Nothing Tastes As Good As Fascism Feels

Last month, Pantone unveiled their Colour of the Year for 2026: white. Sure, they’ve editorialised it as ‘cloud dancer’. But the fact remains: it’s white as snow. Clean. Pure. Virginal. The choice consolidates something we’ve been teetering on the edge of for some time – an unashamed reclamation of the superiority of whiteness. 

Just over two weeks after the Pantone announcement, Nicki Minaj baffled the internet by appearing alongside Erika Kirk – Charlie Kirk’s widow – at a Turning Point USA event. Minaj – a Black woman who is liberal-coded (although nobody is clear on what her politics really are, not even Minaj) – was largely incoherent throughout the conversation, but was evidently briefed to hit on certain talking points. ‘I don't need someone with blond hair and blue eyes to downplay their beauty, because I know my beauty. Do you understand?’. Here, Minaj is giving permission to white women not to shrink themselves or downplay their femininity in order to make Black women more comfortable, something white women have patently never needed permission to do. And in doing so, Minaj is being tokenised to whitewash and erase centuries of systemic oppression, reducing it down to an inspirational Instagram quote: ‘Another woman's beauty isn't an absence of your own’.

There are countless examples of these pop-culture moments from 2025 – notable mention to Sydney Sweeney’s genes, for instance – that underscore how far the cultural mood has swung to the right. And this is echoed in our politics. Since Trump came (back) into power in January 2025, we’ve seen people being disappeared from their homes in ICE raids; countless children separated from their adults. Closer to home, the UK government has taken an aggressively authoritarian stance on our fundamental rights to protest, particularly in relation to support for Palestine and those trying to stop the Imperial War Machine. Sentient potato Keir Starmer channeled Enoch Powell in his ‘Island of Strangers’ speech and doubled down on how much he loves flags, effectively giving white nationalists the green light to continue their campaign of hate and violence. And of course, JK Rowling successfully purchased a supreme court decision that legally defines who qualifies as a ‘woman’ based on narrow and exclusionary biological criteria. Despite their claims, this does nothing to protect the safety of cis-women, and does everything to exclude trans women from participating in public life with safety, dignity, and respect, something that it should go without saying, is a fundamental human right.

I know. I know. You came here to get tips on feeding your kids or Intuitive Eating, and I’m out here talking about fascism. The two things are far less disparate than they seem; hear me out. Because what’s happening culturally and what’s happening politically, is also playing out in and on our bodies, even when we’re not the direct targets of fascist ideology. 

As the political and cultural mood has tilted to the right, so too have our attitudes towards food and bodies. Where, a decade ago, we had a nascent body positivity movement, now we have Ozempic. In 2019 when Just Eat It came out, the conversation was about obliterating the good food/bad food binary. Now, in the era of ultra-processed food discourse, food and morality are wound more tightly than a thread on a bobbin. 

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Can I Have Another Snack?Laura Thomas

All over the internet, I’ve seen this shift explained away as the return of 90s and early 00s diet culture, epitomised by emaciated supermodels and Kate Moss’s infamous quote in Women’s Wear Daily in 2009: ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ (1). We’re told that diet culture teaches us to control our bodies when the world feels out of control, but is it diet culture?