doesn’t inherently, but those for whom it does should have the option to reduce the weight rather than simply try harder against the physical force of gravity.

The way it is pushed on people is entirely a different story with which I am too disgusted and exhausted by broader societal everything to discuss properly, but individual people choosing to use Ozempic off-label (which is how most chronic conditions are treated because the research money isn’t there) as part of their treatment can sometimes be medically appropriate and should not be treated as “fat people taking meds from people who actually need it.”

Anyway, having read the article my observations about the clinical profile of disordered eating is probably not relevant because they’re only quoting a social psych person and I think going through point by point would just highlight the clash between her field and mine (clinical psych), but I think that what we are observing is not a change in eating patterns but a change in signaling around eating patterns, which is super easy to have happen with zero intentional lying on anyone’s part (though I’m sure people also are doing that). People are genuinely terrible at telling how much they’re eating at any point in the spectrum and when it’s necessary to get a truly accurate read on someone’s actual amount of consumption (as in eating disorder treatment) it involves a RIDICULOUS amount of specificity and tracking by professionals to get right even with fully willing and truthful individuals. So basically unless also doing that people can say whatever they want about how they’re eating and it will sound right to them regardless of what the truth is or how truthful they are trying to be.

And then of course there are also the grifters.
posted by brook horse at 4:39 PM on April 17 [9 favorites]

Okay I said it wasn’t relevant but I really like to share whenever my specialist colleagues have introduced me to research that blows my assumptions to bits, so:

Diseases of affluence? A systematic review of the literature on socioeconomic diversity in eating disorders

The takeaway of which is “There is no pattern of evidence for a relationship between higher SES and eating disorders” which we have been replicating since 1996 but ED researchers are still begging people to stop stereotyping disordered eating as being a SWAG (skinny, white, affluent girl) problem. Honestly, this article seems to largely just be repeating the same story we’ve heard about disordered eating for decades, and it’s still not true. But, given I’m in the field of clinical psych and only learned this upon receiving education from specialists in the subfield, I’m not surprised by nor really blaming people for continuing to cycle it, but I hope this information can help break away from that and focus more on the change in social signals.
posted by brook horse at 4:55 PM on April 17 [13 favorites]

I started to write a whole thing about brook horse's use of the term "medically appropriate" because while I agree with the comment, there's a part of me that says "people ought to be allowed to inject themselves with whatever they like in order to shape their body more closely to their personal vision of themselves"--like, rich or poor, let's nationalize ozempic and hand it out at the health department--but then someone would come in like, "oh, should they be allowed to inject HEROIN," or, more seriously there would be the concern that sometimes our "personal vision" of ourselves leads us to sad and unhealthy and dangerous outcomes. But then, like, what's the one thing rich people have that the rest of us don't, and it's the security of a community that cares for you, that watches out for you. You get stuck with a doc whose ideas of how to help you with your weight come off some aerobics tape from the 1980s. "The medicine is right there," you say, and he's like, "have you considered eating only lettuce the rest of your life."

This keeps coming up. There is some right or some treatment that we badly need--but we have so badly atomized ourselves that now we're in danger, we don't have a community of people to watch out for us, to caution us about the risks, to encourage us when it's safe, and also to just listen. You can have the shot, but not the people. Or you can't have either. It must be so nice to be wealthy enough that someone always cares about you, and can guide you through these things.
posted by mittens at 5:05 PM on April 17 [4 favorites]

Oh yeah to be clear my post was simply the first step in full “people should be allowed to inject heroin if they want” (though I would not advise it and would generally describe it as medically inappropriate but health is not a moral imperative!) bodily autonomy but that seemed like it might not go over well so startes with the more moderate “there are reasons to use this that fall well within our medical standards and people shouldn’t be shamed for using it that way” (ignore my whispered rapid theyshouldntbeshamedevenifitdoesnt but baby steps; also, more complicated with the shortage discussion).
posted by brook horse at 5:20 PM on April 17 [3 favorites]

BMI has its problems but presumably rich people can afford DEXA scans to measure their body fat accurately.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:04 PM on April 17 [2 favorites]

But . . . but . . . they'll all be skin and bones when we eat them

We'll just have to make soup.

On the upside, a bit of starvation before harvest really brings out the gamey flavours in a wild-caught meat like billionaire.
posted by flabdablet at 1:50 AM on April 18 [2 favorites]

At this point what drugs hasn’t Elon musk tried
posted by oxford blue at 6:44 AM on April 23

I'm guessing, but death cap mushrooms?
posted by flabdablet at 7:08 AM on April 23