Rich People Diets and Confusing Emoji
Some notes & quotes from recent reads:
Why Don’t Rich People Eat Anymore?
Quotes:
A person’s relationship to food has always revealed a lot about their class. The English king Henry I famously died after eating “a surfeit of lampreys”. In the UK, the connotations carried by different foodstuffs have always been “heavily dependent on scarcity,” explains Pen Vogler, author of Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. “The economists’ old friend, the supply and demand curve, is a fairly reliable indicator of what foods are used to signal high status: venison and game, the sale of which were highly controlled, from the Norman invasion onwards; spices in Medieval and Tudor England; French food in the 19th century,” she says. “For centuries anything imported was high status – and we still grant ‘middle class’ to imported foods such as avocado or quinoa – even though they might be peasant foods in their countries of origin.”
Things are very different for the elite. “The mega-rich don’t have to eat obesogenic food,” Vogler says. “It might be quite tough in our food and social media environment to be slim – and healthy too – but the mega-rich have the resources they need to do it: access to good fresh food, education, space, time, social validation.” It’s also worth noting that Ozempic is still primarily used by the wealthy, with reports claiming that users of the drug are concentrated in affluent areas like Manhattan and Hollywood. Elon Musk, the third richest man alive, has also admitted to using the drug.
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