60: Breaking Down Diet Culture and Healthy Eating Myths with Jennifer Rollin

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With the holiday season in full swing, I always like to come back to conversations about body image and disordered eating… because holidays are really intense for a lot of people, myself included, and we are often face to face with anxieties about ourselves, our families, and sometimes with our relationship to food.

My guest this week is Jennifer Rollin, an eating disorder therapist and the founder of The Eating Disorder Center. The centre is a therapy practice that provides support to people in Rockville, Maryland and worldwide via video chats. She also writes and speaks about eating disorders on Fox, NBC, ABC, and PBS, as well as writing for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

What I love about Jennifer is that she’s very no-nonsense and to the point about diet culture – she calls it like she sees it, and her online presence serves as a strong reminder to take a step back from the wellness and health industry messages we’re bombarded with on a daily basis and reset our minds in terms of what those messages are actually getting at. We chat today about debunking this idea of healthy eating, or of wellness culture fads in terms of diet and exercise, and she provides some really useful tips and boundaries you can use to confront these challenges in your day to day lives. She also has a forthcoming book deal that she shares a bit about – so tune in to find out more!

Learn more about Jennifer! 

59: Cash Only and LA Food Zines with Amanda Lanza

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This week we are exploring the food scene in Los Angeles, California, with my guest Amanda Lanza who works with Cash Only Productions out there. 

Cash Only is a collective of culinary and community-minded creatives – most of whom work in different creative worlds outside the culinary world, but who all view food as the building block for their community. Cash Only started as a zine that honoured restaurants in LA that had been around for decades, but often went unrecognized or inconsistently honoured by internet hype machines – I’m sure we all know places like this, and the algorithm doesn’t do them any justice!

The collective has evolved to hold more space in the educational realm, with food-based discussions that provide language for food lovers or hands on workshops. They also help to highlight the various ethnoburbs of LA and the stories that come from them.

Amanda runs most of the operations, production, and creative endeavours for the project. She’s both a chef and a food anthropologist who is doing her MA at CSULA. She loves to work and explore the idea of what authenticity means in cuisine and what that looks like or takes shape as in LA food communities.

Cash Only does a terrific job focusing and honouring culinary heritage and origin stories, and how these have shaped food consumption and creation experiences in LA, and I can’t wait for you to learn more!

 

Learn More About Cash Only 

58: Empowering Youth in the Kitchen with FoodWorks Ottawa

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Sometimes the stories we want to share through AnthroDish are bigger that just one person's perspective. We've been working to create more thematically based narrative-style episodes, using multiple interviews to explore how different folks look at the same topic. In this way, we’re able to get a bigger picture story about the ways in which food can be used as a tool for powerful social moments and conversations.

 Today we are sharing the story of FoodWorks, and what this program is doing to empower youth in the kitchen. FoodWorks is a social enterprise launched by Operation Come Home in 2016, in cooperation with Causeway Work Centre in Ottawa, Canada. The goal of FoodWorks is to provide meaningful work opportunities to youth while offering healthy meals to those who may need it. It began as a way to bridge the gap between youth and seniors in Ottawa through a meal delivery service, but the program has grown exponentially to better suit Ottawa’s food culture and needs through meal delivery programs that are open to all residents, while also providing catering services for events and restaurants.

The program hires youth who are recruited from Operation Come Home, and helps them develop their culinary skills with a world-class chef, Bruce Wood. All proceeds go to supporting Operation come Home’s mission of preventing homeless youth from becoming homeless adults. 

I spoke with four people who all work with FoodWorks or Operation Come Home in varied ways: Chef Bruce Wood, Eric Bollman, Mandi Lunan, and Katie Sanders. After learning about the program from Eric, I knew that it would be important to get different perspectives and voices on the show, given that their enterprise is so rooted in creating strong communities and empowering youth -- an individual interview just wouldn't cut it! I am excited to share the final product today with you, complete with some fun soundscape play woven throughout the narrative.

Learn More about FoodWorks

57: Why Are Gassy Foods and Farting So Taboo in Anthropology? with Danielle Gendron

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You’re probably wondering what the heck we’re about to explore today… and indeed, it’s going to be all about farts and gassy foods.  

My guest this week is Danielle Gendron, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Danielle and I work together on some research projects, and have been friends for a while through that. She first pitched this idea to me back in the spring, and I laughed at it, almost dismissively. But then I started thinking more about what she had to say, and realized we absolutely had to explore this on the show.

Danielle’s Master’s research topic was about food sovereignty, where she explored the significance of territory-based food systems to Gitxaala First Nation culture and their ways of knowing. Through her work, she traced one particular food, seaweed, through the Gitxaala food system from harvest to processing to consumption. During her experiences there, she soon found out that eating a lot of seaweed can make you very… gassy.

It’s something that feels silly but is, as Danielle says, a legitimate thing to explore. So we’re exploring this more today with a bit of fun – while Danielle does share some really important lessons and experiences she had working with Gitxaala First Nation, we’re focusing more on the idea of farting itself – what makes it such a taboo subject, why do we always giggle when it comes up, and why isn’t it being studied at all in anthropology? Why do we have internal dilemmas about sharing our stories and research about gassy foods and the farts they produce?  

Tune in to hear more! 

Resources 

56: Interpreting Coastal Diets of Past Peoples with Dr. Michael Rivera

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The past week or so has been a bit of a whirlwind for me personally, and I’m sure anyone who’s in academia and in the full swing of the fall semester can attest to! So what a perfect time to have my guest this week, Dr. Michael B.C. Rivera on the show.

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Michael is also an anthropology podcaster and the host of the incredible Arch and Anth podcast, a three-a-week show featuring interviews with experts on human history, biology, and cultures. We’re doing a special guest swap this week – so we did a double header interview. Michael interviewed me over on his show, and I’ve linked that interview if you’d like to learn more about some of my PhD work, and then we took a quick break and switched hats, so I could ask him about his research.

Michael is a biological anthropologist and specializes in studying coastal human archaeology. He has previously worked at the Universities of Kent, Copenhagen, and Cambridge. He completed his PhD research in 2018 exploring life and human health in prehistoric Estonia and Latvia. His other activities involve teaching students, engaging with inclusion and equity issues in academia, and climate justice. Today, you’ll hear from him on how we can interpret the diets of prehistoric coastal peoples – did coastal resources mean different bodies, or different health trajectories? Tune in to find out the answers! 

Learn More About Michael 

 

55: Orthorexia and Branding Your Body with Kaila Tova

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If you’ve been listening to AnthroDish for a while, you know I get really critical when it comes to the idea of what we define “health” as or how we define and understand “diets” – and this week’s guest, Kaila Tova, explores the depths of how healthism and fitness can blend into harmful disordered eating behaviours, like orthorexia.

After recovering from orthorexia, anorexia, and an exercise addiction, Kaila began a career in marketing while moonlighting as a body image coach for women recovering from eating disorders and disordered eating. She is also the creator and host of the brilliant podcast, Your Body, Your Brand. The 15-episode podcast documentary focuses on marketing literacy, neoliberal feminism, and identity economics in the context health and fitness entrepreneurship. This fall, she also joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Communication Arts Department to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture.

Orthorexia is a complicated term, as Kaila explains, because it’s not an officially recognized eating disorder, but it’s impacting a lot of folks who are engaging in fitness and nutrition communities. And how do these deep connections we make with our need to control our food and exercise impact our identities? What about our brands? We explore all these questions and more in our chat, which I think we both agreed could have lasted for HOURS. 

Connect with Kaila! 

Instagram: @bodybrandpod or @performingwoman

Twitter: @bodybrandpod

Website: kailatovaprins.com or https://www.bodybrandpod.com/

Podcast: Your Body, Your Brand