Fancy Feast

Fancy Feast, an essay about the gendered and racializing implications of current American food trends, is now available at Real Life.

This is the new health, same as the old. Beautiful, slim, wealthy white women — long the keepers of purity, health, and hygiene in the American imagination — are again advising the rest of us how to care for our bodies through state-of-the-art technologies. In the case of Moon Dust, the white woman in question is Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of the Los Angeles chain Moon Juice. Her deployment of supply chain management, centralized manufacturing, branding, and other technologies of verification is seemingly magical. She turns the gummy raw materials for her products, derived in large part from the cuisines and medicines of a panoply of brown people, into spiritually potent “moon dust.”