There’s a meme of sorts about how people from all cultural backgrounds claim that what makes their own unique is its love of food. As versus which other culture, is the retort. Every culture (fine, apart from WASP culture) is the one with the food.

So too, perhaps, with dieting. To me, dieting feels like a deeply Jewish pursuit, like something inherent to mid-century-to-Y2K North American Jewish culture. But also, I happen to be a woman born in the 1980s, to a mostly-American, partly-Canadian Jewish family.

I get that, as a demographic matter, the however many gazillion dollar diet industry cannot only have Jewish adherents. I have lived in the world long enough to have, would you believe it, met gentiles on diets. But also, diet culture is something I associate with the self-deprecation of Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Dorothy or Sophia on The Golden Girls, or Natalie on The Facts of Life, and with specific classmates of mine whose mothers served them SlimFast in early 1990s Manhattan, really just a whole Jewish subculture of venerating thinness, all the while (mistakenly, I suspect) believing it to be somehow harder for us to attain than for our non-Jewish white-lady equivalents. Zaftig was our assumed communal set point.

Marisa Meltzer is a lifestyle-journalism A-lister, a byline familiar to readers of The New York Times, Vogue, and the like. One of the names, alongside Hadley Freeman and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, where I see the byline and hop to it. She first came on my radar in 2013, in a piece for Elle.com, a part of which is about how dieting had gone out of style, replaced by the euphemism of wellness: “Losing weight for your wedding day? Okay, you get a free pass on that one. But the daily slog of dieting—all that calorie counting and dessert skipping and cardio bingeing? That’s not at all chic.”

That essay marked, to me, the end of diet culture as it had once existed. Meltzer did not personally end it, but rather was picking up on a shift that had occurred. The long 2010s were not a time when dieting itself ceased to take place, but rather when the way women—or, women of a certain class—discussed it changed dramatically. It was no less important to be thin, but fat-shaming was out, as was overt diet-talk. Gone were the days of, just a small piece of cake for me, I’ll only be a little bit bad. It was understood that to speak of how fat you thought you were was a microaggression to any fatter-still woman who might be within earshot. That dieting and calling it “dieting” was a bit low-class, but also that it was classist to phrase it in such terms.

Then the........

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