ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the campaign featuring Barkley as an example of how US mainstream media and marketing portrays men's interactions around food and eating. It investigates how representations and discourses about food-related practices and male body image embrace and naturalize a set of expectations, values, and behaviors as constitutive elements of acceptable masculinity. The narratives, prescriptions, objects, and practices that facilitate transmission and diffusion of expectation and ideas in public space of communicative and material exchanges all share an ideological function, in the sense that they tend to reinforce specific values and goals for society. The main theme of the communication about weight loss in the United States still makes its appearance: possible to slim down without renouncing any favorite foods. Once again, the core of the communication is the negotiation between the need to stick to what is perceived in mainstream and normal masculinity and the desire to lose weight and achieve a fitter body.
