Beck: I feel like the obvious example here is eating. There seems to be some people who think that you can keep yourself in a pure state of health by eating vegetarian, or vegan, or you can live like our purer ancient ancestors by eating paleo. So, why would you say that’s the wrong way to think about these kind of diets and how does that illuminate this purity psychology?

Shotwell: I started thinking about eating and purity because I eat vegan. I’ve had some of the most annoying conversations I can remember with fellow vegans. All of the approaches to eating are these very elaborate fictions that try to pretend that we are on the right side of something. People say, “it’s the correct thing to do for my body” to eat this particular way—to eat paleo, to eat no sugar, to eat no grains, to eat vegan. All of those logics go back to stories about what’s the “right” way for a human body to eat. I have this critical archeologist friend who’s like, “Yeah all of these narratives about how long ago people didn’t eat any grains, they’re just scientifically wrong. I've seen wheat in bellies this many years ago.”

As soon as you start really looking, you see you can’t be cut off from the incredible suffering that’s produced simply from the fact that we [have bodies]. All of my vegan friends who think that they’re not actually participating in cycles of death and suffering, they’re just wrong. If you say, “There isn’t a way for me to eat and not be connected to death and suffering,” then you have to ask this much more interesting question: Why am I going to eat in the way that I am? And what does that mean? How am I going to think about the workers who produce the food, the people who move the food around? We just can’t be self-righteous about it. We’re looped into this much more complicated system where every choice we make is imperfect and we can’t feel like we’re not connected.

Beck: There are of course multiple reasons why people might take up these different diets. One is what you’re saying, that they want to not participate in factory farming, or to not participate in killing animals. But then there’s also, just, they want to be healthy. And one thing I thought was really interesting in the book is this idea of healthism—that you need to take care of your own health, that you’re responsible for taking care of yourself. Obviously what you eat and whether you work out does have an effect, but does that flip on its head, and turn into: if you are sick, it’s your fault?

Shotwell: Robert Crawford, who coined the term healthism, wrote this article in the ’80s. There were all kinds of things happening coming out of the ’60s and the massive social justice movements that really made people feel like we can make this world a place for everyone to live and flourish. Then there was a turn toward thinking you are personally responsible for your sickness. Whether you get cancer, whether you get diabetes, this is your fault, and if you’re not living well, you’re actually morally culpable for your own sickness. I think of that as a purity politics of despair. When you think about everything that could go wrong and you then say, “The bounds of my skin are the relevant unit of analysis,” then everyone’s also responsible for their own problems. This means you don’t have to feel bad about other people getting sick and dying because they’re living downstream from a factory. They should’ve done something about that, they should've eaten more antioxidants.