Calorie culture.

Dr Atkins' Diet Revolution--the diet which portrayed sugars, bread, rice, pasta, and potatoes among other carbohydrate-rich foods as responsible for obesity and the consumption of high-protein foods as the path to lean heaven--appears to have stalled.

The diet and its variations spawned a massive industry in low-carb products to feed the reported fifty-nine million Americans who claimed they were 'controlling their carbohydrates'. Manufacturers who rushed to cash in on the low-carb craze by altering the carbohydrate content of foods like pasta and bread, have reported disappointing sales results.

In late 2004 the New York Times noted that Atkin's reported a 32 per cent fall in revenue over six months. In Australia, in March 2005 Unilever Australia announced it was dropping some of the products in its 'Carb Options' range of foods, and revised its sales target for the low-carb range from $50 million by 2006 to a more modest $5-10 million. Nestl,, similarly, has no plans to expand on its existing low-carb food products (Sydney Morning Herald2005).

In some respects this is hardly surprising, given that low-carb diets take a techno-scientific view of food. Carbohydrates, particularly starches and sugars, tend to increase insulin levels, which, in turn, is claimed to promote the storage of calories as fat. Limit the in-take of carbohydrates to those found in water-dense foods such as leafy vegetables, so the theory goes, and the body will utilise fat as its primary energy source, rather than glucose.

This is all fine so long as you're prepared to regard food as a standing reserve of calories, devoid of any broader cultural context--steak as nothing more than a sequence of amino acids and lipids for example. Sooner or later, though, it comes up against the fact that eating is an inherently social and communal activity in which it's neither possible nor desirable to have complete control of what you eat

The low-carb craze is giving way to a different diet fad, one that, at least on the surface, emphasises the cultural dimension of food. Or at least the eating habits found in very particular cultures that, like characters in a Dan Brown novel, have stumbled on the secret code of healthy eating.

Take for instance the two recent popular diet books--French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasureand The Okinawa Diet. Both advise readers to imitate the eating and lifestyle patterns of other cultures in order to achieve thinness.

The story behind French Women Don't Get Fatis straightforward enough: French woman goes to the US as an exchange student where she packs on the weight. On her return to France she consults a doctor to lose weight who passes on such miraculous advice as drink plenty of water, eat small portions and slowly, avoid snacks and processed food ... in other words, what almost every nutritionist has been saying for years.

The Okinawa Diet, meanwhile, grew out of a population study of Okinawans that found that the island was home to an unusually high number of centenarians. Not only do Okinawans apparently live longer, they also tend to have lower rates of chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, and are leaner and more agile than people of similar ages in other parts of Japan and the west. The authors of The Okinawa Diet, predictably enough, prescribe a diet rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean animal and plant protein, and high in fibre, water and tea.

While such advice is sound enough as far as it goes, it remains predicated on the idea that one can effortlessly extricate one's self from one's own culture and live as if you were born on a small Japanese island or as a native of Paris. Ignored in these little tracts is the possibility that food is embedded within social and cultural mores, linked with gender and class roles, production systems, logistic and supply networks, working and leisure patterns, all of which shape what and when people eat.

While spending two hours at lunch, as Mireille Guiliano tells us the French do (or at least French people of a certain class) is a rather attractive idea, it's not clear how an individual might do this in Australia without raising the ire of colleagues and management. Similarly, there are undoubted benefits to a diet rich in seafood but it's unlikely that those who adopt the Okinawa diet will go out and catch the fish, prepare it from scratch, and grow their own vegetables. The more likely scenario is that food marketer will come up with 'Okinawa-friendly' foods, highlighting foods rich in Omega 3 oils like those found in fish--or else add them to foods in which they don't naturally occur.

The popularity of diets, whether through techno-scientific abstraction or cultural abstraction, is a symptom of a culture uncomfortable with the limits of embodiment, community and ritual, and bent on remaking them.