ABSTRACT
Research shows that the fundamentals of habitual food consumption and the representative lifetime diet of an individual are grounded in early life and food choices established in childhood or adolescence may significantly spread into adulthood. Distorted diets are not only about restricting overall food consumption or creating a skewed diet by limiting food intake only to specific food groups. They are also about substituting food with herbal supplements and pharmaceuticals and thus a medicalising of body sustenance. Popular diet recommendations range from the healthy to the unhealthy, but also to the risky and the fatal. This chapter looks at the other side of the issue, by exploring the risks posed by skewed dietary patterns that can lead to malnutrition, due to inadequacy of either energy or micronutrients. Ethical attitudes towards animals, and vegetarianism in particular, tends to be a marker of whiteness and middle class status, as well as gendered politics.
