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“Against politically correct nutrition”: Ancestral foods and far-right knowledge production

Extremism
Gender
Identity
Education
Catherine Tebaldi
University of Luxembourg
Catherine Tebaldi
University of Luxembourg

Abstract

This paper explores the diet discourses of the Swiss branch of the Weston Price foundation and the ways they use food to build alternative sources of expertise. It includes “Nourishing Traditions” cookbook, a website, and Instagram accounts where its ideas intersect with popular health influencers and diet trends including paleo’s radical cousin carnivorism and the “ancestral diet”. Its main elements include a high fat diet to stave off depression and anxiety, traditional methods of food production and preservation. Not explicitly fascist, although involved in Covid denial, its arguments and practices provide the foundation for fascist food discourse. Price was a dentist and amateur anthropologist, whose research compared the teeth of various industrialized and tribal peoples. Price found that tribal peoples who consumed lots of industrial food lacked healthy teeth and strong jaws, physical signifiers of the degenerating effects of modernity and the health of tradition. The vitality created in this diet and its opposition tradition/modernity emerges across multiple right-wing food discourses as a floating signifier of white male superiority. Nourishing traditions, I argue, serves as a recipe not only for food preservation but for the kinds of pseudoscience the far-right wishes to use to preserve whiteness.