2025 is Giving the Aura of Body Fascism

Both politically and personally, 2025 has been a dumpster-fire. In the UK we’ve seen an all-out attack on trans people, migrants, and muslims. AI is suddenly everywhere, including places where we categorically do not need AI. Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term in January this year (yeah, I had to fact check it too), unleashing his very specific brand of heterofascist patriarchy. We passed two years of genocide in Gaza at the hands of the zionist, colonial-settler state, propped up by governments around the world. And we are living through a social, environmental, and economic crisis. 

So, could someone explain to me why the fuck we are talking about buttery poos and baby food pouches?

There is nothing that screams ‘END TIMES’ more than the nutrition discourse of 2025. Not because it is directly engaged with the sociopolitical climate, but because it’s a product thereof. 

You might think you’re reading a serious article in the Guardian or the NYT about ultra-processed foods or GLP-1s. But these articles enact power and control over their readers. They tell us that we should be concerned about micromanaging what we eat. They tell us we should care about the size of our waists. They tell us what to think and how to behave. And more than that, they tell us how we think other people should think and behave. I mean, come on. Are you going to tell me that Chris van Tulleken and Bee Wilson don’t love to tell you how to think and behave. GTFO.

This is what my fave mid-century theorist Michel Foucault would call biopower. He would argue that people in positions of power (like Wilson and van Tulleken) weaponise science to control populations. This control is not obvious in the way public floggings were back in the day. It’s not even obvious in the way that big flashy laws are, as we’ve seen with the supreme court rulings around how to define a ‘woman’ this year (which is horseshit, obviously). Biopower is quieter, more subtle. 

Biopower is enacted on and between bodies to keep them docile. Compliant. Weak. Hungry. 

It’s in the way we scrutinise, police, and surveil other people’s choices around food. It’s in the way we micromanage our own eating by scanning it into a UPF checking app. It’s in the way we have normalised the use of GLP-1 drugs for already thin people, thereby distorting our sense of what a ‘normal’ body looks like. It’s in the way we outsource the management of our bodies to tech-oligarchs. It’s in the way we think we have to manage our bodies at all. 

Newspaper articles, TV shows, recipe books and popular nutrition books (such as CvT’s Ultra-Processed People) are not neutrally communicating objective facts. They are technologies intended to discipline body-minds. And it’s working. 

A lot of takes this year centre on the idea that the world is a hot mess, so we try to control our bodies to reclaim a sense of autonomy. And while the world is a hot mess, this explanation feels too simplistic. Too easy. 

The reality, I think, is much more sinister. If we are tying ourselves in knots to eat UPF-free and meet increasingly unhinged body ideals, we’re too preoccupied to notice the attack on our democratic rights. We don’t notice the hunger-striking prisoners. We check-out of political organising for Palestine or migrants or trans people. 

We acquiesce to the autocrats, the tech-ologiarchs, the fascists and the authoritarians. 

We pander to patriarchy. To capitalism. To body fascism. 

We become obedient and submissive.

If we are complicit in our own oppression, then how can we fight for the rights of everyone else?

So yeah, I’m not surprised 2025 has been the year of the buttery poo - return of peak Y2K diet culture - emulsified - ozempic-core - riots about vitamin C in the bread. It’s all just one diabolical distraction.

At a moment where people are becoming more engaged politically – Mamdani in NYC, Polanski here, a global movement for Palestine – elites try to reclaim power and control through the force of biopower. People getting organised, caring for each other and their communities, and doing the job of the state threatens and undermines elite power. 

What we end up with, when we look at it plainly, is a desperate attempt to claw back some control; it’s embarrassing actually. LOOOOK GUYS, UPFS ARE REAL BAD. WON’T SOMEONE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE BABY FOOD POUCHES.  THE MELTY PUFFS ARE KILLING OUR TODDLERS (no mention of the bombs being dropped on babies in Gaza, mind you). 

Body fascism is a distraction. 

Let’s look at how this is working in practice. Here's my round-up of the past 12 months in diet and nutrition discourse.