The Promise of 'Wellness': Understanding Alternative Dietary Practices in Precarious Times (360G-Wellcome-212715_Z_18_Z)

From ‘green juice’ to ‘golden milk’, ‘energy balls’ to ‘spiralised squash’, ‘activated charcoal’ to ‘bullet-proof coffee’, a whole host of supposedly health-enhancing dietary practices have become popular in the UK under the auspices of ‘wellness’. While such trends generate significant media attention and are cause for concern among medical professionals, they remain poorly understood and frequently trivialised. This study will be the first to interrogate the social, economic, and political forces underwriting the rise of wellness culture in Britain and account for its distinctly gendered contours. Rather than debating what actually constitutes ‘healthy eating’, it will use the tools of social and cultural analysis to understand why scientifically unfounded dietary trends are flourishing. Ethnographic methods will explore the glamorous trappings and mundane entanglements wellness generates in women’s everyday lives, and investigate how health practitioners grapple with the proliferation of anti-expert nutritional guidance as manifest online and in clinic. The project represents an original investigation into the cultural mediation of health. Key goals include: - Understanding why women embark on alternative dietary regimes. - Situating the rise of wellness culture within the broader cultural politics of austerity. - Finding ways to enhance communication on issues of food and diet.