Where are All the Fat Social Media Chefs?

Words: Chloe Laws 

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This summer’s aesthetic is food. Our Damson Madder shirts are decorated with fruit prints, our earrings, little mushrooms. Everyone’s tablescaping and whipping butter. You can’t move in London without bumping into a viral croissant or tiramisu-iced-coffee or being interviewed by Topjaw. The It Girls are foodies now too; just look at Nara Smith and Gabbriette. Teenagers are adding faux freckles on their cheeks with broccoli and staining their lips with cherries. It’s tinned fish girl summer; lemon girl summer; “isn't this heirloom tomato kinda Loewe” summer? 

Food is everywhere and everyone’s a foodie. My TikTok FYP is full of women making a name for themselves in the industry, like Meredith Hayden, Matilda Bea, Tess Madalyn and, of course, the aforementioned Nara Smith. I love food, I love cooking, and so - for a while - I loved this shift in the zeitgeist. For so long, women had to pretend not to enjoy food, the patriarchy telling us it wasn’t ladylike to eat big portions, 00s diet culture telling us to replace flavour with SlimFast and Special K. Wearing a dress with prints of spaghetti and seafood would have been unimaginable a few decades ago; filming mukbangs for money is an ungraspable concept for my boomer mother.

After a while though, this new foodie aesthetic started to make me uncomfortable. It took me a while to put my finger on what exactly, but when it clicked, I couldn’t unsee it. For all this talk of food and foodies, no one is fat. Barely any of these women gaining fame for their food-based-accounts are even mid-sized. In fact they are all very thin. Quite a few are models or retired models. From an individualistic perspective, this isn’t a problem - many thin women do enjoy food and they should be encouraged to and promoting positive food habits - aka  women actually loving the food they eat - is a good thing, obviously. Yet society isn’t made up of individuals, and we are not just individuals. We are a community, a small part of a bigger cog. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

When we zoom out, the picture is a grim, fatphobic one. We have reached a new stage of fatphobia where even those people who are paid to enjoy food, are not allowed to look like they do. And as always, there’s a venn diagram of intersectional marginalisation at play. Fatphobia, misogyny and racism all factor into this new reality. 

Men are given slightly different rules, and whilst of course they still face fatphobia, there are expectations in a way that women don’t get. Take Matty Matheson, famous chef and producer and actor in The Bear. I love Matty, he’s a vibrant addition to popular culture. He gets abuse for his weight, but it’s not comparable to the misogynistic abuse bigger women receive due to a lack of patriarchal privilege. And in turn, the abuse a white plus size woman gets is nowhere near to comparable to what a plus size black woman does. Without representation in the one area where it’s most crucial to change the negative discourse surrounding fatness, the food industry, how can we ever expect perceptions of plus size people to change?

Back in 2014, Rachel Khoo said “Last time there was a fat woman chef was the Two Fat Ladies, and they called them two fat ladies! There are male chefs who are bigger, but they don’t call them fat. As a woman you have to tick all these boxes to be able to be on TV. I know I look a certain way and that’s partly why I’m on TV. If I were really ugly and fat, I don’t think I’d have had the same chance.” Obviously her statement has glaring problems - like equating ugliness with fatness - but she had a point, and very little has changed in the past decade except for one major difference - influential cheffing has moved homes from TV to TikTok. 

“We have reached a new stage of fatphobia where even those people who are paid to enjoy food, are not allowed to look like they do.”

Poppy O’Toole, aka the potato queen @poppycooks has 4.4M followers on TikTok, receives a lot of body shaming trolling. Poppy is not even plus size, such is the narrowness of what is deemed unacceptable. She wrote on Instagram, after a bad bout of trolling: “It’s mad how a woman being comfortable in her own body makes some people (men) so very, very pressed. These comments came up recently on the bikini photo I posted last time in response to a troll commenting on my weight, so here, once again, is me on a beach having the time of my life, happy in my carb-loving body and not giving two spuds about being seen as a ‘fat chick’ to be ‘thrown back in the ocean’ as I’ll ‘never be attractive to successful men’.”

It isn’t a coincidence that the return of impossibly thin body standards that we have seen across fashion and social media in the past couple of years is coinciding with a culture obsessing over what we eat. Dieting and starvation used to be glamorised (nothing tastes as good as skinny feels!) as a necessary evil to reach Eurocentric body ideals, but now the inverse has become an equally impossible standard. We are expected to be thin and foodies; to indulge in food and love it, but not ‘look’ like we do. The pressure to be ultra thin has been back for months but now, we are expected to perform a food and body positive message in public, without actually being or feeling either of those things.