Content warning: This article includes the discussion of difficult and personal topics, such as disordered eating, calorie restriction and counting, and calorie burning. Please keep this in mind while reading this article, and feel free to skip around if something makes you uncomfortable.
I watch the girl who stands in front of the cooler, shifting and flipping the wraps and sandwiches on the shelves, laser-eyes scanning the nutrition labels printed on the packaged foods. The labels list words and numbers barely legible. I can imagine the ink sputtering out onto the sticky paper, the printer scrounging for the last drops of ink at the bottom of the cartridge just to make sure the calorie count numbers are in bold, twelve point font, for all to read. She selects a ham and cheese “wedge,” nervously tossing the sandwich from hand to hand, eyes interrogating every label she can spot.
"She stares at the nutritional label for a minute or so, and I can see the calculations happening behind her eyes."
AVI Fresh is Oberlin’s dining provider. This is one of the several pre-packaged AVI Fresh: To Go options, which are stored in a fridge in Decafe, Oberlin’s version of a convenience store. This salad has a list of ingredients, potential allergens, and nutritional information, including the number of calories in the salad. How they determine these calorie counts I am not entirely sure, but AVI Fresh makes sure that every single meal component in these fridges has calories listed.
“Excuse me, are you done yet?” An unshaven young man, eye bags sunken from exhaustion, reaches around her to grab a buffalo chicken wrap and a container of hard boiled eggs, before huffing a sigh and stalking away. He didn’t take a second look at the label. The girl quickly puts the sandwich back and steps aside, allowing the small huddle of people who had begun to gather around her access to the cooler. Once everyone has taken their selection, she positions herself in front of the cooler once more. She picks up a different package this time, a chicken caesar salad. She stares at the nutrition label for a minute or so, and I can see the calculations happening behind her eyes. 214 plus, say, 150 for the dressing, that clocks in at under 400, which is better than the 400 even for the sandwich. If I go to the gym later, I can probably just do a thirty minute workout and that’ll take care of lunch. She steps back, seemingly satisfied with her decision. I take a step forward, now standing next to her, and reach into the cooler for a buffalo chicken wrap, one of the better tasting options, in my opinion. I took a glance at the label, my gaze settling on the calorie count. The number always baffled me, and remembered how once I wouldn’t dare choose it. Numbers bothered me less now, in part because I knew that I likely wouldn’t actually consume all of the calories listed. I always rip off the outer half of the wrap because it feels excessive. Who needs a layer of just empty wrap? And on the other hand, how am I supposed to know if the calorie count was correct? Just last month, the calories listed for the exact same wrap had been one-third the current number of calories listed. And the recipe didn’t seem to have changed, at least not from what I could tell. I figured the real value may be somewhere between the two, but it didn’t really matter anymore.
By the time I brought myself out of my daydream—or rather, daymare? the girl was gone. But her hesitation still lingered in the air. A memory, yet a contemporary. I watched other people file by, making their selections. They all fell into one of two categories: a grabber or a lingerer. Ones who knew what they wanted and didn’t care what the label said, and ones who knew what they wanted but could only have it conditionally—if it met their calorie count for lunch, or if it was the lowest caloric option available. For these two types of individuals, calories mean something different. For one, calories mean energy, sustenance, and soothing the feeling of hunger. For the other, calories were a trap, a warning sign, a measure of merit (to which the lowest count wins). This person may have an eating disorder, or maybe they don’t, but still have a nagging voice in the back of their head, perhaps a remnant from disorders past. This way of thinking makes them linger, second-guess their cravings in the pursuit of being “healthier” or maintaining a calorie deficit. There’s also a third type of person that cares about the number of calories, but calories don’t bother them. Instead, calories are a check off the list of how much fuel they need for the day. Many of these types are athletes, whose coaches guide them on how much and what to eat based on their physical exertion. Calories in, calories out. Calories for this type are a metric. Even this kind of conscious calorie awareness, though, can be problematic. The human body is not a machine, it does not simply function as an input-output circuit. The human body is far more complex than that, and the calories we need may not always match the calories we burn.¹
"For the other, calories were a trap, a warning sign, a measure of merit (to which the lowest count wins)."
This brownie has no nutritional information other than the number of calories that it contains and the ingredients used, reinforcing the high valuation of calories in our diet-culture-ridden society. Additionally, what is not pictured is the fact that nearly every pastry/dessert packaged in this fashion lists the calories as 500 on the dot, a coincidence that I find hard to believe.
Calories became increasingly present in my mind in high school. Beforehand, calories were something I understood as one of the qualities of food, like taste—it’s what provides the body with energy. My mother raised my sibling and I to be conscious of what we were eating, but I don’t recall calories being a part of her rhetoric. Instead, it was “healthy foods” were good, and “junk food” was bad and should be eaten rarely. This was problematic, because it made “junk food” even more appealing to my young mind, but also strongly associated “junk food” with feelings of guilt and shame. However, my mother’s personal judgement of healthfulness isn’t necessarily related to calories (for example, she was perfectly happy with us having snacks of healthy-fat packed peanut butter and apples, even though peanut butter is a highly caloric food per serving). For lunch, we had sandwiches or dinner leftovers and fruit, not packaged snacks or treats. In a way, looking back, I am grateful for this (though I wasn’t at the time) because these foods never listed calories or had nutritional value labels. But most packaged foods do, and for a while this meant little to me. I was aware that high calorie foods and low calorie foods existed, but I didn’t put much thought into how many calories I was consuming. If I was hungry, or had a craving, I ate. This changed in high school, when I was fifteen or so, sometime during the latter half of the second semester of my sophomore year of high school, after NYC schools shut down due to the Covid-19 outbreak in March of 2020. I became occupied with being “healthy,” which for me, strongly correlated with losing weight, and it consumed my every waking minute.
"I became occupied with being “healthy,” which for me, strongly correlated with losing weight, and it consumed my every waking minute."
This image presents AVI Fresh’s proposed approach to health and wellness. The last line mentions “easy to understand labeling in the cafes,” which manifests as the calorie and nutrition information listed at every dining hall on the digital menu screens and printed labels on pre-packaged sandwiches, salads and sides. Juxtaposing this nutritional information with the idea of wellness is misinformed in the sense that knowing nutritional information, especially something like the amount of calories in a dish, is not “wellness,” for everyone. In fact, for people with eating disorders, being always presented with caloric information can be directly detrimental to their wellbeing.
It started with exercise, which, because we were at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, was mostly online workout videos for me. I was fifteen at the time, and more insecure than I’d ever been, especially about my body. Many of these videos posted (and boasted) how many calories you would burn throughout the workout, which, rationally, is a silly thing to do, since every body burns calories differently. A workout in which I burn 250 calories could easily cause someone else to burn 500 calories. But the internet is obsessed with bodies, calories, nutritional value, diets, and “eating right,” and the pandemic meant that I was spending at least eight hours a day online, and that was just for school. My Instagram feed became polluted with “what I eat in a day to lose weight” and “low calorie snack hack” videos, always with little boxes listing the calories and sometimes “macros” (the amount of macronutrients, like protein and carbohydrates) typed out for me. I began to be hyperaware of how many calories the foods I was eating contained, and if I didn’t know how much, I would get extremely anxious (sometimes to the point of having a meltdown). When my dad cooked dinner, I would hover around the kitchen, reading the labels of the ingredients he was using. I can still tell you how many calories are in ¼ cup of tomato sauce, or how many calories a serving of 0% fat greek yogurt contains (I would only consume 0%-2% fat dairy products—anything else was too much). Calories never left my brain, and after about nine months, I started to buckle under the weight of my own disordered thoughts.
"Calories never left my brain, and after about nine months, I started to buckle under the weight of my own disordered thoughts."
I was hesitant to include this image, out of fear of exposing my disordered mindset, but I think it’s important to illustrate the intense emotions that can be associated with calories when a person has an eating disorder. My therapist at the time advised me to write down how I felt after every time I ate (or at the end of each day), and this was one of those notes. For reference, Nick is my younger sibling.
I am now what I consider “well into recovery,” and I try not to let calories haunt my thoughts the way they used to. I now would position myself somewhere in the middle of type one and type two, teetering the tightrope of fighting my disordered thinking and the reality that I care about my health and body image, while telling myself that food is fuel and that calories are just a measure of that fuel, and not my body’s worth. After all, everyone needs calories to live. But moving to Oberlin, which occurred when I was about six solid months into recovery, was tough. Food was going to be different, and I wouldn’t be able to control it in the way I was able to at home, when I could portion things out to the gram if I so pleased. What struck me most about the change was the calorie counts for dining hall meals on the AVI website, as well as the aforementioned handmade calorie labels displayed on the fresh-to-go meal options at Decafe. I was used to packaged, store-bought food having calorie labels, but for “home-cooked” style meals, like the kinds they served at the dining halls, I had only ever been able to guesstimate, and I had finally grown comfortable with that ambiguity again. For every meal served at a dining hall, there is an online catalog of what is being served that day, though one can never count on it being accurate. For *most* meal components, the calories per serving is listed, although the “servings” at the dining halls often have ridiculous amounts of variety (due to natural human inaccuracy). Whether you are serving yourself or being served at a dining hall, there is no way to guarantee that the calories listed on the AVI Fresh screens are equivalent to what is on your plate. There are some dishes that will say “not nutritionally analyzed,” (why this is the case, I have no idea), but many are. This leads me to the question of who is doing this “analysis” and why.
"For every meal served at a dining hall, there is an online catalog of what is being served that day, though one can never count on it being accurate."
(Almost) every week, AVI Fresh will update their website with the menu items featured at a given dining hall that week. As can be seen in the photo, each meal component has the estimated number of calories for a serving. AVI Fresh provides no option to remove the calorie information, forcing students to reckon with the calories in each component of their meals.
Listing calories is a relatively recent trend in food service. The initiative began in 2005, and became federalized in 2010 as part of a response to the “obesity epidemic” and booming popularity and increasing consumption of fast food in the US.² Calorie counts can be useful, especially for people with health conditions, athletes who need a certain amount of calories before practice or to maintain muscle mass, or for people who need to gain or lose weight for medical reasons. But calorie counts can often be an unwanted reminder of past struggles with food, like in my case, or cause a heightened awareness of calories, which can lead to disordered eating.³ Calories are all around us at this school, and Oberlin is not the only educational institution posting calories wherever they can. All sorts of establishments list calories on the food they provide, and this is not necessarily helpful. Calorie counts can often be inaccurate, whether it be over or underestimation, (as illustrated by the buffalo chicken wrap), and frankly, calories are not something that all college students need to be preoccupied with whenever they want a meal, especially since we are still developing humans with malleable brains who need fuel to get us through days of classes, events, extracurriculars, and social interactions.
"Calories are all around us at this school."
This is a sushi roll from Umami, AVI Fresh’s Asian-fusion style takeout dining hall. Similar to the afore-pictured brownie, the label on the roll is much simpler than some of the other packaged food labels. Instead of providing nutritional information, the only information provided to the consumer is the calorie count, sell-by date, and net weight. The fact that the calorie count was deemed important enough to display on it’s own, without the other nutritional information that AVI Fresh pledges to provide, speaks to our society’s valuation of calories as central to one’s health (and sometimes privileging knowing calories over other important nutritional information, such as the amount of protein or fat contained in the dish).
It is crucial to remind ourselves that the research that grounds American rhetoric around the “obesity epidemic” is rooted in colonial knowledge and is based primarily on data from white, male study participants involved in studies over one-hundred and fifty years ago, such as the BMI scale.⁴ Health science historically erases the female body, bodies of color, and disabled bodies, relying on a narrow framework that does not do justice to the reality of the incredible diversity of bodies.⁵ By making bodily health seem monolithic and universal (when in reality, the majority of scientific data completely neglects the non-white, non-male abled body), being fat becomes an individual problem, and one that need to be solved.⁶ The “obesity epidemic,” and the methods used to combat it, serve to further the goals of multinational weight loss corporations and pharmaceutical companies.⁷ Fat-phobia is endemic and profitable because fat bodies are seen as a financial burden (because they are assumed to require/consume more food than non-fat bodies, as well as introduce accessibility concerns that require financial investment), and the the weight loss industry feeds on the capitalist and colonial inconvenience of fat bodies by promoting products and methods to lose weight, (whether or not they are safe and affective), in order to make profit. If non-normative bodies are used for economic gain, then who are these measures really serving, and are their intentions purely to combat America’s poor health? And is calorie counting the way to do it?
Though my issue with calorie posting is somewhat personal, I know I am not alone. I’ve talked with many friends and family members, many of whom express a similar frustration with the omnipresent calorie count. Calorie counts were introduced to address a majority problem—the growing percentage of people labeled overweight or obese by the medical industry. Rather than continuing to focus on this majority, I would like to turn our focus to a minority instead: Americans with eating disorders. Nearly 10% of the U.S. population has an eating disorder, (this is only coming from reported eating disorders—many more people with eating disorders exist under the radar of medical surveillance). Eating disorders are mental illnesses that take hard work and dedication to heal from, and constant reminders of calories is counterproductive in that process. A study done by Ann F. Haynos and Christina A. Roberto in 2017 studied the effects of menu calorie labeling on young women with or without an eating disorder. The findings showed that in fact, for people with Binge Eating Disorder, listed calorie counts resulted in an increase in total calories ordered, and for those with Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia Nervosa, it resulted in a substantial reduction in calories ordered in comparison with women without eating disorders.⁸ These choices align with the characteristic disordered quality of each eating disorder, illustrating that calorie counts actually exacerbate and encourage disordered eating behaviors rather than helping. Additionally, if these results are applicable to those with eating disorders already, young people who are impressionable and exposed to anti-fat rhetoric are susceptible to falling down the rabbit hole of obsessive calorie counting. Which is where my personal experience comes in. I grew up with a relatively body-positive approach to my self-image, and when my best friend fell into the tendency to cut calories and over-exercise, I tried as best as I could to assuage her. But being isolated from my peers, being constantly surrounded by diet-culture rhetoric, and being left to my own devices during the majority of my day due to online schooling during the pandemic, I became susceptible to the societal messages around body size, diet, health, and weight loss. If I encountered calorie counts on menus when I was still deep in the throes of my eating disorder, I would chose the meal associated with the lowest number of calories in a heartbeat, whether or not it actually appealed to me. It would be extremely difficult to get YouTube or Instagram to ban all messaging involving calories on their platforms, but Oberlin College dining is a much easier target to approach. As students, we have a voice in how our dining halls function, through surveys posted by AVI Fresh on their Instagram account, or feedback forms we can fill out by hand in Decafe. Students should have a say about whether they want anti-fat and diet culture rhetoric forced down our throats, just like how we have a say in what we want to eat during a given day.
"Students should have a say about whether they want anti-fat and diet culture rhetoric forced down our throats, just like how we have a say in what we want to eat during a given day."
This is the AVI Fresh website logo for their dining plan iteration at Oberlin College. The foods depicted in the image are all fruits and vegetables, which is meant to demonstrate the “fresh” approach to dining. Fresh could be interpreted simply as meaning fresh ingredients, but fresh also could mean new or trendy, and given the fruits and vegetables shown, seems to send the message that eating “clean” foods like these is cool and hip. This feeds into the trend on social media that prioritizes and glorifies “clean” eating habits, which for some can lead into a harmful relationship with food due to orthorexia, an eating disorder in which a person becomes obsessed with eating “healthy” foods, which can result in malnutrition or can morph into another eating disorder.
I’m not suggesting that calorie counts be removed from everything, but perhaps there should be an option for whether or not someone wants to see the calories of their food. Not everyone feels the need to constantly be aware of the amount of calories they consume, and displaying them for everyone everywhere can actually do more harm than good. In fact, many studies show that listing calorie counts for people (without recorded eating disorders) has little to no effect on their choices.⁹ It would be simple for AVI to add a selection button for “show calories,” so that calories are not immediately thrust into the viewer’s mind when deciding what to have for dinner. I know from personal experience that calorie-blindness is an extremely important step on the road to recovery from a restrictive eating disorder, and having the option to remove the presence of calories can be a liberating experience for both those who are diagnosed and those who are not. Even if someone doesn’t have a clinically diagnosed eating disorder that doesn’t mean that everpresent caloric information doesn’t affect them. Posting calorie counts enables calorie counting, which in turn enables disordered eating, especially restriction. Students—young and still growing, educated and still learning, individuals who are impressionable—should have the option for whether or not they want to see the calories of the sandwich they have for lunch.
"It would be simple for AVI to add a selection button for “show calories,” so that calories are not immediately thrust into the viewer's mind when deciding what to have for dinner."
There is an option to view “my preferences,” on the AVI menus webpage, in which the user can select what allergies they have in order to exclude menu items that include any of these allergies. Despite the fact that viewing/not viewing calories is closely related to mental and physical health of those who benefit from that information or those who severely don’t, such as students with eating disorders, an option for whether to display calorie counts for every dish is not included in the “my preferences” section. This would be a very simple way to add a calorie-sensitive option, by providing students the agency to choose whether or not they wish to see the calories of a given meal.
Ella Bezkorovainy, OC’26, is a Comparative American Studies and Dance Major from Brooklyn, NY. Ella has a particular interest in the intersection of food studies, fatphobia, diet culture, and colonialism, as well as exploring intersections between the performing arts and culture studies.
