Why Is Tinned Fish ‘Hot Girl Food’ Now?

By the ‘you are what you eat’ logic, junk food makes for junk people, and unfamiliar food makes for strange, ‘different’ people. It’s worth questioning the assumptions we make about what’s normal, plain, right or good in food, and what’s not. Often, these judgements we make about food and identity say much more about the person airing them than the

But the food narratives we create when we shop, cook and eat don’t need to be exotic, expensive or rarefied. They shouldn’t be estranged from the humdrum, ugly, familiar mess of everyday life. They don’t even have to taste good. The important thing is giving yourself time to imagine your food, to touch, taste and smell the ingredients, and to reall

our attitudes to food in general are so messed up that we muddle vegetables with salvation, and emptiness with virtue, what does that mean for the ways we treat the less fortunate among us?

There’s also an individualistic—and, arguably, masculinist—assumption at work in diet culture, which minimizes the role of food in shared pleasures, both daily and during special celebrations. But there is something immensely valuable about being tied to the world, and our bodies, and each other, by the thrice-or-so daily practice of satisfying our

Sometimes we lose all of this magic in the margins. Even though food is everywhere in our social fabric and in our culture, it’s still squeezed into one thing or another. Diet gurus make food the sum of calories and carbs. Self-avowed foodies use food as a code for class. Restaurant critics polish food into a smooth, substance-less thing, while foo