For a £5 trillion industry, the way we talk about or analyse wellness can feel a little general. Wellness can mean many different things, look like many different bodies, and speak in many different codes. My ambition here is to make sense of the diversity of the wellness consumer landscape, help you understand how to codify a wellness offering fluently, and predict what’s coming next.

In a previous piece of analysis, I explored how wellness sells a sense of control as a way of coping with anxiety. I decoded almost 40 years of diet culture through two* foundational anxieties:

• Contamination: the fear that something damaging has entered the body, that the outside world is acting on you without your consent. The response is to detoxify, defend, and cleanse.

• Insufficiency: the gap between what you are and what society demands. Depending on cultural trends, you either shrink toward acceptability or upgrade toward an optimised version of yourself.

What follows assumes this framework, but doesn’t require you to read the full history.

*In my previous decode, I actually named three anxieties: contamination, insufficiency, and optimisation. Upon reflection, I realised that optimisation and purity are strategies. So I separated the anxieties from the strategies, and the map became considerably sharper:

For contamination anxiety, the strategies are:

• Purity: The urge to remove the bad, by restricting, or cleansing from the inside out. Success looks like internal virtue.

• Release: The “dark mode” response to the cultural pressure to be clean. It splits into two distinct operational modes:

  • Transgressive release: You actively choose to rebel against the status quo because it restores a feeling of agency. Often, the rebellion is performed. You drink the Diet Coke and light the cigarette as a deliberate counter-aesthetic.

  • Defensive release: You mute the internal cognitive overload. Under modern productivity pressure, you’re not trying to make a cultural statement, but quiet the overwhelming noise.

For insufficiency anxiety, the strategies are:

• Optimisation: The biological upgrade pursuit. You stack the right inputs to engineer optimal gains, and quantitatively measure the results. The body and the data become visible proof of your superior discipline and biological intelligence.

• Reduction: The never-ending mission to shrink yourself towards a smaller size the world might accept.

The updated framework maps every diet code of the last 30 to 40 years, tracing the cultural landscape of wellness. You can check out all of the codes, here.

The 2020s

This is the decade where all four strategies are carried out simultaneously for the first time, giving rise to four distinct bodies.

The Clean Body is bound by a single code: Whole Food Integrity. Visualised through biodiverse produce and non-industrial processes, this quadrant rejects industrial complexity. Yet that single code contains a multitude of visual identities, like the fashionable tomato girl using heirloom tomatoes as table decor imitating a still life painting, the tradwife making sourdough from a three-year-old starter, and the Nonnamaxxer adopting the rituals of an ancestral past. The provenance and rejection of processing are identical across all three. Only the aesthetic changes. Whole Food Integrity represents 2010s Clean Eating code logic, shifting the clean body from a survival mechanism into an aspirational visual identity.

To the right, The Elevated Body pairs purity with optimisation, currently treating the interior landscape (specifically the gut-brain axis and the nervous system) as the newest site of maintenance. Systemic regulation and cortisol culture resolve internal contamination through functional protocols like adrenal mocktails and cycle-synced supplement stacks. The scientifically regulated body has become the ultimate proxy for a luxury lifestyle.

Bella Hadid is the newly appointed face of ALO and the perfect avatar for this quadrant. Her supermodel and queen of vintage status, equestrian hobbies, and functional tonic brand Kin Euphorics (made with adaptogens and nootropics for relaxation, focus, and stress relief) position her where fashion, luxury, purity and optimisation intersect. The ALO yacht completes the picture: breathwork at sunrise on a Mediterranean superyacht is not a survival strategy against burnout. It’s just content… an elite lifestyle flex. Optimisation has become a spectacle of itself. This quadrant is about aesthetic performance.

The tomato or butter-yellow fashion girlie has moved on from the clean, hyper-visible Erewhon smoothie and Lululemon leggings. She has quietly pivoted to low-cortisol chic: regulating her nervous system in archival athleisure. The new status symbol is making hyper-curated optimisation look entirely unbothered. It’s giving Peak Physique meets Systemic Regulation.

In the lower left, The Defiant Body emerges. GLP-1 sits at the heart of this quadrant, operating as the ultimate engine of defensive release paired with reduction. By reclassifying self-restraint as a pharmaceutical intervention, it makes extreme thinness accessible and effortless. By deleting food noise, the medication presses the mute button, offering time out from the exhausting bandwidth of constant food presence.

While GLP-1 acts as the quiet defensive engine, the cigarette and Diet Coke serve as the transgressive weight-loss accessories. This is where transgressive release takes over as performed rebellion. Both the hyper-skinny and the Performative Nihilists use extreme restriction alongside a dark mode aesthetic as a middle finger to clean wellness. This body shrinks to stand out. It performs the most visible rejection of the wellness system while being the most captured by it. This makes it the most conformist body on the map (it just has great branding).

Ariana Grande is the quadrant’s most visible signal. In her Petals music video she smokes a cigarette, putting her hyper-skinny silhouette and the dark mode aesthetic in the same frame. She embodies this performed rebellion, representing purity while her method of extreme reduction remains unconfirmed, triggering public speculation, judgement, and demands for an explanation. The system demands thinness but can’t cope when someone actually delivers it without apology or explanation. She actually complies with it so completely, so visibly, and so silently that the compliance itself becomes the transgression.

The Sovereign Body is produced by release and optimisation working together, confusingly expressed through carnivore diets, seed-oil panic, MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), primal sovereignty, biohacking, and longevity protocols. Supported by the manosphere’s community infrastructure, this is the most crowded quadrant of the decade. Almost entirely absent before the 2020s, it’s now overflowing.

The increasing structural powerlessness men feel manifests as a profound lack of trust in institutions. From a food perspective, this becomes a fear that toxins are entering the body, because the food system has been compromised. It manifests as contamination anxiety. Yet men are not resolving this through purity, but through transgressive release. The carnivore is not cleansing; he is building a sovereign body by deliberately rejecting state-regulated food and medical consensus. He’s going back to when men were “men”: primal, strong, dominant. Anxiety is resolved through rebellious, ancestral consumption. The sovereign body reclaims agency by disobeying the system.

While it preaches primal independence, the body is crafted through synthetic yet hyper-rational science, ironically excusing it from any toxicity. It is also changing: the hyper-muscular carnivore frame is giving way to a lean, angular silhouette, where skinny is rebranded as cellular efficiency or an aesthetic glow-up. Within the attention economy, becoming better-looking becomes a means of gaming the system. When it feels like the world is acting on you, outsmarting the system becomes appealing.

Bryan Johnson is the poster boy for this quadrant. He’s the logical extreme of male optimisation. Yet his absolute faith in hyper-quantification is quietly undoing itself. Johnson recently revealed he is living with autoimmune gastritis, exposing the limit of the biohacking project. Even the most heavily monitored body on Earth cannot optimise its way out of contamination. A reminder that biology is complicated beyond our scientific understanding and capabilities.

Different as these bodies are, all four are undoubtedly getting thinner. In 2020, culture’s gravitational pull favours an optimised skinny as the ultimate baseline.

The Shifts

→ From Body to Table

This is the decade men took over the entire map. Historically, they entered the wellness landscape through optimisation (i.e. the Titan, the Biohacker, the Systems Maxxer). Yet, by now, they have adopted every other strategy too, and rebranded each one as something new.

Contamination anxiety was historically female coded and resolved through purity, but has now crossed the gender line. This creates the first horseshoe on the contamination axis. If you follow purity far enough to its ancestral conclusion you reach the tradwife: raw milk, tallow, domestic purification. Then follow release far enough to its sovereign conclusion and you reach the MAHA carnivore: raw milk, tallow, biological reclamation. Both use opposite strategies yet buy from the same shelf to exit the industrial food system. They arrive at the same body through opposing strategies, and there is nowhere left to go. The clean body has become politically sovereign. The horseshoe has closed.

The MAHA movement is the release strategy’s most political dietary expression. RFK Jr.’s recent vaccination reversal exposes the exact point where this horseshoe breaks against collective reality. As a figurehead of institutional distrust, endorsing any vaccination demonstrates the limitation of individual sovereignty. The individual protocol cannot protect against airborne pathogens or contaminated supply chains. So when the leader points back to pharma under systemic threat, it proves the sovereign body was an illusion all along. Individualism cannot provide sovereignty against collective contamination events.

The clearest signal of where this goes next is Nara Smith. The tradwife movement’s most visible influencer recently distanced herself from the label on the Call Her Daddy podcast. The identity had become too politically legible, so she attempts to rebrand as a more palatable wellness figure, just in time for the launch of her first cookbook, Homemade. The same arc as Deliciously Ella a decade earlier: a food identity built on purity translated into a wellness identity. Like Ella, her origin story is now built on community and self-healing. They both anchored their brands in using whole foods to overcome severe autoimmune disorders, framing non-industrial eating as a wellness necessity that the medical system couldn’t solve.

The aesthetic remains: the from-scratch cooking, the whole ingredients, the domestic nourishment. But during the podcast, she shifted the code’s orientation away from individual protocol by talking about the community she found in the hospital while her child went through chemotherapy. When the real health crisis came, is seems the individual protocol was insufficient and the food was no longer the point… the community was. She is stepping into a realm of collective experience that the existing individualised map can’t hold.

Reduction also crossed the gender line. Structural powerlessness is ushering men to adopt a supermodel skinny frame through Looksmaxxing aesthetic ideals, achieved through GLP-1. Looksmaxxers even conquered the runway this year. So a second horseshoe forms on the insufficiency axis around GLP-1. The return of Heroin Chic is reconstructed through pharmaceutical means. It’s no longer choosing between costumes. This body is wearing all of them at once. The codes have stopped being distinct identities and collapsed into a single, very skinny body. This horseshoe has also closed.

This is also the loneliest quadrant because every code in it requires an audience to function. This body performs agency yet is the most dependent on social validation. Which means that when the audience stops paying attention, it is left with nothing. No community or table. Which is the gap the 2030s codes are going to fill.

2. From Transformation to Maintenance

The binary between the natural and the synthetic has collapsed. Historically, wellness built its entire logic on its opposition to pharmaceutical intervention. Purity was natural, organic, and unrefined. Pharma was toxic, industrial, and reductive. GLP-1 and the Sovereign Body have demolished this divide. The same consumer buying organic, seed-oil-free sourdough is now injecting a bio-engineered peptide weekly without a trace of cognitive dissonance.

In doing so, pharma has fundamentally altered what wellness is for. Where diet culture previously sold willpower as moral virtue, pharma-wellness sells defensive release: the deletion of desire. For decades, wellness told us that managing appetite was a test of moral character. By deleting desire chemically, pharma doesn’t just manage weight, it offers an escape from moral judgement. When food noise is chemically muted, food ceases to be an arena for emotional rebellion or disciplined restraint. Those protocols become redundant and the identities built around them become harder to sustain.

Pharma now does the heavy lifting of body management, leaving wellness to handle the side effects. Protein shakes for muscle atrophy. Electrolytes for nausea. Magnesium for sleep disruption. Wellness products are orienting themselves towards helping the body survive the medication rather than offering transformation. The ambition of the category is quietly downgrading to maintenance, and almost nobody has noticed because the drug is delivering what the diet never reliably could. The wellness industry is no longer the alternative to Pharma. It’s becoming Pharma’s support act.

3. From Scarcity to Devaluation

Historically, diet culture relied on the simple economic premise that extreme thinness was hard to achieve. Although products sold miracles, success stories were few and far between. Skinny functioned as visual proof of discipline, financial resources, time, and biological superiority.

GLP-1 is reducing that scarcity. By reclassifying self-restraint as a pharmaceutical intervention, the drug democratises thinness, making it accessible to anyone with a prescription. But in luxury economics, democratisation is devaluation. So will thinness remain “chic”?

This theoretically accelerates the death of reduction as a viable strategy. The cultural elite might be forced to move the goalposts away from body size entirely because when physical shrinkage no longer signals status, the body stops being a canvas for social positioning. This clears the way for new, qualitative markers of status like presence, time and ease.

4. From Optimisation to Presence

Optimisation is the decade’s most oversaturated strategy. To maxx is to optimise.

Yet tracking breeds its own exhaustion. Consumers have followed every protocol only to arrive at a hyper-quantified version of their original anxiety. The data and the lived experience have come apart… the gap between the dashboard’s score and the actual feeling of being in a body is impossible to ignore.

Peptide froyo is the ultimate endpoint signal. When even a treat is assigned a (synthentic) wellness job, optimisation has consumed the last space where food was allowed to just be food.

What optimisation can’t produce is presence. A meal that tastes like something, a table shared with others, or a moment unlogged or shared online. The more total the tracking, the starker this absence becomes. When that absence becomes the primary problem, the body starts looking for the qualitative stuff that the dashboard cannot measure.

That is where the 2030s begin.

2030s: A New Map

The existing map was built for a world where the individual body was the unit of intervention and the future was a stable destination worth preparing for. The four shifts have closed that map down. The horseshoes have closed. The strategies have exhausted themselves.

Two forces are dismantling the premise simultaneously.

The polycrisis makes the future unstable in ways no diet can fix. You can’t reverse climate breakdown, economic precarity, or institutional collapse with a supplement stack or a seed-oil-free diet. The individual body is the wrong unit of intervention for these new collective conditions.

The AI paradox makes self-optimisation feel cheap. When everything about you becomes algorithmically calculated, personalised, and comparable, being perfectly optimised loses its performative friction and status currency. Worse, AI creates a form of prescriptive loneliness. A reality where every person at a table consumes a completely different, algorithmically calculated bowl of bio-individual macros. The data that once signalled biological sovereignty now signals that you are running an isolated protocol alone.

Together these two forces produce a new anxiety that neither contamination nor insufficiency can contain. It’s impermanence: the felt condition that the future is not stable nor within our individual control.

So, the new map needs new axes.

The X axis represents time and runs from the future to now. Every existing code is organised around a future outcome.

The Y axis represents the unit of intervention, running from individual to collective. Every existing code sits at the individual end.

The 2030s territories (in yellow) are the first organised around something larger than the individual body, like the food system, the community, the climate, the shared table.

The existing 2020s codes cluster in the top-left quadrant of our new map: individual and future-oriented. But the cultural trajectory is moving toward the bottom-right: collective and present-tense.

The consumer is already signalling this shift through the loneliness epidemic and the Nara Smith pivot toward shared healing. This bottom-right quadrant is the most significant territory on the new map. There is overwhelming demand, but virtually no supply.

The brands that win here won’t sell individual protocols or subscription apps. They will build infrastructure: the physical conditions, spaces, and formats that make collective, present-tense wellness possible at scale.

Five Territories of the 2030s

So far the maps indicate how wellness has and might continue to evolve across several decades:

• 2010s Clean Eating was all about moral purity: Removing dirty processed foods and allergens to preserve internal virtue.

• 2020s Biohacking is about tracking and improving your individual performance: Pushing biological metrics toward peak output.

• 2030s Buffering will be about collective resilience: Building physical and emotional tolerance against systemic disruption.

Here are the 5 distinct code territories that might occupy this new landscape, framed as a clear spectrum of cultural reactions against 2020s biohacking, and listed in order of predicted emergence.

1. No Protocol → Healing from wellness

2. Pure Appetite → Sensory pleasure over function

3. Environmental Body Burden → Collective resilience

4. Community Table → Belonging

5. Living System → Qualitative reconnection

FUTURE TERRITORY 1: NO PROTOCOL

Often referred to as a scam that preys on people’s insecurities, the wellness industry does not have the best reputation for making people well. This space is an inevitable response to wellness fatigue.

It’s for someone who has tried everything and arrived at an obsession with wellness: the wellness refugee. Now that thinness and bio-monitoring have lost their status currency, the ultimate flex is opting out of this lifestyle altogether. We’re due a body positivity rebrand, just waiting for someone to codify it.

I can’t think of a significant wellness brand that is organised around recovery from wellness culture. The eating disorder recovery space exists but it’s clinical and somwhat stigmatised. The intuitive eating space also exists, but is somewhat politically coded in ways that limit its market. The space between the two, the person who is not disordered but is exhausted by diet culture, who wants to eat without a manual but doesn’t know how, is entirely unserved. The wellness industry created this consumer, and as the industry grows, so does this market.

The product territory could include frictionless physical spaces, like dining rooms, bathhouses, retreats, and travel destinations that explicitly ban trackers, phones, and macro or calorie-counting. It’s therapy-adjacent hospitality specifically for people recovering from wellness culture and algorithmic feedback loops. The aim is to restore hunger and intuition as a fundamental human signal rather than a variable to be managed. It’s the relearning of taste as a legitimate guide to eating.

The performative reward for participation is being present and fine. Not optimised, not clean, not sovereign, not reduced. The brand that promises somewhat of a sanctuary and delivers human presence will be the most subversive and valuable.

FUTURE TERRITORY 2: PURE APPETITE

Food in the wellness space has been relentlessly functional for quite some time. We face more peer pressure to eat protein midlife than we did to take drugs in our teens. Food’s only worthy if it contains a benefit that constructs a future version of ourselves.

This is a territory for the consumer stepping off the optimisation treadmill, struggling with functional eating fatigue, looking to reawaken their sensory desire. Where GLP-1 offered defensive release by deleting appetite, Pure Appetite reclaims healthy yet unquantified sensory experiences.

The opportunity to take the function out of wellness is enormous and entirely unoccupied. Again, there is no significant wellness brand organised around eating as pure experience rather than investment, or pleasure as a signal rather than a risk factor that needs to managed.

The product territory could include seasonal ingredient subscriptions framed as sensory connection to time and place (boxes that tell you what to eat based on what is happening outside right now), rather than what your biomarkers are telling you. Cookware and kitchen tools are positioned as objects of presence rather than performance tools: the cast-iron pan you keep forever as an antidote to the kitchen gadget. Sensorial whole foods with no claims, just good food, well-sourced, honestly described.

The performative reward is the person who is actually present, experiencing food without anxiety. Who can describe what lunch tasted like rather than what macros it hit. Unquantified pleasure could become the most aspirational identity on the map.

FUTURE TERRITORY 3: ENVIRONMENTAL BODY BURDEN

Individual sovereignty protocols fail against collective reality. You cannot biohack your way out of microplastics, heat stress, or climate-driven pathogens.

This territory is for the person who understands that contamination is now atmospheric/shared. It marks the shift from individual bio-sovereignty to collective buffering. The villain of this code is not a specific ingredient in the food system, but a systemic condition we all share. An ecologically disrupted world producing new pathogens, heat stress, and fragile supply chains.

The product territory would centre itself around biological security through, for example, radical localism. Hyper-local sourcing could be positioned as shared supply chain resilience (instead of ethical consumption). Freshly harvested, climate-adapted produce carrying intact soil microbiomes, community fermentation projects that build collective immune resilience against regional pathogens, hydration and mineral protocols designed for heat adaptation, and circadian eating protocols adjusted for disrupted light and temperature cycles.

The performative reward is a body that is grounded and collectively resilient alongside its immediate environment. Capable of maintaining stability in conditions that are destabilising everyone else.

FUTURE TERRITORY 4: COMMUNITY TABLE

Loneliness is the condition underneath every wellness code, yet no major wellness brand has ever treated community as the primary product rather than a secondary benefit. The belonging is always in service of the individual practice. The opportunity is to invert this. This territory is for the person who has nobody to eat with.

The product territory could focus on creating community eating infrastructure as a new wellness category: neighbourhood kitchens as subscriptions, the shared table as a recurring communal format with a consistent group of people organised around a shared food philosophy, fermentation as a practiced collaboration (the collective sourdough starter, the shared kimchi, the neighbourhood miso project), food gifting as a wellness gesture that feeds someone else rather than optimises yourself.

The performative reward is feeding others and being fed. Having a physical table to go to.

FUTURE TERRITORY 5: LIVING SYSTEM

In this territory, the anthropocene is recognised for what it truly is: a crisis of a distrupted relationship with the earth in which we see ourselves as outside or above it, not part of it. Decades of hyper-rational science, algorithmic tracking, monoculture, synthetic foods, and pharmaceutical muting have produced a profound spiritual starvation.

This space signals the overdue return of a holistic code. Where the 2020s was reduced to nutritionism, this territory restores real-world coherence.

The product territory here presents a fundamental structural design challenge. Industrial food systems are static, rigid, and hyper-standardised, whereas natural systems are inherently fluid, unpredictable, and dynamic. Bridging this gap requires entirely new infrastructure built for qualitative value.

While Environmental Body Burden takes a pragmatic, defensive stance against collective contamination, Living System takes a philosophical, spiritual stance against hyper-rational science and quantification, offering qualitative connection over protection.

In an era of optimisation, maintaining an unmeasurable, felt relationship with the living world becomes aspirational. Being grounded, enchanted, and rooted is the performative reward.

The wellness industry has spent at least forty years locating structural powerlessness in the individual body and selling individual solutions.

The predicted territories of the 2030s are the first that genuinely cannot be fully individualised or solved by an algorithm.

Climate resilience requires a food system response. Community belonging requires other real human beings. Impermanence anxiety requires a relationship with time that no software or supplement can supply.

The brands that win the next decade will build infrastructures for collective nourishment, community belonging, and present-tense experience.

Postpartum Glow Up Guide for New Mums [Stamina Level: Insanity].

Discover effective tips for your postpartum journey! Transform your self-care routine and embrace your beauty after childbirth. #postpartumglowup #glowupguide

1. Have a baby.

2. Stack your tasks while baby sleeps: 20min Youtube workout or squats during contact naps or baby carrier pilates.

3. 10,000 steps per day (3-5 miles).

4. Only eat nutritionally balanced, filling meals you can prepare and eat with one hand while baby sleeps.

5. Sleep while baby sleeps.

6. Skin: Brow & lash serum, ice roller in the morning, dry brushing at night.

7. Etc.

Losing your sense of self postpartum (often called identity grief) is an incredibly common experience for women. It’s something I’ve been curious about and have kept close watch on as I move through the fourth trimester.

From an identity perspective, I feel like myself. Just evolved. I’ve experienced a tremendous amount of change, trauma, and pure joy in a very short space of time. It’s overwhelming. I’ve learned that I can be a mother too.

What’s upset me most, oddly, is something much smaller: the way my body looks right now, and the fact that I can’t wear my clothes the way I’d planned to yet. This is where the grief actually lives. Not in the big existential questions, but in my wardrobe.

I’ve come to think the clothes aren’t really about clothes. They’re one of the few identity signals I could always control. A way of saying this is who I am on any given day. Postpartum, my body isn’t following my intentions on any predictable timeline, and when a tool I’ve always used to express myself stops cooperating, it gets misfiled as I don’t recognise myself, when it’s closer to I don’t have my usual tools right now.

And into that gap walks a new signal: the most toxic form of bounce-back culture I’ve witnessed yet. The old version (where you aim to erase the pregnancy and get your body back) has been replaced by a new one: “Project MILF,” “Hot Mom Summer”, the “MILF Era,” or “MILF Mode.”

Historically an external, male-gaze category, the acronym has been linguistically reclaimed by women themselves as a personal goal, used to signal a refusal to be desexualised or flattened by motherhood. But this pivot away from the traditional, soft “stay-at-home mother” aesthetic simply exchanges one narrow box (the invisible mother) for another: a hyper-curated, digitally performed motherhood rooted entirely in optimisation.

It’s optimisation dressed up as female empowerment. Not just recovering, but coming back better than before. Making up for lost time. It’s worse than the old script because it masquerades as self-love, which makes it harder to catch. But it’s the same restrictive impulse in a girlboss outfit. Still directed towards social approval and billed as tiresome progress.

What both versions of this script share is an assumption I didn’t clock until I tried to name it: that the self is static. Something with a fixed prior state, a “before” that you either return to or improve on, but never actually move past. Bounce back, glow up, optimise… it’s all the same instruction dressed differently: get back to a version of you that already existed. The interest isn’t in who this version of me actually is now, but how close I am to a photo taken before any of this happened.

However, to borrow from Deleuze, identity isn't a fixed state of being. It is a continuous process of becoming. It is a self that is constantly in motion, never arriving at a finished, permanent template.

This optimisation culture promises a false version of growth based on being-more. More toned, more productive, a hyper-efficient upgrade of your past, static self. But it’s a trap because it still assumes the original, pre-baby template is the only valid destination. True postpartum growth is becoming-other. It is an expansion into something genuinely new that the old categories cannot hold. Motherhood hasn't made me a more optimised version of my past self; it has folded entirely new dimensions into my existence. I am genuinely different, not failing to hold still.

To be less vain about it, though, the clothes aren't even the deepest example. A bigger part of my identity is cooking. Slow cooking. No recipes. Grandma style, the kind that comes from instinct and time. The kind that isn’t legible on instagram. It's one of the most tangible ways I can express who I am and what I’ve experienced. Hours spent building something from patience and feel rather than buying it or performing it. With a baby, I can just about manage snacks all day, if I'm lucky.

That loss sits differently to the wardrobe one. It's not about how I'm perceived. It's a skill and a rhythm I built over years, temporarily out of reach, and it makes the identity question less about vanity and more about which parts of a self are actually sustained by having the time and space to practise them.

Bounce back, come back better, make up for lost time, it's all sold on urgency, as if the goal is speed. But getting in shape takes months of consistent, unglamorous repetition, the same currency as the stew. It was never instant, even before a baby existed to blame. So the culture demands urgency while quietly requiring the one thing it never mentions: time, uninterrupted, which is precisely what I don't have right now. That's the real reason the wardrobe grief and the kitchen grief are the same grief underneath. Both are about a life that no longer has the hours it takes to build anything slowly, whether that's a stew or a stomach.

The cruelest part of this urgency is how it pollutes the time I do have. I have a tremendous amount of time to spend with my child. Fluid, fleeting moments that are constantly changing, moments I know I should be cherishing slowly. But the ambient pressure to return to normal, to hurry up and resolve the transition, makes that slow presence incredibly difficult to hold. The culture demands that I rush through the very experience that requires me to slow down.

It's made me think harder about identity as a form of self. How much of it is built from the things we do, buy, wear, and fill our time with, and how easily we conflate that with the self underneath it. Cooking without a recipe and choosing an outfit both count as identity, but they're not the same kind. One is purchasable and performable. The other is a practised, private competence that doesn't need an audience, only time. Both are creative and expressive. But there's a real difference between identity expressed through what can be bought or seen, and identity located in things that need no props at all, like judgment, humour, feeling, how you treat people, or what you notice. Both layers make up the self.

The wardrobe grief and the kitchen grief are unsettling for different reasons. One reveals how much weight I quietly placed on a fragile, expressible layer. The other reveals how much of the deeper layer depends on something as unglamorous as having a spare afternoon.

Then I open my phone, and the algorithm has decided I am a woman who only wants baby content. My identity, flattened into a single feed. And I can’t participate by performing any version of motherhood (tradwife or MILF) because I simply don’t have the time to cook or exercise. And I can't help think that surely this is leaving money on the table? Surely I'm not only worth marketing baby carriers to?

The problem is that the algorithm operates on tree-like thinking. It looks for a single, dominant taproot (in this case, “new mother”) and assumes that every single branch, leaf, and interest of my life must sprout from that one vertical trunk. If I want to cook, it must be a baby-friendly pureé. If I want to read, it must be a parenting manual. It treats a major life transition as a total system reboot, erasing the rest of the landscape.

But a whole person is rhizomatic. We don’t grow like trees… we grow like grass or ginger roots, spreading sideways, non-hierarchically, sending out shoots in every direction at once. My identity as a professional, a cook, a person with niche taste in clothes, and a new mother are all connected horizontally, underground. They intersect and feed into one another with no single defining root.

The algorithm is completely the wrong shape for how a human being actually exists because it cannot track a horizontal, slow-burning self. It values legibility, the instant click, the fast vertical spike of transactional interaction. It can measure a microsecond purchase of a baby carrier, but it has no syntax for a four-hour simmer or months of unglamorous repetition. It isn’t a real mirror. It’s an optimised one, for engagement, not for me.

And it makes the same mistake as the bounce-back script, just from the other direction. Bounce-back culture assumes I’m trying to get back to a better “before.” The algorithm assumes I’ve arrived at a fixed “after,” a permanent new-mother state, and stops updating. Neither one can hold a self that’s still moving. A self that is becoming.

This isn’t hyper-personalisation, it’s a shortcut that looks like personalisation. Brands and platforms that treat major life transitions (new parent, new job, divorce, bereavement, retirement) as the only relevant variable are optimising for short-term engagement at the cost of long-term trust. They’re missing the far bigger opportunity of a person whose identity is expanding, not shrinking, even if her bandwidth for it has temporarily collapsed to snacks and survival.

Bounce-back culture 2.0, Project MILF, "come back better", postpartum "glow-ups", succeeds commercially because it borrows the vocabulary of empowerment while selling the same anxiety as before. Any brand operating in this space should ask whether it's selling recovery or selling inadequacy with better branding. The companies that will earn durable loyalty here are the ones that resist the urge to monetise the gap between how a woman feels and how she's "supposed" to look, and that recognise identity loss isn't only about appearance. It's also about the quieter competencies, like a slow-cooked meal with no recipe, that get crowded out by a schedule that isn't hers to control right now.

People often grieve a symbol of identity, like clothes, body, or routine, not the actual self. Products and services that address the proxy directly, with honesty about what it represents rather than pretending to fix the underlying feeling, build more trust than those promising total transformation. A well-made piece of postpartum clothing that fits now solves a real problem. A campaign promising to help her “get her body back” solves nothing and reinforces the wound. The same logic applies further out from fashion: a service, a meal kit, a moment of covered childcare that gives someone back an hour to cook the way they used to is solving the actual problem, not a marketing-shaped version of it.

My instinct is the sharpest business insight here. A platform that reduces me to one life-stage category isn’t just alienating me, it’s under-monetising me. I haven’t stopped being a professional, a cook, a person with niche interests and old hobbies. My algorithm has been optimised for the loudest, most recent signal instead of the fuller picture underneath it. Systems built to detect the horizontal expansion of identity, not just the rigid confirmation of a single label, will always outperform ones that lock users into narrowing feedback loops, both ethically and commercially.

Something interesting is happening across industries right now.

Take Charli XCX’s new album. It features John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. One legend per field, and one per title: Music, Fashion, Film. Cale built the experimental infrastructure that made alternative culture possible. Jacobs carried street culture upward and high fashion downward simultaneously. He’s the designer who made that translation work. And Scorsese represents the last institutional voice in cinema that the algorithm genuinely cannot absorb.

By featuring them, she forces the audience to confront their actual history, rather than consuming a trendy, surface-level imitation of their influence. The reality of their physical presence does all the conceptual work for her. The material is the concept.

We saw this at the Met Gala too: Sabrina Carpenter wore a Dior gown made from actual strips of film from the 1954 movie Sabrina. Her body became a moving surface for actual cinema history, rather than a costume of it. Paloma Elsesser wore a gown made from nearly 100 vintage dresses sourced from eBay. A single reconstructed dress literally made of other dresses. Emma Chamberlain wore a hand-painted Mugler gown inspired by her father, an oil and watercolour painter. The paint on the dress was his actual paint.

Within all of these examples, the thing and the reference are the same object. There’s no gap between signifier and signified. No borrowed cultural capital. The depth is in the material itself.

This is creative depth. And because it’s becoming so rare, it’s incredibly noticeable when it appears. It’s a signal worth paying attention to.

But if you look at the food industry today, that signal has gone entirely cold. It forces a glaring question: when did food brands stop making culture?

When did food brands stop making culture?

Food used to possess genuine creative depth.

If you think back to the history of Champagne, it didn’t just reflect an existing culture. Its creators developed an entirely new consumption ritual around the beverage: an elevated moment of celebration and ceremony, anchored permanently by the sound of a popping cork. In the 1960s, Heinz didn’t track consumer data to follow condiment trends. Instead, it defined what a condiment could mean: consistency, safety, and trust. The unchanging object that is always there on the table.

These brands shaped the world because they were built with a genuine, uncompromised point of view. Not a strategy for capturing temporary attention within it.

Food brands used to be among the most culturally generative forces in the economy. The industry reached for actual joy and physical provenance. It relied on real fermentation, rather than a “fermented” claim on a label. It utilised ingredients with actual history, rather than a story engineered by an agency to sound like one. The depth was inside the material itself. The culture followed naturally.

Now, the industry is in a crisis of derivative optimisation. To me, the ultimate tell is that “culture” and “cultural fluency” have become dominant corporate buzzwords. When an industry starts talking about culture this incessantly, it’s usually because it has stopped making or understanding it.

The conversation is a symptom. The thing being discussed is the exact thing that’s gone missing.

What happened?

For decades, a mediated middle carried creative depth outward. In food: The Michelin guide, the influential critic, the editor with genuine institutional authority. In fashion: Anna Wintour. In music: The A&R system, the independent press.

They were gatekeepers but they were also infrastructure. Because they operated outside the immediate, hyper-speed feedback loop of the mass market, they could afford to protect things that were slow, niche, weird, or difficult. They found work with genuine depth and gave it the conditions to exist, find an audience, and travel.

Of course, there were profound issues with the mediated middle. The velvet rope created exclusion, so we tore it down. The internet promised total access, and the algorithm promised total participation. TikTok told everyone they could be a tastemaker.

But we made a fatal miscalculation. We assumed that by destroying the gatekeepers, we were liberating and gaining access to the depth. Instead, we destroyed the protective ecosystem that allowed depth to survive, leaving culture entirely exposed to the raw mechanics of the free market.

When you replace an human arbiter (an editor or a critic) with an automated aggregator (a platform algorithm), the metrics of value completely invert. An arbiter looks for substance, and an aggregator looks for engagement. An arbiter can validate something quiet and illegible, but an aggregator can only read noise.

Without a mediated middle to translate depth into economic viability, creators are forced to adapt to the new and ever-changing infrastructure to survive. They had to stop optimising for the material and start optimising for the feed.

What actually happened is we got the appearance of access with none of the actual substance.

The Met Gala this year charged $100,000 a ticket to celebrate “culture” while being bankrolled by a logistics empire that monitors warehouse bathroom breaks. This is the ultimate victory of the aggregator over the arbiter, with Jeff Bezos as host/villain. The machinery of extraction didn’t just fund the party… it became the party. What felt different this year was that the conversion of extracted wealth into social legitimacy was finally made hyper-visible.

The exact same logic collapsed in the food world. Noma (three Michelin stars, five-time World’s Best Restaurant) was revealed to have been running on free labour. When forced to start paying its interns, it added $50,000 to its monthly costs and announced its closure months later. A New York Times investigation detailed physical abuse going back to 2009.

The art evaporated. What remained was the raw exposure of the realities of the supply chain. Amazon’s delivery empire and Noma’s tasting menu share the same substrate: extraction dressed as culture.

What Noma and the Met Gala ultimately expose is a grim economic reality: under the rule of the aggregator, creative depth is no longer affordable. Material substance isn’t inherently too expensive to produce, it’s just that the raw mechanics of the free market have made it impossible to sustain. When success is measured purely by scale, speed, and algorithmic visibility, the messy, slow, human costs of actual creation become a financial liability.

To survive without a protective buffer, producers of genuine culture are forced into a tragic choice: either partner with the machinery of mass extraction, or exploit their own backend infrastructure just to keep the empty shell of its performance alive. The art evaporates because the system is no longer built to pay for it.

The collapse of the mediated middle did not democratise access to creative depth. It removed the structural insulation that protected it, and optimisation rushed in to fill the gap.

The spectrum.

It feels like there are two ends to how culture gets made:

Creative depth is when the thing and the reference are the same object. The film strips are the film. The dresses are the dresses. Champagne is the actual place, the actual method, the actual history encoded in the glass. Depth is inseparable from the material. You cannot extract the signal and reapply it elsewhere because the signal is the substance.

Optimisation is the opposite move: extract the signal, discard the substance, reapply at scale. It is how a £4 yoghurt becomes a £7 yoghurt with “25g protein” slapped on the front. Gut health, GLP-1 adjacency, and adaptogens. These are not new ideas. They are just old anxieties in new packaging, mined from genuine food cultures built slowly over time with real knowledge, and converted into benefit claims. It is the fermentation aesthetic without the fermentation. The heritage story without the heritage.

The tragedy of today’s modern market is that the majority of brands position themselves closer to creative depth, but almost everyone is performing depth while practising optimisation.

The cultural landscape of 2026.

To understand how this performance plays out, we have to map the two forces driving the modern market: the attention economy and the mechanics of luxury.

The attention economy demands total legibility and maximum noise just to be seen on a feed. True distinction defends and differentiates itself through illegibility. The moment a high-cultural signal becomes too easy to read, optimisation copies it, flattens it, and strips its value. To survive, genuine depth must retreat where the algorithm cannot follow.

This creates a simple matrix:

• X-Axis: Legibility of signal (Legible, Illegible)

• Y-Axis: Volume of noise (Quiet, Noisy)

1. Noisy legibility.

This is the attention economy’s native register. This mode requires engineered spectacle just to get a two-second clip on a feed.

• In fashion: A look memed before the celebrity even reaches the top of the stairs. Sarah Paulson wearing a dress referencing billionaire greed to a Bezos-funded party. It is a critique that has become so hyper-readable it becomes the joke.

• In food: The viral, enormous croissant, or the spectacle-filled restaurant experience. The function is entirely the generation of content.

This mode is losing cultural credibility fast. Consumers are ceasing to respect it, and they are ceasing to respect themselves for consuming it.

2. Quiet legibility.

Optimisation with better taste. This is curated distinction, calibrated for a narrower audience.

• In fashion: The off-duty model shot. The “if you know, you know” outfit that signals membership without announcing it.

• In food: The heirloom tomato at the farmers’ market, the sourdough from the right bakery, or the olive oil with the austere, minimalist label.

This is the mode that most often mistakes itself for creative depth. The person buying the heirloom tomato feels like they are opting out of the performance. They are not. They are just in the most aestheticised version of it. It is optimisation with better taste, which is still optimisation. It is safe, predictable, and becoming genuinely boring.

3. Noisy illegibility.

Monetised confusion. This is where the most discussed cultural moves of 2026 live and where genuine critical culture gets most easily misread.

• In fashion: Bad Bunny at the Met Gala in old-man prosthetics dressed by Zara. The world’s most-streamed artist wearing a fast-fashion brand that perfected the 21-day micro-trend cycle, attending an event sponsored by the man who perfected the 24-hour delivery cycle. Or Bhavitha Mandava showing up to the carpet in jeans.

• In food: High-end coffee roasters like Friedhats packaging premium beans in chaotic plastic medicine containers, or natural wine brands like Italian Plastic intentionally jumbling traditional luxury codes.

These brands purposefully scramble semiotic signals to keep consumers on their toes. It is a premium strategy for distinction through disorientation. Gigi Hadid summarised this quadrant perfectly when she noted that you should always buy art that confuses you a little bit. Confusion is the product. Your willingness to ask signals your membership. Your confusion is monetised.

4. Quiet illegibility.

This is depth so established it has zero need to perform. This is the endpoint.

• In fashion: Zendaya or Meryl Streep choosing not to attend the Gala. Their actual absence generated more commentary than most looks that showed up. Genuine absence, not performed withdrawal.

• In food: The “Racine effect.” The traditional brasserie that never tried to be cool, that serves the same dishes it always has, and is full every night because it is completely, utterly itself. Brown food. Rich, stewed beans served as a traditional Fabada Asturiana without explanation. Not rebranded beans on toast for a feed.

This is the complete refusal of the legibility game, which becomes its own most powerful signal.

The shift.

The most important thing on the map is the red arrow pointing right, toward Illegibility.

The entire landscape is drifting. Consumer sophistication is moving faster than brand strategy, and the gap is widening. Noisy Legibility is losing credibility. Quiet Legibility is becoming wallpaper. The cultural action is entirely in the Illegibility half of the map, which is precisely where optimisation struggles most.

Real Illegibility can’t be manufactured. It can only be earned.

Underneath the surface, the drift toward Illegibility is a drift back toward a single question: is there actual depth in the material? On this map, pointing toward Illegibility means pointing directly at creative depth. They are the same destination.

For luxury, this is a bit of an ultimatum. The brands that will survive the next decade are abandoning cultural fluency as a marketing strategy because they are realising that you cannot position your way to the right side of the map. True luxury can no longer exist as a lifestyle aesthetic or a legible status symbol. If a brand just references culture, it will be absorbed, stripped, and sold back by the aggregator. To remain luxury, it has to stop trying to be readable to the mass market and focus entirely on protecting the messy, expensive, and un-generatable substance of creative depth. It must define itself as the final fortress of the un-optimisable.

Consumers aren’t stupid.

The cultural exhaustion people feel right now (the sense that everything is hollow, self-parodic, and impossible to trust) is the specific fatigue of oversaturation and the exhaustion of being performed at, rather than made for.

This optimisation machine has scaled inward to conquer daily human existence. Consider the media and investment empire of Steven Bartlett. From The Diary of a CEO to ubiquitous optimisation investments like Huel, Zoe, and Whoop, the dominant cultural gospel of 2026 tells us that every single facet of life must be monitored, measured, and maximised. We track our deep sleep, parse our gut microbiomes, analyse our stress indicators, and audit our daily routines for peak performance.

But when you treat your personal life like a corporate supply chain to be optimised, you strip away the messy, unquantifiable substance required to actually live it. You extract the signal of a flawless life and throw away the actual joy of existence. The end result of this endless personal optimisation is absolute exhaustion. It is a hollow, metric-driven performance of living that sucks the spontaneous joy entirely out of the room.

But consumers recognise the alternative when it appears.

Consider the universal praise for Emma Chamberlain’s custom Mugler gown. In an era where culture is completely fractured into algorithmic echo chambers, and where people wonder if we will ever see a piece of music or art that unites everyone again, that dress achieved absolute consensus.

It did not achieve this through a clever marketing narrative or an optimisation strategy. It did it because it was a living canvas that required forty hours of hand-painting and days of physical drying time, rooted in the actual texture of fine art. The consensus was the direct result of creative depth. When a piece of work possesses that much material weight, it creates an objective gravity well. It forces a fragmented audience to pause, look, and agree.

The vocabulary might be new, but the feeling is old. It is the difference between something made with genuine intention, and something made to look like it was.

This is why you cannot fluently perform your way to depth. Consumers are not looking for brands that understand culture. They are looking for brands that are actually contributing to it. And they are getting better, not worse, at telling the difference.

The live experiment.

This structural battle is exactly what makes Charli’s next album a strategically interesting cultural move in 2026.

Brat started with genuine creation underneath it. The repulsive colour, the low-res font, and the deliberate refusal of polish expressed a real, uncompromised point of view. But within weeks, it became “Kamala green” and a template for every corporate brand doing smudged text on a feed.

The positioning was extracted from the creation and reapplied without the substance. The hyper-speed surface layer absorbed it, stripped it, and sold it back. That is what the surface layer does. It is extremely good at it. The response (featuring Cale, Jacobs, and Scorsese) is an attempt to solve this problem structurally.

It is a new infrastructure, instead of the expected aesthetic. These are people whose depth cannot be extracted because it is entirely inseparable from the decades of physical work that produced it. You cannot easily make a Cale-adjacent commercial product. You cannot easily do a Scorsese-inspired fast-fashion campaign. The real thing resists flattening in a way the mere aesthetic of it never does.

The attempt here is to place something on the surface layer that fundamentally refuses to be optimised. Whether this depth successfully travels or gets flattened anyway remains an open question. But the logic is exactly right.

You cannot solve a depth crisis with better positioning. You have to go back to the material.

What this actually means.

Creative depth is still being made. Look at Paloma Elsesser’s dress built from actual dresses, Sabrina Carpenter’s gown cut from actual film, the independent food producer working with real material, or Bouchon Racine simply continuing to be itself. It exists. It just can’t travel the way it used to.

The infrastructure that once carried depth outward has been replaced by a system designed exclusively to transport surfaces. The work sits on a red carpet for a single night, or fills the same tiny restaurant within a single square mile for years. The market has no mechanism for scaling what it cannot read.

Therefore, the strategic question for anyone making something right now isn’t “what is the next trend to latch onto?” It is much simpler, and much harder:

Champagne and Heinz didn’t ask what culture wanted and then deliver it. Things happened the other way around. They made something entirely real, and culture organised itself around them. That was the standard. Not cultural fluency. Not trend literacy. Not a beautifully designed version of a hollow centre.

The majority of brand innovation currently positioned as depth is just optimisation. The market cannot always see the difference but consumers increasingly can. And the brands that are actually making something (rather than performing the making of it) are the ones that will still mean anything when the next cycle of performed depth has been absorbed, stripped, and sold back.

The interesting work already exists. The job is building the conditions for it to travel.

This is an essay about 30 years of wellness culture and what it has actually been mapping without knowing it.

Underneath every diet code, every decade, every gendered vocabulary of healing and optimisation, there are three shared anxieties. Contamination. Insufficiency. Optimisation. The anxieties are stable. What changes, decade by decade, is the performative reward for compliance with them. The costume changes. The anxiety underneath does not. And when you map which gender has historically owned which anxiety, and watch what happens as those ownerships begin to shift, you see something the wellness industry has never wanted you to notice: the dietary codes are not about health. They are about survival in a world that keeps changing the terms of social acceptance. They are the most visible surface of a much older condition. The feeling that the world acts on you, and the body is where it shows up first.

Braden Eric Peters, known online as Clavicular, is the face of the Looksmaxxing movement. He recently sat down for a Channel 5 interview with journalist Andrew Callaghan which ended abruptly with a question.

The question Clavicular asked Callaghan was this: “when you wake up every single morning and look in the mirror, are you one hundred percent satisfied with every single thing?” Callaghan responds: “yeah, more or less.”

Clavicular called it disingenuous and immediately ended the interview.

It was both uncomfortably funny and diagnostic. What became obvious was that the Looksmaxxing toolkit (the jaw exercises, the mewing, the bone structure analysis, the nutritionism, the obsessive supplement stacking in service of bodily optimisation) only functions if dissatisfaction is felt universally.

The premise of the entire project rests on the idea that no one, looking clearly at themselves, could be satisfied. There is always a flaw to fix, an optimisation to chase, a closer version of the ideal to work toward. So when Callaghan said he was fine, he didn’t just decline the invitation to join in. He pulled the structural pin.

The system has nowhere to go if you don’t accept the premise that something is wrong with you. As one commenter put it afterwards: “confidence is the one thing they never sell you.”

—

The Symmetry

Looksmaxxing seems complex and extreme. The community is, among other things, a seriously pharmaceutical one. Forums discuss steroid cycles, HGH stacks, and increasingly, GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide. Members use these not for weight loss in the conventional sense but to suppress the extreme hunger that anabolic steroids produce. They are chasing a lean, angular muscle definition that has become the new masculine ideal.

Ozempic has entered mainstream culture as a weight loss tool overwhelmingly taken by women. It arrives in looksmaxxing spaces as an appetite management protocol for men running testosterone cycles. The same drug presented in a completely inverted context. The gender coding attaches to the framing instead of the drug itself. And the framing does all the cultural work.

Underneath all that complexity, the architecture is pretty simple. Looksmaxxing cannot survive contact with self-acceptance. Its product is the perpetuation of the anxiety that makes improvement feel mandatory. Which makes it structurally identical to every diet movement that came before it.

What is new is that biological and aesthetic standards are being applied to men with the same structural force once reserved for women. I notice it in the way my partner critiques his body, or in the way my eleven-year-old nephew has started obsessing over protein intake while pumping weights at the playground.

Clavicular, at twenty years old, was born into an attention economy that prices bodies. He is doing what every inhabitant of that economy eventually does. He monetises the anxiety the system produces.

Emily Ratajkowski understood this from the other direction. She theorised the male gaze and argued that choosing your presentation can be an act of empowerment, all while posting the very images of the ideal that the economy demanded. The theory didn’t dissolve the trap. It just meant she understood it (and how to monetise it) while she was inside it, because she represents the ideal. Clavicular is running the same adaptive logic from the other side. As a young man, he sees the system clearly enough to walk out of an interview when it stops working, and continues building within it anyway because adaptation is the only path to social acceptance.

Once you see this symmetry, the shared grammar becomes hyper visible.

Open two what-I-eat-in-a-day videos. The first is a woman: warm lemon water at 6am before the cortisol spikes, steel-cut oats with collagen powder, a lunch that is mostly greens, an evening of cycle-synced eating and magnesium glycinate before bed. The second is a man: raw liver at 7am for the micronutrients, grass-fed beef at every meal, no seed oils, no plants, nothing processed. Their vocabularies are worlds apart. Her language is healing. His language is optimisation. But the structure is identical: I was broken, I found the cure, I am following protocol, I am being fixed.

Plate for plate, Clavicular’s obsession with nutrition is structurally identical to the clean eating content that has filled female feeds for fifteen years. Both movements are about control framed as optimisation. The empty or measured plate is evidence of discipline, regardless of who is holding it.

The visual endpoint of male optimisation and female restriction are, in the 2020s, the same body.

—

The Grammar

Despite the headlines, the skinny 90s never really went away. The aesthetic merely went underground while body positivity had its cultural moment: the intuitive eating movement, the fat acceptance discourse, the slow dismantling of heroin chic as aspirational aesthetic.

Now it's back. Quietly at first, then everywhere. The low-rise jeans. The collarbone exercises. The ponytail facelift. The BBL reduction. The body reduced to its most architecturally geometric and minimal form. Absence as aspiration. What is different now is that skinny is more accessible thanks to GLP-1 medication. The minimisation logic has become more extreme, moved beyond a female pursuit of social necessity, and been medicalised and redistributed via the algorithm to an even wider recruitment base.

I was born into the early 90s version of this grammar.

After a divorce, my mother turned to vegetarianism and raw foodism, meditation ashrams in India, and hosted colonic detox retreats in our home. She made me fresh juices and charcoal-purified water every morning before school, replaced her meals with Atkins carob bars, and maintained a diet Pepsi and Marlboro Light addiction. Back then, diet products were seen as legitimate wellness. A way to release and indulge without compromising your goals.

It took me twenty years to realise none of it was about nutrition. The juice and the colonics were a fringe control system: rituals meant to create a sense of biological agency over a life that had come apart. Both the purity-focused and reward-focused practices existed without contradiction because they were never in dialogue. One was cleansing, the other was release. Both were responses to the same anxiety. The food was just the costume.

This is the grammar underneath 30 years of wellness culture: locate the anxiety in the body, sell a system of control, attach an identity to compliance.

The grammar has 3 primary flavours:

Contamination is the purification project. Something bad has gotten in, or accumulated, or been absorbed from a hostile environment. The body is impure and the project is removal, purging, cleansing. This anxiety has historically been directed at women. The female body constructed as a site of accumulation, of excess that must be periodically expelled. The performative reward for compliance is purity: the clear skin, the clean vessel, the visible evidence of internal virtue. Underneath the purity is a structural condition. The woman who detoxes is a woman who has learned that the world acts on her body without her consent, and has found a ritual that restores the feeling, however temporarily, of agency.

Insufficiency is the reduction project. The body as it arrives is not socially acceptable. Too much, too visible, too large, too present. The project is reduction toward a form that passes, that fits, that stops attracting the wrong kind of attention. The driver is social legibility. The anxiety is about fitting into a world that has made it clear, repeatedly and structurally, that you currently do not. This anxiety has also historically been directed at women. The performative reward for compliance is social acceptance: the body that no longer invites comment, scrutiny, or exclusion.

Optimisation is the upgrade project. The body's biological capacity is not being fully realised. The baseline is insufficient not socially but biologically. The project is engineering beyond it: stacking inputs, measuring outputs, achieving a state of performance the unoptimised body cannot access. This anxiety has historically been directed at men. The male body constructed as raw material for a better version of itself. The performative reward for compliance is dominance: the body as a visible proof of superior discipline, data, and biological intelligence. Underneath the optimisation is also a structural condition, though it has taken longer to name it. The man who engineers his body is a man who has learned that biological superiority is one of the few remaining routes to social power in a world where the traditional routes are closing.

These three anxieties have split almost perfectly along gender lines for almost 30 years. Male wellness codes have historically spoken the language of science: metabolic mechanisms, hormonal variables, the body as a system to be measured and improved. Female wellness codes have historically spoken the language of wisdom: ancient traditions, intuition, the body's innate intelligence, knowledge that a medicalisation built around the male body as default never offered them. Not ideology. Navigation. You go where you are believed.

That distinction is eroding. The woman tracking her cortisol on an app and building a supplement stack around her cycle data is doing what her mother did at the ashram. She just has a dashboard now. The scientific vocabulary has colonised the alternative tradition and reissued it with credentials. The institution that failed women for decades has returned, via the wellness market, to monetise the infrastructure women built in its absence. This is not progress. It is the language of one tradition absorbing another and calling it a legitimate upgrade.

What makes the triple-anxiety framework powerful is not the anxieties themselves but their overlaps. When contamination anxiety borrows the logic of optimisation, a new status identity is born. When insufficiency anxiety borrows the language of contamination, another emerges. The venn diagram I build is not a taxonomy. It is a map of how wellness culture generates new costumes for the same underlying fears, decade by decade, by recombining the same three anxieties with different performative rewards.

—

The Timeline

The 1990s: Restriction is feminine

• Primary anxiety: insufficiency.

• Secondary anxiety: contamination.

• Performative reward: thinness as moral discipline.

• The status identity: the woman who has her appetite under control.

Female diet culture lived entirely in the subtraction half of the map. BMI became a clinical standard. Calorie-in/calorie-out became gospel. SlimFast. Weight Watchers points. For the first and last time in thirty years, institutional medicine and the wellness industry were reading from the same page. The page said fat is the enemy. The page said shrink.

The structural condition underneath this is worth naming plainly. The 90s female body was constructed as a problem to be solved. Not by the woman herself, not for her own benefit, but for the comfort and legibility of a social world organised around male defaults. The thin body was not healthy. It was compliant. The wellness industry did not create this demand. It monetised one that was already structural.

The decade's defining tension sits between two female codes pulling in the same direction by different routes. Heroin Chic subtracts directly: the depleted body as rebellious aesthetic ideal, absence made visible. Peak Physique adds through exercise to arrive at a smaller, more controlled body anyway. One restricts. One burns. Both arrive at the same place. Even the addition is in service of absence.

Superfoods are the era's outlier. Raw Cure represents a whisper of contamination anxiety that will become a roar. The idea that certain foods contain quasi-medicinal power the mainstream ignores is a seed. It is also, in retrospect, the first signal that women were beginning to construct their own explanatory systems for bodily experience, in the absence of a medical establishment that took that experience seriously.

Male diet culture barely registered as a cultural category beyond Arnold, Venice Beach, and protein powder. Not an ideal the mainstream felt was expected of them. Just admired.

Women minimised. A small pool of men maximised.

The 2000s: The hidden mechanism arrives

• Primary anxiety: insufficiency and contamination for women, optimisation for men.

• Performative reward: insider knowledge.

• The status identity: the person who has seen through what the mainstream is doing to everyone else.

This era introduced the move that defines all subsequent diet culture: the claim that there is one master variable that explains everything and corrects mainstream medicine. Diet culture is no longer supplementing medical advice. It is replacing it.

This is the moment male diet culture acquires a theory. The insulin narrative is metabolic, mechanistic, adversarial to consensus. The optimisation anxiety finds its first scientific legitimacy. The performative reward shifts from size to knowledge. The status identity is the man who has done his research, who has seen through the dietary consensus that was making everyone fat, who has access to the real mechanism. The structural condition underneath this is the beginning of a male relationship with institutional distrust. The food pyramid failed him. The medical establishment was wrong. The insurgency needs a cardiologist to lead it, so Robert Atkins obliges.

For women, the 2000s produce the contamination economy in full. The insulin logic lands alongside every anxiety that already existed, compounding rather than replacing. Carbs become a threat. Fat is still a threat. Calories remain a threat. The list of things that can harm you grows longer every year, because the structural condition generating the anxiety has not changed. Women are still navigating a world that acts on their bodies, that holds them responsible for the consequences, and that offers an ever-expanding market of solutions to problems it helped create.

The detox movement located the damage not just in what you eat but in what your interior has become: emotional residue, environmental accumulation, the need for a total flush and reset. Subtraction at its most dramatic. Alongside it runs a quieter code: the slow meal as spiritual practice, the body rebalanced daily rather than periodically purged. One produces a before-and-after. The other produces a self. Both are inward, subtractive, and entirely female-coded. Both are built, quietly, in the gap left by a medical establishment that consistently failed to believe women's accounts of their own interior experience.

Women cleansed and restricted the body. Men became amateur scientists to build it.

The 2010s: The map gets crowded

• Primary anxiety: contamination across genders, optimisation emerging for both.

• Performative reward: aesthetic and ethical purity made visible.

• The status identity: the person whose food reflects their values.

Clean eating synthesises superfoods, detox, and plant-based goodness into a unified theory of everyday purity. Instagram turns this into an aesthetic economy and an identity simultaneously. The informed woman becomes the pure woman. You are not just controlling your eating. You are documenting the protocol.

The structural shift here is significant. For the first time, the female contamination code becomes publicly visible as a performance. The what-I-eat-in-a-day video is the panopticon made voluntary. You film your compliance. You post your discipline. The audience becomes the surveillance mechanism. Nobody is forcing this. The system has become so thoroughly internalised that performing it feels like self-expression.

Paleo arrives as the evolutionary argument: the contamination is not just in the food, it is in the category of food. Grains, legumes, dairy. The entire agricultural project is an evolutionary mismatch. Contamination anxiety at civilisational scale. The ancestral framing plants a seed that carnivore and biohacking will later claim. Crucially, it is the first code where contamination anxiety begins to borrow the language of optimisation. You are not just avoiding poison. You are returning to your biological design. The performative reward begins to include primal correctness alongside purity.

The decade's most consequential development is gut health. Previous codes located the damage in what you eat. The detox codes located it in what your interior had become. Gut health goes further. The gut is now a living ecosystem with its own memory and its own relationships with the brain, the immune system, the mood. You cannot empty it and start again. You have to tend it like a garden, adding the right things, building microbial diversity over time. This is the first major female code validated through science and organised around addition rather than subtraction. Contamination anxiety borrows the logic of optimisation. The status identity shifts from the purified woman to the microbiome-literate woman who understands her interior ecology.

The Barry's Bootcamp lobby is where contamination anxiety and optimisation anxiety meet in a shared physical space for the first time. The smoothie bar menu is both arriving at the same product simultaneously. Every ingredient has a job. This is the commercial precursor to everything that happens in the 2020s.

Intuitive eating arrives at the decade's close as the structural outlier. Its primary anxiety is social rather than contamination or optimisation. It refuses the logic of rules and protocol, then generates its own economy anyway. The rebellion is monetised within the same market cycle that produced the thing it rebelled against.

The 2020s: One anxiety, three expressions

• Primary anxiety: all three, simultaneously, across genders.

• Performative reward: sovereignty.

• The status identity: the person who has seen the system for what it is and is optimising their way out of it.

The diagram shifts. And the shift is not symmetrical.

Carnivore and seed oil panic are the first male diet signals organised around contamination rather than pure optimisation. Men begin to feel what women have always been told to feel: that the world is acting on them, that the food supply is hostile, that the interior requires vigilant protection against invasion. The structural condition that generated female contamination anxiety for 3 decades has spread. Declining economic mobility, contracting institutional belonging, the closure of the pathways through which the optimisation code traditionally delivered its promises. When you cannot build your way to security, the narrative shifts. The system is not failing to reward you. The system is poisoning you.

But the performative reward is not purity in the female sense. It is sovereignty. The contamination anxiety is the same. The costume is entirely different. The man who avoids seed oils is not trying to be clean. He is trying to be ungovernable. This is the Venn in action. The same anxiety borrowed by a different gender, expressed through a different performative reward, produces a completely different status identity while running on identical underlying logic.

The 2020s codes split into two responses to this shared condition.

The first is the attempt to hack or outlive the system. Systems Maxxing and Longevity Pursuit treat the body as a recursive feedback loop where every input is a variable to be dialled to its limit. The continuous glucose monitor as dashboard. Average as failure state. Both are maxxing on inputs. The primary anxiety is optimisation. The performative reward is biological dominance. The body becomes measurable proof of superior intelligence and discipline.

The second is the attempt to optimise backwards. Primal Sovereignty reaches toward something that feels uncorrupted: raw milk, beef tallow, seed-oil-free certification, the body returned to its pre-industrial baseline. Dietary choices become explicitly framed as political selfhood. The trad wife and the carnivore arrive at the same product shelf. Nobody is actually exiting the system. The ancestral eating protocol is still a protocol. The raw milk still has a subscription. The contamination anxiety is real. The exit is performed.

Whole Food Integrity is a rebranded, more aspirational version of clean eating, adopting principles of intuition and provenance to promote balance and mindfulness. The identity becomes more varied: lean muscle definition for the Pilates Princess, Italian grandmother's cooking and farmers market seasonality for the Tomato Girl. It’s the most luxurious iteration of clean eating yet. The contamination anxiety remains. The performative reward has upgraded from virtue to taste.

What is most significant about the 2020s is that the most sophisticated practitioners are no longer committed to one anxiety. They alternate. They know when to purge, when to restrict, and when to optimise. Systemic Regulation is the code that lives between all 3. It’s the person who understands that the body requires both optimisation and rest, both addition and subtraction, both the protocol and the permission to abandon it. This is the most complex dietary identity the map has yet produced. It is also the most anxious, because it has internalised every previous code and found no resolution in any of them.

What unites all the 2020s codes is the premise that the body is under active threat. The food system is poisoning the cell membranes. The stress hormones are dismantling the endocrine system. The modern environment is suppressing testosterone, degrading the microbiome, accelerating cellular ageing. The threat is total and the response must be equally total.

This is a structural shift from every previous decade. The 90s body was socially unacceptable and needed reducing. The 2000s body was contaminated and needed purging. The 2010s body was impure and needed disciplining. The 2020s body is under attack. The anxiety has not just intensified. It has changed category.

—

What the Direction of Travel Reveals

The most honest thing the triple-anxiety framework shows is not where the codes sit but where they are moving.

Women have not been meaningfully liberated from the structural conditions that generated contamination and insufficiency anxiety. The body positivity movement changed the aesthetic vocabulary without changing the underlying architecture. The contamination codes persist because the conditions persist: the gender pay gap, the maternal penalty, the medical establishment's continued dismissal of female symptoms, the beauty standard's continued function as a social tax. The female wellness infrastructure was not built as ideology. It emerged as navigation, in the gap left by a medicalisation that was never designed with this body in mind.

What has changed is that men's structural position has deteriorated. The traditional routes to social power that the optimisation code promised to unlock are narrowing. When the optimisation code stops delivering, contamination anxiety arrives as its replacement. The narrative shifts from the system is failing to reward me to the system is actively working against me. Carnivore. Seed oil panic. MAHA. These are the dietary expression of that shift. The anxiety is new to men. The condition it describes is not new at all. Women have been navigating it for much longer than 30 years.

The direction of travel is not convergence in the optimistic sense. It is not two cultures meeting in the middle. It is the expansion of structural powerlessness to a new demographic, and the wellness industry's rapid adaptation to serve it. When men adopt contamination anxiety, the industry does not offer them the female codes. It produces new ones with new performative rewards: sovereignty, biological dominance, primal reclamation. The anxiety is the same. The costume is everything.

The longevity obsession is where the direction of travel lands most precisely. Longevity sits in the overlap between contamination and optimisation: the fear of cellular decay expressed through engineering protocols. It optimises in both directions simultaneously, forward through cellular repair and NMN supplementation, backward through ancestral eating patterns and Blue Zone data. Pure holism left the building long ago. What remains is the protocol, dressed in the language of wisdom. When the optimisation code stops delivering its promises in the external world, it turns inward and forward in time. You cannot build your way to the house or the status. But you can, theoretically, optimise your way to more time. Longevity is the optimisation code with nowhere left to go except the future. Which makes it the most honest expression of structural powerlessness the wellness map has yet produced. The man who cannot secure his position in the world attempting to secure more of the world's time instead.

The visual endpoint of male optimisation and female restriction is, in the 2020s, the same body. And that body is increasingly the 90s body: just with better branding and a prescription.

—

Performative Nihilism

When the optimisation becomes too heavy, people do not return to normal. They pivot.

The resurgence of Diet Coke and cigarettes as cross-cultural signals (among MAGA-voting corporate alphas and Brat-aesthetic urbanites equally) is not a return to anything. The meaning of the signals has changed. For the male, it is a middle finger to the nanny state and a nod to the nostalgia of inconsequential capitalism. For the female, the cigarette and the mess are a rebellion against twenty years of Clean Girl cortisol culture. Both are structurally symmetrical acts of performed escape.

Diet Coke is the perfect symbol for where this leaves us. A formerly feminine signal of 90s insufficiency anxiety, adopted as masculine rebellion, that still produces the same physical result the system demands. Compliance disguised as contamination. The release that allows the control to continue.

The only way to feel like you are not being controlled by a wellness system is to adopt a sickness system (sometimes referred to as “Dark Mode”). My mother understood this without knowing it. The purity and the release are two sides of the same coin, both managing the same underlying anxiety around living in a body you do not feel you own. Baudrillard called it simulation: the map of resistance circulating in place of resistance itself.

—

Back to the Interview

Byung-Chul Han calls this the burnout society. The over-achiever who has so thoroughly internalised the command to optimise that the violence is no longer external. Nobody is telling you to be thin, fertile, and productive. You are telling yourself, filming yourself telling yourself, and posting the film. The optimisation never arrives at optimal. The protocol is the point, not the outcome.

When solutions are medicalised and rebellions are performed, we are left in a state of High-Definition Nihilism. We see the trap perfectly, as Ratajkowski and Clavicular both do, but there is no outside to move into.

Clavicular walked out of that interview because Callaghan’s answer made the system visible. A system that only works if everyone agrees something is wrong with them. A system that has been making that agreement mandatory for women for at least thirty years, and is now extending the offer to men.

When Callaghan said he was fine, he didn’t just answer the question. He committed an act of economic sabotage. Because if everyone woke up tomorrow and said the same thing, the wellness industries would vanish by noon.

The confidence they never sell you is the only thing that actually dissolves it.

Everything else is just a different diet.

Picture this. You’ve just sat down at a restaurant. The food arrives. It looks exactly right: the lighting is good, the composition is there, the signals are doing something you want to be a part of. Before you’ve tasted anything, the phone is out. You adjust the angle slightly. You take several versions. You save the best one. You put the phone down. Everyone feels a bit awkward. You move on. You eat.

Nobody told you to do that. You didn’t decide to do it. It just happened, the way it always happens now, so smooth and automatic, that the decision has disappeared entirely. The “camera eats first” joke has stopped being funny because it stopped being a joke. The meal and the documentation of the meal have become the same gesture.

This is the cage.

Max Weber described the iron cage as the inevitable consequence of rational capitalism. A structure built not by force but by logic. Each individual choice makes sense. Collectively they produce a system nobody chose, and nobody can exit. You didn’t set out to turn your lunch into content. You set out to eat. But content is what the system needed, and content is what you gave it, because the alternative was invisibility. And in the attention economy, invisibility is the only thing worse than irrelevance.

The bell curve from part 1 maps where people sit in relation to food knowledge, enthusiasm, and accrued taste. This piece maps something underneath it. The cage that the curve lives inside. The mechanism that turns the Purist’s private act of knowing into the Performer’s public act of signalling into the Fueller’s complete indifference. And explains why all 3 responses are, in their own way, a reaction to the same system.

There is a specific anxiety that hits you when you’re standing in a 40-minute queue for a pastry, watching every person in front of you hold their phone at the same 30-degree angle once they’ve reached their breakfast.

It arrives quietly. The realisation that you’re not eating. You’re working. You’re not a customer. You’re a content generator for the bakery’s SEO. Your appetite has been colonised. Your breakfast is the raw material being mined for surplus value. You are a labourer in the attention economy, and you queued for 40 minutes to clock in.

For the person who made the pastry, this tension is felt in a sharper and more existential way. To make food is to be both inside and outside the cage simultaneously.

You know exactly what the food is worth. You also know exactly what the system will value. These are not the same and the gap between them is where the creative self goes to quietly suffocate.

All you want to do is produce meaning. But to be visible, you must be legible. Your expertise must be extracted as lore. Your craft must be translatable as vibe. Your knowledge must be packaged as content. The cage doesn’t ask whether you consent. It asks whether you want to exist.

To understand why the word foodie feels so grotesque to anyone who actually works in food, you have to decode the mechanism of the cage: what it’s made of and how it functions.

The map of extraction.

The geometry of the cage is defined by two intersecting forces.

The X axis is the use-value; the depth of meaning. It’s the creator’s labour and knowledge. Years of technical failure. The cognitive load of history. The physical toll of craft. The thing that actually makes the food good. It’s the real: the thing everyone craves but almost nobody can fully access because access requires formation and formation requires time and time is the one thing the system doesn’t reward.

The Y axis is the exchange-value; signals of taste. It is the lore, the branding, and the status markers that transform a private act of creation into a public unit of cultural currency. It’s the caption, the reference, the reservation, the knowing, rather than what it tastes like. It is the thing the algorithm and industry can harvest.

The irony of the cage is that the system doesn’t value the X axis. It treats the creator’s knowledge like a scenic backdrop: a story to be sprinkled on a caption or product to justify the Y axis price point. The more authentic the labour, the higher the status the consumer can extract from it. The craft is the raw material. The vibe is the product.

The codes.

Every position on the curve speaks a different language of extraction, determined by where they sit in this geometry.

• The Fueller opts out entirely. Food is functional utility (the Huel, the meal deal). The cage is irrelevant, nothing to harvest.

• The Experiencer consumes the spectacle. They chase the TikTok trend, the cheese pull, the sensory overload. The cage is a playground.

• The Enthusiast pursues knowledge. They are the map-makers, the list-builders. The cage provides inspiration. They provide the labour of discovery that the system then monetizes.

• The Performer converts knowledge into aesthetic distinction. Together with the Enthusiasts and the Experiencers, they live at the peak of the noisy Y-axis. The Pet Nat, the forced rhubarb: the cage is their native habitat.

• The Omnivore performs authentic roots. They are the most sophisticated players, rebranding the cage as an anti-cage by chasing the hyper-local and the real, which the system immediately packages as the next trend.

• The Purist produces encrypted essence. They sit at the intersection of high meaning and low noise. It is the only position that approaches a genuine exit, and the one the system tries to consume the moment it becomes legible.

The creator’s problem.

To work in food is to live inside this contradiction at full resolution.

You know exactly how the mechanism works. You know which image will perform. You know the caption that will travel. You know the restaurant that will generate engagement before you’ve tasted a single thing on the menu. You have, at various points, made all of these calculations consciously and proceeded anyway. Because to not participate is to be invisible. Because the kitchen doesn’t pay for itself. Because the algorithm is indifferent to your principles.

So you feed the cage your joy just to be allowed to keep your kitchen. You become your own extractor. You take the thing you know most deeply and you translate it into the language the system can harvest. You write the caption. You take the photo. You adjust the angle slightly.

And then you eat.

The consumer does this unconsciously. The creator does this with full knowledge of what they’re doing. Which is not a more comfortable position. It is a significantly less comfortable one. Because you cannot unsee the mechanism once you’ve learned to operate it. Every meal is now two things simultaneously: the thing itself and the content or value it generates. The taste and the story about the taste.

The lifecycle.

Signals don’t stay where they start. They travel. Leftward, always leftward, through a process that looks like democratisation and functions like extraction.

1. Signals begin as principles: Food in its radical private state. Pure labour, deep context. It belongs only to the maker and the eater. (Bottom right).

2. Then comes aesthetic: the first stage of extraction. Someone strips the labour away and keeps the look. The knowledge is converted into lore to justify a price point or a social hierarchy. The craft becomes a vibe. (Top right).

3. Then trend: the signal scaled for the masses. It is no longer about flavour or history. It is about the dopamine of participation. The Enthusiast enters here, consuming the signal to prove they were present at the right moment. They enter here thinking they’re discovering something. They are not discovering something. They are arriving at the trend exactly on time. (Top left).

4. Then commodity: the death of the signal. Mass produced, hollowed out, stripped of every trace of the labour or meaning that produced it. Truffle oil in a plastic bottle. Artisan sourdough from a supermarket chain. MSG as a TikTok trend. The signal has travelled so far left it has forgotten what it was. (Bottom left).

Somewhere in this process the thing itself (the actual food, the actual knowledge, the actual craft) gets left behind. The simulacra replaces the real.

The assembly line.

In the cage, the boundary between the person behind the pass and the person behind the phone has dissolved. You are now coworkers on the same digital assembly line.

The creator produces the raw material: the dish. The consumer performs the refining and distribution: the post, the signal. The algorithm extracts the surplus value: the engagement. The foodie thinks they are a patron, but they are an unpaid marketing intern. The chef thinks they are an artist, but they are a content-factory foreman.

Exiting the cage.

The closest thing to an exit is illegibility. The Purist’s silence is not indifference: it is the refusal to translate. The meal is not content. The knowledge is not lore. The craft is not a vibe. It simply is what it is, it is not for sale, and the algorithm cannot harvest what it cannot read.

But illegibility is a luxury. It requires having already built enough reputation or income to survive without the mechanism. The chef who has stopped performing has usually spent twenty years performing first. Which means the exit from the cage is not a moral position, it is an economic one.

The labourer’s handshake.

The Purist is the consumer-side mirror of the creator. Two sides of the same coin of essence. The creator knows the X axis because they built it through failure and repetition. The Purist knows the X axis because they recognise it through sustained attention.

When they meet in silence over a meal that needs no caption, they are conducting a transaction the cage cannot tax. A direct exchange of value with no digital footprint. The only interaction in the restaurant that isn’t a shift on the assembly line.

The encryption of taste.

As the cage gets better at simulating the real, some codes become harder to crack. The Omnivore’s authentic roots have already been harvested and sold back as a franchise.

So taste has gone underground.

It has moved away from the aesthetic and toward the stubbornly ordinary. The next signal isn’t a perfectly plated dish. It’s a meal so aggressively un-photogenic and resolutely normal that the algorithm doesn’t recognise it as a target. The code isn’t being broken, it’s being hidden in the noise of the mundane. The gate is no longer a price point. It is a level of discernment the machine cannot yet simulate.

The Macro Observation: Food has completed its transformation into pop culture. The dinner table has replaced fashion as our primary site of self-expression. The centre of gravity has shifted. In the 2010s, peak foodie belonged to the Enthusiast, yet in the 2020s, it belongs to the Performer. It is no longer enough to know where the food is… you have to know what the food says about you. The 'foodie' is no longer a student. They are a director.

—

The bell curve is an uncomfortable thing to apply to taste. It implies that most people cluster somewhere in the middle. Not through any failure of character, just through the basic mathematics of how cultural formation works.

You were exposed to what you were exposed to. The rooms you grew up in, what was considered good there, what you could afford, what you were taught to notice and what you weren’t. By the time taste feels like instinct it has already been decided. The curve just reflects that. It doesn’t ask how you feel about it.

The other uncomfortable thing about a bell curve is what it says about the two ends. They are thinly populated. And they tend to look more like each other than either does to the middle. Which, in the case of a foodie, turns out to be very funny and completely true.

Highsnobiety recently declared we’re living in a performance economy. Their evidence was food culture. They’re not wrong that performance exists. But they’ve simply surveyed the loudest section of the room and called it a diagnosis. This is what happens when you mistake the peak of the curve for the whole thing. Which is exactly what the peak of the curve always does.

The performance is real. But it’s just a band, not a condition.

Here’s why. Taste is where status lives. Not as intention: most people are simply eating, following what feels natural, making choices that feel entirely like their own. But status doesn’t require intention. It’s an outcome. It accrues quietly in the background of every meal, every preference, every instinct about what constitutes good food. The hierarchy exists whether you’re playing to it or not.

Performance is what status looks like when it needs to be seen. It's the mechanism the middle of the curve reaches for because it's the most available one: assembling the right references, demonstrating taste to an audience, making the meal do social work. But status doesn't require an audience. It just requires taste. And the highest status position on the graph performs nothing. The lowest performs nothing either. The loudest performances happen exactly in the middle, where knowledge is high enough to signal but not yet deep enough to make signalling feel unnecessary.

Which means the curve isn’t about what you’re trying to signal. It’s about what your relationship to food reveals (about exposure, about formation, about what kind of access you’ve had to the thing itself). You didn’t choose where you started. You do have some agency over where you move. But the graph is always there, running underneath your choices, indifferent to your intentions.

One more thing before we begin. Several people on this curve would rather die than be called a foodie. Note who they are. That reaction is also data.

—

What type of foodie are you?

—

The Fueller: You eat because the body needs it. Not as event, not as identity, not as culture. The meal deal is just a meal deal. Not an ironic statement, guilty pleasure, or a window into your soul. It’s just lunch. There is a sandwich. It is consumed. This is not a failure of your imagination. You’ve been quite savvy with your combo choices: egg (protein), red bull (energy), let’s go.

You simply have a different relationship with time and attention, one in which food does not feature as a category worth thinking about. A meal should provide value for money: the bigger the plate the better.

• The giveaway: you genuinely cannot tell others what you had for lunch yesterday. Not because you’re forgetful. But because it didn’t register as information worth retaining. It was probably Huel.

• When asked whether you’re a foodie: you are confused by the question. Not offended. You just don't understand why it's being asked.

• Your foodie enthusiasm: completely absent. Not suppressed, just absent. Food is not a site of feeling for you. It is purely operational.

• Status accrued: none. Which is its own kind of status, though you would find that kind of observation baffling.

The Fueller is not on the curve in any meaningful sense. You are the left tail, which is the structural mirror of the right tail. You’re present in the shape but outside the logic of the thing entirely.

—

The Experiencer: Greggs strawberry matcha. Limited edition Cadbury collaborations. You’re part of the once in a blue moon Borough Market Saturday crowd. You go for the foodie atmosphere and leave with a £12 brownie (and a photo). Food, for you, is all about the event: novelty, participation, the pleasure of being present at something. There is no pretension here and that is, genuinely, the most honest position on the curve. You’re not confused about what you want. You just want a sensory hit.

• The giveaway: the meal is inseparable from the occasion: i.e. bottomless brunch post barry’s bootcamp. Without the context it just wouldn’t be the same. You leave bad reviews on Google based on the service and atmosphere.

• When asked whether you’re a foodie: you happily self-identify. The most honest use of the word on the entire curve.

• Your foodie enthusiasm: present and genuine but essentially passive. The delight arrives with the thing itself: the novelty, the occasion, the moment. You’re not actively seeking. You are very open to receiving. There is real joy here and it requires nothing of you.

• Status accrued: accessible, participatory, legible. Consumption is belonging.

—

The Enthusiast: You’re genuinely excited about food as a pursuit. You’ve watched all of the Chef’s Table (+spin off) documentaries on Netflix, have strong opinions about hot sauce and which neighbourhood has the best Gails, and will travel and queue for a meal that’s gone viral on TikTok. Tried all of the Dubai Chocolates. Borough Market again but this time you know which stalls are worth it. You might be dipping your toes on Broadway market. This is not performance. You are engaged.

• The giveaway: discovery is the engine. The new place, the new dish, the new cuisine. The enthusiasm is real but it’s also restless. A perfect version of something you’ve already had excites you less than something you haven’t tried yet. You trust the consensus: anything with a 4.8* rating must be good, right?

• When asked whether you’re a foodie: you half-identify with it but sense it undersells you. You’re conflicted. Will say “I mean, I wouldn’t not call myself one” and then change the subject.

• Your foodie enthusiasm: this is the loudest point on the curve. As an Enthusiast you don’t just enjoy food, you evangelise it. You have recommendations for every occasion. Opinions about every neighbourhood. Many running google maps lists of places you absolutely have to try.

• Status accrued: knowing things. Being someone who knows things. Food is cultural fluency. This is also, not coincidentally, the peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve applied to food. Enough knowledge to feel certain. Not enough to doubt yourself. The confidence and the volume are directly related.

—

The Performer: The most populated point on the curve and the most complex because the performance is often genuinely invisible to the person doing it. You are not cynical. You really do care about natty orange wine, about where the meat came from, about the listening bar with the interesting small plates menu. But the choices are also doing consistent social work, assembling an identity, accumulating the right references, and demonstrating taste to a specific audience.

• The giveaway: the meal exists slightly outside itself. It is an engine for content, conversation, and position. When you find a hidden gem that no one else recognises, you feel a flicker of deflation; the mirror has gone dark. You gravitate toward perfectly curated, disney-fied JKS-style dining rooms: spaces that feel like a film set of an authentic experience, where the menu is objectively good but the visuals are finely tuned for digital capital. Meme culture is your native language; you process taste in real time through what you reference and what you find funny. The meme is the meal before the meal. (You will almost certainly read this and place yourself one band to the right).

• When asked whether you’re a foodie: you would never use that word. Too try-hard. Not quite cool enough. You’re not a foodie; you’re just someone who’s intentional about where you eat. Get it straight.

• Your foodie enthusiasm: the excitement is still there but it has transformed. It’s been processed into curation. Visible delight has become a slightly blunter instrument. What replaces it is the knowing recommendation, the considered opinion, the raised eyebrow at the wrong or passé choice. Your enthusiasm has become expertise, or at least the performance of it.

• Status accrued: what I eat tells you who I am and who I am is someone worth knowing. Food is cultural capital.

—

The Omnivore: Bourdain-literate. You’ve broken out of the Eurocentric fine dining hierarchy (f*ck fine dining). You’ll eat on a plastic stool in Peckham or venture to Ilford for Afghan Sheeryakh and understand exactly why it matters. You’re deeply suspicious of restaurants that require a lot of theatre or conceptualisation, and of Google star ratings. You value and regularly surf for hidden gems, possibly the working-class meal (caffs not cafes), the place that’s been there for thirty years with laminated menus and no Instagram presence. As soon as a restaurant becomes popular, you’re over it. You’re passionate about context: the grandmother’s kitchen, the culture behind the dish. Bigger plates, bigger bowls.

• The giveaway: you can tell anyone exactly why the no-frills noodle place is better than the expensive one. And you’re right. But the fluency with which you explain it is doing its own quiet work. You still participate in food culture but with curatorial distance. You share things that demonstrate range rather than belonging. The meme is now a reference rather than a signal. You are performing effortlessness, which is the hardest performance of all.

• When asked whether you’re a foodie: you visibly bristle. The word feels reductive, consumerist, and insufficiently serious. You’re not a foodie. You’re someone who understands food as culture. The strength of your reaction is proportional to how close to the Performer band you actually are.

• Your foodie enthusiasm: the Dunning-Kruger drop is felt. You know enough to know how much you don’t really know at all. Easy excitement has been replaced by something more considered, more specific, and harder to earn. When something lands, it lands with real weight. You’re no longer as loud about it when it does. You probably gatekeep and tell yourself it’s to protect the sanctity of the find.

• Status accrued: the ability to read across registers signals a more advanced palate than those still stuck in one. Cultural range is sophistication. This is a real and meaningful shift in taste. But there is still a narrative running underneath it. The story of the meal: the authenticity of it, the discovery, the cultural omnivorousness it demonstrates, is part of what’s being consumed. The status has been reframed but not dissolved. Anti-hierarchy is its own hierarchy. Eating cheap, knowingly, and fluently, is the move.

—

The Purist: No frills. Simplicity, beige, or “bad” as code. MSG not as irony but as genuine principle: a quiet rejection of the wellness-coded, aesthetics-first framework that has colonised food culture. Three ingredients done exactly right. The same thing ordered every time from the restaurants that share St. JOHN’s principles (places that understand that a piece of aged meat, or a vegetable at its peak requires nothing else) because although the elements might change with the seasons, it's a perfect dish and there is no reason to deviate. A twenty-ingredient tasting menu is exhausting (and probably ethically incoherent) rather than impressive. Less equals more taste: values such as seasonality, craft and ethics are driven by the pursuit of flavour above all else. One exceptionally sourced thing beats ten “interesting” things every time.

You can’t buy your way here, and you can’t reference your way here. You can’t arrive here without a very specific kind of training: deep exposure, sustained attention, and the hard-won experience of having seen the theater and decided it’s mostly noise.

This knowledge is accumulated in one of two ways: through the grueling labour of the industry or the absolute luxury of time. Whether you’re the weary chef who has spent twenty years distilling food into its essence, or the bored billionaire who has exhausted the world’s supply of novelty and now just wants a perfect peach, the result is identical. One reached the summit by climbing, the other by private helicopter. But they both sit at the same counter in total, unperformative silence.

• The giveaway: You have enough experience to know what you’re tasting and why. Amongst the noise, you'd often prefer to dine out alone.

• When asked whether you’re a foodie: the word simply doesn't register. Not a rejection, more like asking if you're a hobbyist about breathing. It is a fundamental part of your existence, not a lifestyle choice.

• On foodie enthusiasm: (almost) entirely internal. Not because the joy has left but because it no longer needs an audience. The satisfaction is total and private. You’re back at the beginning of the curve in volume and peace. But nothing like the beginning of the curve in understanding.

• Status accrued: the highest on the curve. It is a status built on discernment that is invisible to everyone who hasn’t got a clue. It’s the ultimate “if you know, you know”, requiring no social media footprint to validate its existence.

—

*Disclaimer: I’ve been most people on this curve. Some of them for longer than I’d like to admit. I’ve also been multiple at the same time. That remains true. Most of my professional work now focuses on those left of centre: left of where enthusiasm crosses taste.

Signals travel too. What read as Purist-coded a decade ago is Experiencer-coded now. Ramen. Natural wine. The laminated menu place. Even MSG. Each thing gets discovered, gets written about, gets a Wagamama, gets an airport branch. The Purist moves on. The Experiencer arrives. That’s not a tragedy. That’s taste doing what taste does.

This means that the most valuable position on the curve isn’t the furthest right. It’s the ability to read where a signal is in its journey before everyone else does.

—

The uncomfortable part.

Most people reading this have already located themselves. And most of them have been generous.

The Performer reads themselves as an Omnivore, convinced their interest in a no-frills kebab shop is purely about the spice blend and not the authenticity points it earns them. The Enthusiast reads themselves as a Performer, assuming their Google Maps list constitutes a curated perspective. Almost nobody reads themselves as an Experiencer because the Experiencer, by definition, isn’t reading long essays about food culture on Substack.

But the curve is indifferent to your self-filing. It tracks the moment the phone comes out, or the moment you feel a flicker of disappointment because a hidden gem was actually empty. The higher you climb the right side of the curve, the more you use food to separate yourself from the people to your left.

The way you read yourself should be based on what you actually do when nobody is watching, when there’s no social context to perform into, when the meal is just the meal.

What do you order then?

—

The thing nobody tells you about really understanding food is that it makes you quieter.

The enthusiasm curve peaks loudly at the Enthusiast (evangelical, urgent, certain) and then it drops. The Performer refines it into cool. The Omnivore deepens it into conviction. The Purist goes almost silent. Not because the joy has gone but because it has gone somewhere the outside can’t reach.

The entire apparatus of food culture… the reviews, the recommendations, the discourse, is produced by and for the middle of the curve. The people with the most to say are not the people who understand it most. The people who understand it most have largely gone quiet. Everything we consume about food is structurally filtered through the loudest point on the curve, not the deepest one.

You can only draw this graph from the right. But to publish it, you have to come back to the middle.

That’s what this is.

The men in those bedrooms aren’t fringe anymore. The movement they belong to has cabinet secretaries now. Legislation. A food policy agenda moving through the most powerful government on earth. And it is beginning to reshape what you are told to eat, what you are allowed to buy, and whose version of nutritional science gets to count as truth.

Most people who watched the documentary are only now catching up with these men. The movement itself has already moved on. This is where it went.

The original pyramid was already a lie.

To understand the new food pyramid, you need to understand the original one (pyramid on the left).

The base layer: 6-11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, pasta daily was never a public health recommendation in any pure sense. It was the outcome of a negotiation. Grain industry lobbyists shaped it. Scientists whose objections were quietly overruled knew it at the time. An entire generation was handed the result as objective truth, and it took decades for the official story to catch up with what critics had been saying all along.

This matters because the manosphere’s entire political identity is built on that betrayal. The original pyramid was captured by industry. The science was manipulated. The institutions lied, and every one of those accusations is substantially true. That’s what makes what comes next so difficult to untangle… the diagnosis is largerly correct. The solutions are a different story.

Where the new pyramid came from. Not where you think.

This story begins in the 1930’s. A dentist from Cleveland named Weston A. Price travelled the world studying teeth. What he found was striking: indigenous populations eating traditional diets (Swiss alpine villagers, Inuit hunters, African pastorialists) had almost no tooth decay, well-formed facial structures, and robust health. When those same populations adopted industrialised foods (white flour, refined sugar, vegetable oils), their descendents dental health collapsed within a generation.

Price published Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in 1939. It is still in print. His core thesis: that the industrialised food supply was doing something damaging to human bodies. This thesis has held up better than mainstream nutritional science would like to admit.

The problem isn’t Price. The problem is what got built on top of him.

In 1999, Sally Fallon Morell founded the Weston A. Price foundation and published Nourishing Traditions. The book translates Price’s fieldwork into a very recognisable dietary programme: raw milk, organ meats, bone broth, animal fats, fermented foods, sourdough. Seed oils are the great villain. Soy is near-poison. The cholesterol panic is establishment fraud. The book openly challenges what it calls ‘politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats’, linking directly back to the industry-captured food pyramid, and to the scientists who had opposed it.

The foundation found its audience largely with women seeking to feed their families better. It also began quietly building political infrastructure: lobbying for raw milk access, organising at state level, creating the legal and activist architecture that would later become very useful to people who presumably had no idea who Sally Fallon was.

Here is something worth pausing on. The framework that would become the intellectual backbone of a movement obsessed with male vitality was built by a woman. Weston Price’s original concern was maternal nutrition and child development: whether mothers were nourished enough to produce healthy children. The Weston A. Price Foundation, in its early years, was domestic, feminine, homeward-facing.

The food didn’t change. What happens next changed the food’s meaning entirely.

The gender flip. Same food, different story.

Sometime in the 2010’s, through the paleo movement, through fitness culture, and through a series of charismatic figures who discovered that dietary rebellion and masculine self-improvement formed an intoxicating cocktail, those same foods got regendered.

Eating liver stopped being about a mother nourishing her children. It became about a lost man reclaiming his testosterone. Raw milk stopped being about traditional farming. It became about bodily sovereignty against a feminised, safety-obsessed regulatory (nanny) state. Bone broth, animal fat, all of it shifted from the language of maternal care into the language of masculine conquest. The symbolic grammar changed completely. The food stayed exactly the same.

This shift makes psychological sense when you understand what the manosphere is actually offering. At its core, it is a system for explaining and relieving male distress. It’s the same distress the Theroux documentary made so difficult to ignore. Many of its recruits genuinely feel unwell: depleted, purposeless, unable to find third spaces that organise male identity. From that position, the ancestral diet framework offers something extraordinarily useful: a causal story, a villain, a cure, and a community, all at once.

The story is: you were poisoned. The modern food supply (seed oils, soy, ultra-processed food, chemical additives) has literally unmanned you. Distrupted your hormones. Weakened your body and your purpose. You’re not depleted because life has become harder to navigate for everyone. You’re depleted because you have been chemically altered by forces that benefit from keeping you down. The villain is the system. The cure is your sovereignty. And you can fix it today, with what you put in your body.

It is a remarkably complete meaning system. It also produces real results. Cutting ultra-processed food and increasing protein will make you feel better. The ideology gets credit for a genuine phenomenon, which is what makes it nearly impossible to dislodge outside. You cannot simply debunk your way out of something that partly works.

The Intellectual Dark Web accelerated the transfer. Jordan Peterson’s adoption of an all-beef diet gave carnivore ideology philosophical weight and a respectable distribution channel. By the time the manosphere absorbed it, the food had already been laundered through contrarian intellectual culture and repackaged as independent thinking.

The ironies. There are several.

The surface one: These men are recovering pre-modern masculinity by following influencers on social media, buying supplements from Shopify, and gathering in Discord servers. The authentic ancestral worrior is chronically online.

Slightly deeper: The fantasy being sold of a man who needs nothing. A man whose body is self-sufficient, who has excaped the pharmaceutical dependency and medical management. In practice, the most committed adherents are amongst the most medicalised people alive. Comprehensive bloodwork. Stacks of supplements. Heart rate tracked every morning. Continuous glucose monitors. They have not escaped clinical surveillance of the body. They have only intensified it, while changing the brand from mainstream medicine to alternative medicine.

Deeper still: The ideology promises autonomy and self-sufficiency. The actual practice is elaborate dependence on content: on an attention-led commerce ecosystem. Raw milk from a local farmer sounds like a rejection of industrial supply chains. In practice it means following a specific podcast host’s farm recommendations, buying the recommended fermentation equipment, and paying for the online course. The financial architecture is nearly identical to the wellness industry; aspirational identity is sold through products, transformation perpetually one purchase away.

The deepest irony: The regression fantasy requires a belief that pre-modern men were more vital and more themselves. But pre-modern men were almost entirely subject to forces beyond their control. Famine, plague, physical danger, early death. The actual hunter-gatherer could not optimise his inputs or shop for ingredients online. He had no concept of the self as an improvement project. The autonomous man who monitors his biometrics, selects his ancentral diet, and takes charge of his hormonal destiny is a thoroughly modern, individualist product of capitalism. There’s nothing more modern than a man trying to be primal.

Following the money.

The manosphere diet is not just a meaning system that happens to have an economy attached to it. The economy may be the point. The meaning system is the marketing.

Consider the architecture. You need men to feel deficient (testosterone depleted, poisoned, unmanned). That creates demand. You need them to believe the solution is individual and purchasable rather than structural or social. That's the product positioning. You need a community that reinforces both the deficiency narrative and the solution. That creates retention. And you need an enemy (Big Food, the pharmaceutical industry, the feminised deep state) that makes buying feel like an act of resistance rather than consumption.

This is a sophisticated commercial operation dressed as a countercultural movement. And it works precisely because the men inside it don't experience it as consumption. They experience it as awakening.

The grift sits on a spectrum: from true believers who also happen to make money, to sophisticated operators who identified a market and built a product, to outright fraudsters like the Liver King (Brian Johnson), whose entire primal aesthetic rested on a significant steroid programme. The exposure barely dented his following. That is how immune this movement has become to factual debunking. The financial incentives run through all of it, and they all point in the same direction: keep men feeling deficient, keep them buying.

What happens when the fringe wins?

All of this would remain a chapter in the long history of men performing masculinity for each other were it not for what happens next.

The movement built on institutional distrust, organised around bodily self-reclamation, went and captured some significant insitutions.

In the United States, the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) coalition is where the mythology becomes policy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t just a supporter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. He spoke at their events. He has purged federal committees and installed fringe figures in their place. He is the bridge between a countercultural food movement and the Department of Health and Human Services.

And this where the story gets pretty complicated, because (as noted) the diagnosis is not entirely wrong. The American food supply has serious problems. Ultra-processed food correlates with poor health outcomes in ways that cannot be dismissed. Food dyes aren’t safe. The dietary guidelines have a documented history of industry influence. The low fat era was substantially shaped by the sugar lobby’s manipulation of nutritional science. The manosphere has real ammunition because the establishment gave it to them.

What is not worth defending is the shape of the solutions, and what they reveal about who this movement is actually for.

The 2026 Dietary Guidelines have officially inverted the food pyramid, placing red meat and full-fat dairy at the pinnacle of health. But this reset carries a hidden price that most Americans can’t pay. The ancestral diet is built on pasture-raised, grass-fed, and wild-caught products. Grass-fed beef costs 3x to 5x more than conventional meat. By making these the official gold standard, the government is telling lower-income families that true health is a luxury they cannot afford.

The new steak-and-butter pyramid is a luxury model that does not scale. MAHA enthusiasts sell a vision of happy cows in green pastures, but 99% of U.S. meat still comes from industrial factory farms. Promoting a meat-heavy pyramid without dismantling the industrial complex actually subsidises the very agricultural systems RFK Jr. claims to oppose. Regenerative farming cannot scale to meet the demands of 330 million people eating ancestrally.

The supplement industry has operated in a regulatory grey zone since the early 90s. When the movement that benefits from weak regulation reaches government, it gains a regulator with no interest in regulating it. The alternative health media ecosystem gains political credibility that grows its audience. The men remain convinced they are dismantling a captured system. But they are funding the construction of a new one.

The meaning system creates the market. The market creates the movement. The movement captures the state. The state removes the regulations that constrain the market. That is the pyramid's hidden base layer. And it was there from the beginning.

The coded language.

The policy choices reflect the mythology’s priorities rathen than the epidemiology’s. Raw milk has become a legislative priority because it’s so symbolically important: the purest representation of rejecting industrial processing and regulatory paternalism. Seed oils get a huge amount of policy attention while white sugar gets comparatively little, not because the science demands it, but because seed oils fit the narrative architecture more neatly.

The language being used to signal all of this is no longer just nutritional. Terms like ‘seed oils’ and ‘soy’ have become political dog whistles: shorthand for industrial, globalist interference in the American body. ‘Soyboy’ links plant-based eating to the perceived feminisation of the liberal West. ‘Raw milk’ signals sovereignty and rebellion against the nanny state. ‘Ancestral Wisdom’ codes for a return to a socially stratified past in which certain bodies are presumed to be the natural default.

It is worth naming this once, clearly: the new food pyramid is not being built for everyone. Its aesthetics are Eurocentric. Its economics are exclusionary. Its politics are not incidentally so.

Whose sovereignty, exactly?

The gendered dimension of this ideology does not stop at the irony of men adopting their mothers’ dietary framework and calling it masculine conquest. When this movement reaches government, it carries a specific programme for women’s bodies. That programme is not incidental to the food policy. It is continuous with it.

The ancestral diet is extraordinarily labour-intensive. Fermentation, sourdough, bone broth, organ meats, scratch cooking from premium ingredients. This is hours of daily kitchen work. In the tradwife aesthetic, that labour is framed as feminine fulfilment, a return to natural purpose. In practice it is unpaid domestic work being valorised by a political project that has no interest in compensating, supporting, or even acknowledging it as work. The new food pyramid doesn’t just tell lower-income families that health is unaffordable. It tells women that their time is the price of it.

The fringe rewriting the dietary guidelines also has an active programme for women's reproductive autonomy. This is not a coincidence. Price's original concern (whether mothers were sufficiently nourished to produce healthy children) maps directly onto a politics that treats women's bodies as vessels for national health outcomes. Bodily sovereign is claimed loudly for men. For women, in this framework, the body is a national resource.

When institutional food and health science is delegitimised, what gets discarded includes decades of of research on women’s nutrition, maternal health, and reproductive outcomes. Women’s health has historically been the most underfunded area of medical research. It is also the most recently accumulated. The losses from dismantling that infrastructure fall hardest where the ground was already the thinnest.

These men adopted their mother’s diet and called it their own. What they are building with it is not a world their mothers would recognise.

The strangest coalition in politics.

The coalition assembling around this programme makes almost no sense by normal political taxonomy standards. It includes libertarian homesteaders and tradwife Christians. Carnivore devotees and anti-vaccine parents with otherwise progressive politics. Organic food advocates who spent decades fighting industrial agriculture. Silicon Valley biohackers. Disaffected liberals who followed a charismatic figure rightward and found themselves comfortable there.

These groups share almost nothing except two things: the body as politics, and institutional food science as the enemy.

This is a genuinely novel political formation. What you might call biopolitical populism. The belief that the elites have managed and damaged the population’s bodies, and that bodily freedom must be reclaimed from them. It’s a cousin of every populist movement that came before it: activated by legitimate grievance (COVID-19, the cost of living crisis, geopolitical uncertainty, decades of genuinely bad governmental nutritional advice), and shaped by mythology, nostalgia for imagined better days. That nostalgia is not purely cynical. It is a psychological resource that helps people cope. It is also, in the hands of those who understand its commercial and political value, an extraordinarily effective tool.

Rebels on the inside.

Here is the final irony, and possibly the most important one. A movement built on the romance of the outsider (on the moral clarity that comes from being ignored and dismissed) now has cabinet secretaries. Legislation moving. The most downloaded podcasts in the country as its distribution infrastructure.

It has won. Or won by enough.

And yet its psychological identity as outsider remains completely intact. The rhetoric is still revolutionary. The supplements are still marketed as forbidden knowledge that pharma giants don’t want you to have. The community still gathers around shared, suppressed truth. That’s not an accident. The outsider identity is the product. Strip it away and all you’re left with is a high-protein diet and some legitimate concerns about food additives, which is not, on its own, a political movement. The rebel image must be maintained even after the revolution succeeds, because without it the whole story loses its emotional architecture.

This is what a successful fringe looks like after it wins. It still calls itself fringe. Nobody noticed it happening. That’s how it won.

The men eating raw liver for their followers, the women churning butter for the camera, the podcasters explaining what the establishment doesn’t want you to know: they’re not at the margins of food culture or politics anymore. They are shaping what you eat from inside the institutions they built their identity opposing, sustained by a mythology that has not yet noticed its own triumph.

Louis Theroux showed us the bedroom. This is what’s happening in the pantry.

The original food pyramid was built by lobbyists in suits. The new one was built by the manosphere on the internet. Different aesthetics. Same moves.

They came to reclaim something ancient. They recovered something very modern: power.

Having a baby right now feels like an irrational, slighty defiant act of luxurious optimism.

Naturally, despite all my attempts to dissociate from what’s going on in the world, I’m still anxious and concerned. It’s why I’ve started Prenatal Palate Training™.

A lot of people think eating during pregnancy is just about nutrition, but recent studies suggest that this thinking is outdated. Prenatal Palate Training™ is about giving a future person a head start: exposing a foetus to flavour complexity, developing their taste, and introducing cultural capital before they even enter this world.

Some parents read or play classical music to their unborn children. I’m tallying 30 different fruits and vegetables a week in the name of our shared microbiome while playing Talking Heads on vinyl.

• First trimester: Survived on whole pineapples flown in from Costa Rica and micro-bakery croissants.

• Second trimester: All about corrective education: an intensively seasonal, local flavour-exposure curriculum.

• Third trimester: Advanced preserves and fermentation. Yesterday I introduced anchovy-stuffed olives. Tomorrow I move further into unchartered challenger territory.

The world may be unstable but within the perimeter of my kitchen, hope persists. The baby will emerge asking for fennel and recognising the protest in Fela Kuti. No deposit. No safety net. Just a palate, a sensibility, and the ability to sit with bitter notes: resilience.

Prenatal Palate Training Log

Day 131

• Exposure: Radicchio

• Cost: £5 a head

• Rationale: Character-building

• Conditions: Rain and mild flooding

• Status: Hope persists

Day 175

• Exposure: Quality Palestinian Olive Oil

• Cost: £25/L

• Rationale: Civilization may collapse but my ethics and standards cannot

• Conditions: Geopolitically fraught and tense

• Status: Angry but in control

Day 236

• Exposure: Extra Mature Kimchi

• Cost: £7.50, 250g

• Rationale: Preparing the child for complexity

• Conditions: World War III

• Status: Brave externally. Internally… acid reflux.

As a subversive millennial, I was trained in irony. It started as a defense mechanism against conformity and evolved, thanks to the internet, into a way of life where everything is viewed through layers of detachment, sarcasm, and self-reference. Sincerity felt naive. Hope was kind of embarassing. The intelligent response to an unstable world was to acknowledge the instability with a meme and continue whatever you were doing.

The dog sits in the burning room: this is fine. It works because it’s accurate and versatile, not just as satire but as self-portrait too. Full awareness of the situation. Complete continuation of daily life. It’s not denial, but something more interesting than that; like the decision to keep going anyway. "Keep Calm and Carry On". Real life dressed up as a joke.

This ironic era also produced the debunk: a chronically online intellectual reflex. It’s the move where you take something that looks sincere and explain what it’s really all about. Applied to culture, it can be eye-opening. When applied to human emotion, it tends to be both correct (technically) and completely wrong. It explains the form (the what/how) but misses the meaning (the why). It also keeps the camera pointed outward. (You never have to reckon with hope if you can reduce it to performance).

The world being in the condition it is in is, if nothing else, excellent company. When the outside is loud enough, it provides very good cover for a life that is also (in its own ways) somewhat mid-renegotiation. The logs say “flooding” and “World War III” but the conditions field has always been doing more than one job. Chaos is easier to mock when it’s collective. Because when it belongs to everyone, it belongs to nobody in particular. A person can keep her situation under global and keep moving.

There's always a good list of reasons not to have kids, or to wait. Things might be complicated in ways that are difficult to explain at a dinner party. It’s much easier to file them under “conditions: geopolitically fraught.” This internal monologue and/or external unsolicited advice isn’t malicious. It’s often loving. In its own way, it’s asking whether you have thought this through.

You have. And that’s precisely the problem.

The rational self is very good at conditions. It can list them fluently: my floor is made of glass, the deposit will not materialise. It’s not wrong about any of this. It’s simply applying common sense to a decision that has already decided it won’t be governed by it. Common sense will keep you stuck in the middle indefinitely: intention is there, but action is deferred, and the conditions perpetually never right.

The bet is placed or the bet is deferred.

The people who don’t think it through are probably sleeping a lot better. The people who do (those who have absorbed every reasonable objection, weighed every unfavourable condition, sat with the complexity and still decide to go for it), tend to be the ones tallying vegetables, filling in status reports, checking in on hope.

The reality of being human is that everyone has a story to tell about a thing they did that went against common sense and/or advice. Although it wasn’t rational, it wasn’t necessarily wrong. It was hopeful. Probably meaningful.

What I know about control is that the need for it is inversely proportional to how much you actually have. The Prenatal Palate Training™ curriculum did not emerge from a position of everything being fine. It emerged from a position of very little being fine within the framework of large systems (personal, political, planetary) behaving in ways that nobody planned for. In response, the brain does what it does: finds the smallest possible unit of order and meaning and defends it with rigour.

Hence the log. The rationale. The careful accounting of biodiversity and cost against conditions. A person who actually had everything under control would not be tallying 30 different fruits and vegetables a week. She would be resting.

Here’s where my debunking reflex comes in. Right on cue. You guessed it. It’s Cultural Capital.

I must start by admitting that the vinyl, olive oil, carefully sourced vegetables and curated palate are all signals. They’re distinctions that carry tremendous cultural weight and some cost. Pierre Bourdieu would have something to say about the class encoding embedded in my anchovy-stuffed olives, and he would not be entirely wrong.

The “parenthood as power move” framing circulating in recent cultural commentary argues that children are becoming a luxury good, functioning as accessories to your personal brand.

While this debunking logic leans on a powerful theoretical framework, it has somewhat misidentified the object. It has made a telling assumption that the person writing the logs has a floor that’s been built by someone else. That the £25 spent on olive oil was an afterthought rather than an a considered decision. That buying radicchio is for someone who is insulated from the rent-equity trap, someone for whom the survival tax has already been solved. Basically, someone who can genuinely afford to perform.

It may not be. It may be the behaviour of someone who has taken a good look at the biological standoff (the impossible arithmetic of the city, the nursery versus the wine bar, the deposit that will not materialise) and placed a bet. Hope, like authenticity, is the currency, the cultural capital, that allows us to climb up the ladder when financial capital is scarce. In this situation, hope is reflected in the realisation that the one thing she can pass on that costs much less than a deposit and means everything (to her) is a palate. A sensibility. A way of moving through the world with taste and resilience and the ability to sit with bitter notes without flinching.

That’s inheritance without inheritance. Cultural capital accumulated not from a position of inherited privilege but from a position of scarcity, transmitted not through property or invisible safety nets but through flavour. Through music. Through the deliberate, and ridiculous act of introducing a foetus to complexity before it has even arrived.

The cultural capital I speak of is hope. That’s what’s being cultivated and passed on. It’s the belief that the future is worth preparing someone for, that bitterness is worth learning to sit with, that complexity acquired early enough becomes a form of resilience. The olive oil is not the point. What the olive oil carries is the point.

The form and the meaning are not the same thing. From the outside, PPT™ looks like control: the curriculum, the logs, the trademark. The debunking system reads the form and stops there. But the form is just the vessel. The meaning is the inheritance. And inheritance, unlike status, is not oriented towards the present. It’s placed in a direction that the audience/interpreter can’t see, toward a future that hasn’t arrived yet, for a person who doesn’t exist yet.

You can’t actually perform for an audience that isn’t born. By nature, the long bet is the least legible thing you can actually do. Which is why the people that are most likely to make it are not the ones with the most to signal, but the ones with the most to prove (to themselves mostly, in the kitchen, with a log and a rationale).

Underneath the performance of the curriculum is a genuine argument. An act of faith and excitement dressed safely as ridicule. Every puntarelle introduced to an amniotic sac is not a sign of delusion. It’s evidence of a position taken, in full knowledge of current conditions, both the ones in the news and the ones closer to home.

A child is the longest bet most of us will ever make. It says that I think there will be a future. I think it will be worth inhabiting. I am willing to stake something irreversible on that belief. Not because the timing is right. Nor because anyone looking at the situation from the outside would call it the obvious move. But because hope is not a reward for favourable conditions. It’s something you practice in their absence.

The ironic stance served a great purpose. It was pretty honest about the gap between the way things were supposed to be and the way they actually turned out. But it became its own kind of evasion. A way of never being wrong because you were never fully bothered or committed. A way of never being exposed because everything was always meant in jest. A way to perform intelligence and mask fear.

Post-ironic hope is not the abandonment of that. It’s what happens when a person has read the room, sent the meme, laughed at the joke, understood that the joke is partially on herself, and then (knowing full well how it looks), bought the radicchio anyway. Not because the conditions are right. Because she has decided that meaning something is worth the risk of being seen to mean it.

Obviously the foetus doesn’t know about any of this. It’s being introduced, incrementally, to the complexity of the world through the medium of flavour. Bitter notes. Fermented things. The protest in a bass line.

Eventually though, it will arrive into whatever the world has become, with a palate shaped by the past few months and the safe perimeter of my kitchen. A place where, thankfully, something always seems to feel possible.

• Status: Hope persists.

• Cost: Whatever it costs.

• Conditions: You know the conditions.

In a basement near Euston, a thirty-two-year-old software engineer sits alone, hunched over a £13.75 plate of Char Kway Teow at Roti King. They aren’t lonely; they are refueling. In the world upstairs, their peers are divided between those whose Victorian terraces were funded by a parental deposit and those whose professional flatshares are ticking time bombs of rent hikes.

To live in London in your 30s is to realise that the unlimited potential or hope that motivated you in your 20s has hit the structural ceiling of the London economy. The deadlock is a state of permanent transition: the realisation that the hustle was supposed to be a bridge to a stable life, but the bridge has simply become the destination.

The deadlock manifests as three distinct no-win scenarios:

• The rent-equity trap: You earn enough to live a high-status life (the £8 sourdough loaf, the fancy gym), but the survival tax (rent) is mathematically tuned to prevent you from ever saving up for a deposit. You are effectively paying for someone else’s stability while your own floor remains made of glass.

• The biological standoff: To afford a family in the city, you need a seriously well-paid career. You are forced to choose between the nursery (which requires money you don’t have) and the natural wine bar (which provides the community the city has otherwise priced out).

• The identity paradox: You are consumed with a sense of moral panic yet work for the very systems you ethically oppose. To resolve this, you spend your high salary on consumption that feels authentic to buy back the soul you feel you’ve leased to your employer.

At this point in your life, London starts to feel less like a playground, and more like a series of trade-offs between material survival and ethical coherence. We are no longer just living; we are navigating a high-stakes strategic matrix where every choice (from the overpriced flat white to the decision to remain child-free) is a micro-vote for survival.

The strategic chaos is most visible in the way that we eat. Consumption has evolved into a weaponised form of identity-risk management. Whether you are bio-hacking your way through a corporate law firm in Canary Wharf or performing cultural omnivorosity at a natural wine bar in Hackney, you are participating in a sophisticated strategy to manage the chaos of late-stage urban life.

Mapping the Deadlock

We have moved past the era of mere status symbols and into the era of spatial and biological strategy. In this new landscape, authenticity is the rarest commodity and efficiency is a survival mechanism. To understand the chaos of the London in your 30s, we must plot it on two brutal axes: the economic reality of the Self-Made Grind vs. Privilege, and the psychological toll of Self-Optimization vs. Moral Panic.

The Y-Axis: Your Economic Foundation

The primary tension of the London 30s is the silent friction of the bank balance. This axis determines your resilience in this city: the invisible divide between those with an inherited deposit and those who are one burnout away from Zone 6.

• Inherited Privilege: The Luxury of Failing Upwards

  Your floor was built by someone else. You have access to invisible capital: family health insurance, inheritance, or the psychological safety of knowing you can’t truly fail.

  The vibe: inherited down payments and the performance of “finding oneself” on a safety-net budget.

  The trap: The reality gap → comparing your “organic” growth to someone else’s venture-capital-funded life.

• Self-Made Grind: The Scarcity Engine

  You are the safety net. If you stop moving, the lights go out. This is a life of constant, low-humming anxiety; it is the realisation that if you stop pedaling the bike, the bike disappears.

  The vibe: Meritocracy myths, side hustles, and a hyper-awareness of every pound’s utility.

  The trap: The sunk cost fallacy → believing that because you suffered to get here, you must keep suffering and carrying on, even if you’ve grown to loathe the destination.

The X-Axis: Your Psychological State

If the Y-axis determines where you stand financially, the X-axis determines how you cope with it, or justify it. This axis governs your purpose in London: the choice between turning yourself into a wellness machine or being consumed by systemic dread.

• Moral Panic: The Burden of Feeling Everything

  Your energy is consumed by questioning the system. You possess high empathy and high anxiety, but low efficiency. You are hyper-aware of systemic collapse, ethical consumption, and biological timelines.

  The vibe: An “am I doing it right?” obsession.

  The trap: Analysis paralysis → the exhaustion of trying to be a perfect ethical consumer or anti-capitalist while living in a system that makes it impossible.

• Self-Optimization: Mastering the Simulation

  You don’t have a crisis, you have a 5:00 AM Pilates class and many productivity apps. You’ve traded feeling for efficiency and perceived control, mastering/ hacking the system rather than questioning it.

  The vibe: High-end athletic wear and £18 salads at a standing desk.

  The trap: Maintenance → realising your lifestyle is a high-performance engine that requires a 60-hour work week just to keep the oil changed.

The Four Existential Quadrants of the London Table

When these axes intersect, they create four distinct existential territories. In these quadrants, consumption is no longer about taste… it is a tactical maneuver. Each tribe has its own refuelling station where the food is secondary to the identity it reinforces.

The Burnout Martyr (Grind + Moral Panic)

Food choices enforce the idea that your exhaustion is a sign of your integrity.

• The Persona: The Freelance Strategist or overworked NGO staffer.

• The Scene: Enjoying a frantic, last-minute feast at Wong Kei after too many post-work survival pints at a Blue Post. Or enduring a 45-minute Saturday morning queue at Jolene while feeling an acute, physical pang of guilt over the plastic straw in your iced latte.

• The Performance → Radical Awareness. Every purchase is a heavy moral choice. You are exhausted because you are attempting to consume ethically within a system you literally cannot afford to exit.

• The Kid Logic: “I can’t afford a house, let alone a human.” The biological clock isn’t a rhythm… it’s a source of intense, high-frequency dread.

• Reading: Fare Magazine, Vittles or The Guardian Long Read.

The Wellness Machine (Grind + Optimization)

Food choices help convince yourself that you aren't a cog in the corporate machine.

• The Persona: The Fintech Founder (Pre-Seed) or Product Manager (Big Tech)

• The Scene: Midweek is a 12:15 PM high-efficiency refuel at Farmer J. You’re there for the Field Tray protein synthesis. The weekend is for recalibration: a 9:00 AM session at Third Space, followed by a tactical hit at Borough Market to source anti-inflammatory building blocks. Socialising is rebranded as a networking ROI during a shared Zone 2 run.

• The Performance → Systemic Mastery. You treat your body like a piece of high-performance hardware. Authenticity is irrelevant, efficiency and productivity is king.

• The Kid Logic: In your current operating system, a child is an un-optimizable variable that threatens the entire structural integrity of your Zone 2 rental. You’re a DINK (Double Income, No Kids) by necessity: if you stop the grind to raise a child, your glass floor shatters.

• Reading: Wired, The Generalist, or a high-performance bio-hacking Substack.

The Performative Puritan (Privilege + Moral Panic)

Food choices enforce your status as someone who knows better.

• The Persona: The Documentary Producer or Creative Art Director

• The Scene: At the Farmers Market in Brockley or Stoke Newington on Saturday morning with possible toddler in tow. Quick trip to the local natural wine bar at 4:00 PM. Often reminiscing about good old days at the original Singburi in Leyton (RIP).

• The Performance → Cultural Omnivorosity. You wear a £400 French chore coat to look like you’re in the grind, appropriating authenticity to scrub the guilt off of your safety net.

• The Kid Logic: “The world is ending; it’s unethical to procreate.” A convenient moral shield for a lifestyle you simply aren’t ready to share or dilute. Or if you do have kids, the moral panic doesn't disappear, it just shifts into high-gear conspicuous parenting. The child becomes an extension of the authenticity performance. "My child only wears undyed organic hemp and attends a forest school where they learn to negotiate boundaries with trees.

• Reading: The New Yorker, The Gourmand or Vittles.

The Optimized Heir (Privilege + Optimization)

Food choices enforce the reality that you’re the one who actually owns the ground everyone else is fighting over.

• The Persona: The Venture Capitalist or Head of Global Partnerships.

• The Scene: Tucked into a red leather booth while having lunch at Quo Vadis. Your "grind" is networking at White City House. You value the stability and institutional weight of the classics like the French House, and aren't chasing the new because you represent the permanent.

• The Performance → Effortless Ownership. High-end, understated power. You don’t need to perform authenticity because you own (or are the primary stakeholder in) the institutions themselves.

• The Kid Logic: Children are a legacy project. They are affordable, outsourced to nannies, and enrolled in bilingual nurseries before they can speak their mother tongue.

• Reading: Monocle or The Financial Times (How To Spend It).

Neighborhood Field Notes

Hackney: Panic epicenter. High-grade anxiety masked by small plates. Eating is a moral lifestyle act. If the world is ending, at least the butter was churned by hand and the vibes were high.

Canary Wharf: Dystopian heartland. Survival through optimization. High-performers wondering why they feel so empty inside despite having a perfect gut microbiome.

The Authenticity Arms Race

Identifying the players is only half the battle. To understand why London feels so claustrophobic, we have to look at the notion of authenticity. It’s the invisible currency that allows the privileged to cosplay the grind and the grinders to perform a soul they can barely afford to keep.

In the late-stage London economy, authenticity is the most expensive thing you can buy. To be high-status in the 2020s is to be a cultural omnivore: possessing the strategic ability to move between a £1.50 wing shop in Peckham and a £140 tasting menu in Shoreditch with equal fluency. It signals that while you may have a high-paying corporate job, you haven’t lost your soul.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the moral panic food scene. When a Performative Puritan spends £14 on a single plate of carrots at a restaurant with intentionally ugly lighting, they are buying a moral shield. The aesthetic signals a rejection of dystopian optimization, even if they’re paying with a credit card backed by a global investment bank.

The Child-Free City

The relentless performance of authenticity, coupled with the grinding realities of London, culminates in the city’s most profound strategic shift: the great sterility.

For the Wellness Automaton and the Self-Made Grind, children are the ultimate inefficiency. A child isn’t just a financial burden; it’s a career-ending injury or a mandatory relocation to Zone 6. DINK status isn’t hedonism, it’s the raw mathematical equation of survival.

Even for the Performative Puritans, the potential child-free decision is cloaked in the virtuous language of panic. “It’s unethical to procreate” they declare, justifying a lifestyle they are unwilling to share. It’s a surrender to the London reality: where community is priced like a luxury good and equity is a zero-sum game.

Toward Radical Realism

The London deadlock feels terminal because it forces us to choose between being a machine (optimization) or a ghost (panic). But there is a third way: Radical Realism.

Radical Realism is the refusal to let your consumption define your morality. It is the realisation that you cannot eat your way out of a climate crisis or a housing bubble. When we stop performing authenticity, we free up the emotional mental space required to actually build something.

The exit strategy is simple, though not easy:

1. De-optimize your life. Eat at places that aren’t “Instagrammable.” Or eat there but just don’t post it on Instagram. Would you even eat there if you couldn’t post about it?

2. Acknowledge the safety net. If you have one, stop pretending you’re in the grind. Your friends will appreciate it.

3. Build the village without the nursery. If the economy has stolen the traditional family path, use that saved capital to create communal security for you and your peers.

In the end, the most authentic thing you can do in London is to be unproductive. To sit in a quiet park eating a sandwich you made at home, realising that while the city is a matrix of chaos, you are the only one who can decide where to plot your point on the map.

Every season now seems to crown an “it-girl” ingredient. We saw it with the tomato. Summer 2023: the tomato wasn’t just food, it became an aesthetic, a fragrance, a martini, a fashion colour story, a meme, a lifestyle. The tomato became a cultural motif. A visual language. A storytelling device.

The rise of the tomato, and now the cabbage, points to something much bigger than food trends: cooking has become fully culturalized.

Historically, cooking has moved through phases: aristocratic knowledge → low-status domestic labour → democratized skill → high-status cultural capital expressed through creativity, ethics, and expertise. For most of history, the elite didn’t cook. They simply understood food, while the labour itself was delegated. Everyday cooking was routine, invisible, and low status.

But in the last decade, something shifted. The internet, social media, and the constant global circulation of ideas have democratized cooking. Anyone can learn technique, explore cuisines, and display their skills online. And paradoxically, that same democratization has made cooking more status-laden than ever. When everyone can participate, distinctions intensify.

As food culture becomes universal, foodies stratify. When the masses chase expensive, globalized ingredients, the top tier leans into the humble, the local, the overlooked. These are foods the majority might still consider “bad.” Taste becomes a form of cultural fluency.

The new flex is how you cook, why you cook, and what that communicates. The new currency: creativity, ethics, knowledge, aesthetic sensibility, and cultural literacy. Cooking has shifted from chore to performance… an aesthetic practice, a mode of self-expression. Consumers want inspiration, provenance, and narrative.

And this is where the cabbage comes in. Cabbage embodies this humble-turned-aspirational shift. It’s accessible and versatile → aligning with slow, mindful living. It’s simple, seasonal, and rooted in local provenance → echoing quiet luxury and sustainable ethics. It carries history and nostalgia → tapping into memory, identity, and story. It’s nutritionally vibrant → fitting seamlessly into clean, aesthetic eating.

As the majority reach for matcha and globally circulating premium ingredients, the cultural elite return to the cheap, rooted, and forgotten everyday ingredients. Those that only the “in-the-know” can see as aspirational.

This is a huge opportunity for FMCG brands because everyday ingredients can be reframed as cultural artefacts. “Low” or even “bad” foods can become aspirational through story, provenance, and creativity. And ultimately, premiumization can be unlocked through meaning, not price.

Are we over purpose-based marketing? Or has it evolved? This question came up at work the other day, prompted by a Guardian article about marketing’s “woke” rebrand and the ways in which it has fuelled the far right.

I’ve worked in the F&B industry for just over a decade, and to me, brand purpose always felt closely tied to conservative values. That was the status quo. Think: buying British, supporting conservation, eating “properly” according to traditional food culture.

Then came brands like Oatly, with a more disruptive, almost anarchist tone that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Over time, as brand purpose became more closely tied to lifestyle (especially alternative lifestyles), we saw a shift toward “wokeness”, and with it, a fresh wave of backlash. But now? It feels like we’ve come full circle.

We all know that food carries strong political and cultural significance. Purpose-driven marketing reflects the deeper meanings we attach to what we consume. These days, we’re deriving meaning and identity from even the simplest food products. Supermarkets are hosting fashion campaigns. A weekly grocery shop is treated as an aesthetic luxury. Food is now furniture, clothing, makeup, and more.

It’s a lot. And frankly, it’s exhausting. When it comes to food, there’s a growing appetite for a return to simpler, more sensory-based experiences and marketing messages. In some ways, we’re starting to see that shift.

Take Cherry Coded, a cross-category trend Pinterest predicted would be a showstopper. And they were right. Cherries are everywhere: in makeup, mood boards, and menus (cherry martini, anyone?). But why?

They evoke freshness, sweetness, and wholesomeness. These are all qualities that make them irresistibly versatile. They offer a sensorial experience that can elevate any proposition narrative. The recent Glossier, Inc. Black Cherry launch is a perfect example of how a campaign can combine sensory and visual elements to not only showcase new products but also communicate a brand’s message.

From striking imagery to carefully crafted textures and colours, they created a multi-dimensional experience that resonated with their audience, transforming a simple product drop into a curated moment. The event featured beautifully presented cherry-flavoured foods, a cherry shrub-making workshop, and influencers championing seasonality and simple, whole foods. Ironically, cherries were completely out of season (making them anything but “pure” or “clean”).

The cherry aesthetic may seem playful and innocent on the surface, but it carries more than just surface-level charm. Historically tied to 1950s–60s Americana, it evokes retro diner culture, pin-up fashion, and an idealised postwar domestic life. It’s a time that’s often romanticised by conservative movements as “simpler” and more morally grounded.

Semiotically, cherries straddle a fine line between innocence and sensuality. On one hand, they suggest sweetness, youth, and traditional femininity; on the other, the well-worn metaphor of “popping the cherry” embeds a sexual undercurrent, framing desire through the lens of purity that’s been lost. This duality mirrors broader conservative ideals: sexuality exists, but only within tightly controlled, heteronormative boundaries.

The visual language of cherries (glossy red, heart-shaped, perfectly ripe) reinforces an ideal of feminine perfection: attractive, wholesome, and non-threatening. Often deployed in domestic contexts (aprons, kitchenware, beauty products), the aesthetic subtly promotes the image of the nurturing and desirable homemaker: beautiful, sweet, and always in control.

Even the sensorial cues (bright, sugary, and slightly tart) map onto coded expectations of femininity: pleasant, emotionally restrained, but with just enough “bite” to stay interesting.

In short, beneath the glossy nostalgia, the cherry aesthetic continues to echo deeper, and often conservative codes of gender, sexuality, and domesticity.

So, are we over purpose-based marketing? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just evolved. Today’s brand narratives are less overtly moralistic, but they’re still steeped in meaning (just through aesthetics, nostalgia, and sensory cues). The cherry trend is a perfect case in point: what looks like simple fun or innocent indulgence is, in fact, a visual language packed with coded values. In rejecting the heaviness of “woke” branding, we may have landed somewhere even more subtle and, arguably, more insidious. Purpose didn’t go away. It just got prettier.

According to Allie at Healing forward and Snaxshot, we’ve reached late-stage wellness. This is where the focus has shifted toward expensive, high-tech products and treatments that promise extraordinary health benefits, yet tend to overshadow the simple, foundational practices that genuinely improve one’s health.

“We’ve entered a fascinating (and at times absurd) era of wellness where the promise of health often comes with a price tag that’s more inspirational than accessible.”

This week’s alternative trend report builds on a recent post by Andrea Hernández from Snaxshot, focusing on the intersection of consumer trends, food as politics, and late-stage wellness: The Pendulum Swung Back Hard. It’s a brilliant read. She explains how corporations have exploited the growing consumer demand for better food systems by creating trendy products like adaptogenic ramen and prebiotic sodas. Instead of addressing real, systemic issues with food systems, they're capitalising on the trend through consumerism. These businesses are profiting by pushing overpriced, unnecessary products to consumers, leaving consumers dissatisfied.

Andrea points out that, just like stars collapsing under enough pressure, the backlash to this was inevitable. As consumers grow tired of unhelpful products, a push-back against these exploitative business practices was bound to happen, and I do agree.

Wellness, as an industry and ideology, has indeed become politically charged, reflecting deeper and wider societal tensions. The shift we’re seeing in the wellness industry mirrors a broader cultural shift tied to rising fatigue and distrust of modern institutions and corporations (which has been growing for decades but became especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic). It’s tied to a “yearning to return to ‘the good old times’” says Anu from What’s Anu. She calls it “regressive nostalgia”.

From a wellness perspective, key themes include a desire for more personal autonomy in health choices, scepticism toward mainstream science, and a return to natural or ancestral practices. Essentially, this change in wellness trends is part of a larger movement that challenges traditional authority and instead, as a form of control, embraces alternative health practices.

In 2014, my employers in the wellness industry gifted me a copy of Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook written by Sally Fallon in 1995. The book promotes a diet based on whole, nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods, including raw milk, offal, healthy fats from pasture raised, wild-caught animals, and fermented foods. At first glance, this extensive (and somewhat overwhelming) “bible” of nutrition seemed like a wholesome gesture, and I didn’t think much of it. But things took a turn later that year when, for work, I was required to attend a Weston A. Price Foundation conference in Esher, UK.

The Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) was co-founded by Sally Fallon, the author of my new cookbook. Like the book, the foundation advocates for traditional diets and the preservation of indigenous food wisdom, grounding its legitimacy in the research of Cleveland dentist Dr. Weston A. Price, who conducted studies in the 1930’s. Often referred to as the “Isaac Newton of Nutrition,” Dr. Price’s theories explore the relationship between nutrition, dental health, and overall physical health. Marketed as an opportunity to "learn more about wise traditions in food, farming, and the healing arts," the conference initially seemed interesting. I had no idea it would be the first time I would encounter a real-life cult.

As the conference went on, I began to feel a growing sense of unease. The intensity of the group's beliefs was impossible to ignore. What initially seemed like a passionate commitment to nutrition soon revealed itself as something far more rigid, almost dogmatic. The attendees weren’t just adopting a diet; they were fully invested in a belief system, with a zeal that was both unsettling and isolating. It became clear to me that this wasn’t just about food anymore; it was about creating a sharp division, an “us vs. them” mentality.

This discomfort pushed me to dig a little deeper, both then and now. Weirdly, this wasn’t the last time I’d encounter a cult while working in food. It’s not that surprising if you think about it, because mission-led food brands promise transformation and provide a sense of community: a sense of belonging. This is usually nicely tied to a blend of charismatic leadership and ideological purity.

Groups like WAPF take on a cult-like quality due to their rigid adherence to specific beliefs, championed by charismatic leaders (like Sally Fallon), who promote a particular worldview. WAPF, for example, rejects mainstream scientific findings, particularly those regarding health and nutrition, dismissing widely standardised recommendations such as the need to consume lower-fat diets and moderate one’s fat intake.

To them, it’s all about fighting the politically “correct” or nutritionally “woke” agenda. They passionately defend raw milk as a superior food source and actively lobby for legislative changes to make it more accessible. And that’s not even the bad part. What’s more is their ongoing “anti-soy” campaign fuelled by misinformation, and their push to legally restrict soy milk for children in particular. They continue to promote alternatives like breast milk or "properly prepared" cow’s milk, despite the growing awareness of lactose intolerance and challenges with lactation. This is particularly troubling, considering that soy milk has been consumed in Asia since the Han Dynasty (around 2,000 years ago).

WAPF’s push to limit soy consumption stems from its belief in the superiority of traditional, whole-food diets. The diet they refer to includes milk consumption and is historically tied to white Europeans, whose populations adapted genetically to digest lactose, a trait less common in non-European groups, like East Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Indigenous peoples. Framing milk as “natural” or “essential” therefore reflects a Eurocentric perspective, marginalising those without this genetic adaptation.

In a globalised world, the nature of WAPF’s milk-pushing agenda can be understood as an effort to promote a universal, Westernised idea of “optimal” nutrition, driven by political and economic motivations.

The active promotion of milk disregards cultural and genetic diversity and ultimately reinforces ideas of cultural superiority. Some might argue that it also reinforces gendered ideas of superiority. In Confessions of a Food Cult Refugee, David Gumpert writes,

“The anti-soy campaign made me receptive to all the teachings put forth by Sally Fallon, the charismatic founder of WAPF. I attended WAPF national and regional conferences from 2008 to about 2013. Of course, the major rallying issue for WAPF was raw milk and resisting the regulatory attacks on farmers producing and selling it across the country. For me, the fight for raw milk was simply the exclamation point in my growing enchantment with the organisation.”

Gumpert’s advocacy for raw milk demonstrates connections between the anti-soy campaign and the rise of masculine virtues. According to Snaxshot, this is evident in the rejection of ‘soft’ and ‘feminine’ foods, like soy, because they contain phytoestrogens, in favour of raw milk, which in the West, traditionally symbolises strength, tradition, and defiance.

Andrea’s article thoughtfully examines the rise of the "soyboy" meme, which coincided with David's involvement with the Weston A. Price Foundation. It explains that the meme is intended to symbolise male "emasculation," rooted in the claim that soy consumption (particularly its phytoestrogen isoflavones) lowers testosterone in men. It also further argues that the conservative movement later co-opted the meme to rally against plant-based alternatives. However, I’m suggesting that perhaps the meme was inherently political from the start, created with a clear ideological agenda that went beyond just promoting a fear of soy.

The raw milk movement, championed by groups like WAPF, promotes independence and self-reliance, often as a rebellion against regulatory control. This shift aligns with broader cultural trends, including the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both movements reflect a growing distrust of mainstream health guidance, government regulations, and pharmaceutical companies.

The pandemic fueled skepticism of modern healthcare, prompting many to seek alternative wellness practices that are seen as closer to “ancestral wisdom” and free from profit-driven motives. These practices resonate with those rejecting industrial farming, processed foods, and the pharmaceutical complex.

Both raw milk advocates and anti-vaccine proponents share a desire for personal control over health, viewing these choices as a reclaiming of autonomy from government and corporate influence. This common distrust of the medical establishment creates a sense of solidarity among those who feel marginalised by mainstream health systems and broader corporate and national governance.

This distrust and vulnerability are key factors in Trump’s recent election victory, as he tapped into feelings of societal exclusion and resentment toward liberal values and "cancel culture". WAPF and anti-vaccine movements are connected through this resentment and share surprising ties to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, largely due to one individual: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

While Kennedy Jr. has not held a formal role within WAPF, he has spoken at its events and publicly endorsed many of its principles, particularly around vaccine safety and criticism of government and corporate influence in health matters.

WAPF actively promotes anti-vaccine sentiment on its website, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vocal advocacy for these issues highlights the foundation’s growing influence. This connection shows how a radically conservative organisation like WAPF has moved beyond internet culture memes such as "Soyboy," "Yes Chad," and "Chad’s Tradwife", and viral content like Nara Smith’s, to now permeate national governance through an even greater movement known as MAHA, part of a broader agenda to restore traditional values in America.

Here in the UK, food is not devoid from politics either. But we’ll discuss that in another post very soon.