The New Yorker:

Can the decision to forgo food be removed from the gendered realm of weight-loss culture?

By Molly Fischer

Eleven years ago, a startup promised to solve the problem of food. Soylent was a venture-capital-funded meal-replacement product composed of such ingredients as soy protein and maltodextrin; it could be consumed as a convenient shake, and it provided a way of getting calories into a body without all the bother of cooking, chewing, or tasting very much. It also inspired a certain amount of skepticism. One could be forgiven for wondering (and many did) whether the new product—a fortified beverage that you could drink instead of eating a meal—wasn’t basically SlimFast.

A crucial difference here was branding. SlimFast was understood as a diet drink for vain women with nothing better to do than worry about how they looked; Soylent, meanwhile, was a life hack for body-optimizing tech bros with more important things to think about than lunch. Its popularity offered an early inkling of a broader trend. In the late twenty-tens, men in Silicon Valley discovered the allure of not eating—and the combination of self-tracking apps and elaborate rules about when and what to consume produced habits otherwise associated with red-carpet crash dieting. Jack Dorsey, the monkish Twitter co-founder, tweeted, in 2019, that he’d “been playing with fasting for some time” and eating only one meal a day. As with Soylent, these practices had been removed from the embarrassing and inevitably gendered realm of body image and weight-loss culture; instead, they were steps on the path to an enlightened state of productivity. Intermittent fasting was of a piece with an interest in manful self-improvement via stoicism.

Go to link