This piece, the first of two written by our Council member Lucy Aphramor, is the first in our new series of articles offering diverse perspectives which challenge and seek to expand the debate on current research, narratives and ways of thinking.
“I’m not interested in conversations that pretend nutrition exists outside of colonialism and racism. If dismantling that structure isn’t our priority, our work will always be performative by default.”
Stacey Williamson, Just Feed Me
The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission report has been widely celebrated for centering justice as pivotal to food systems transformation. While it’s not news that justice is crucial to sustainable, equitable food systems, I’ve sensed a confidence that EAT-Lancet’s endorsement and analysis could catalyse real change in this direction.
In considering justice, EAT-Lancet’s authors, importantly, want us to reckon with the power colonialism wields over life and death, in other words, its necropolitics. To this end, they echo others in naming colonialism as a force that shaped and continues to shape food systems against Black-aliveness (to use terminology from Black scholars). But they haven’t noticed the ways that anti-Blackness shows up in their own thinking. Instead, they repeat a classic error of locating colonialism elsewhere, only. This is really important because by side-stepping the colonialism of their own biomedical thinking, the deep logic of EAT-Lancet perpetuates the harm its authors, and food justice advocates, condemn.
People make mistakes. It is easy to miss a group-think error when we belong to the group. I think there is important learning in considering why we – broadly, people working collaboratively for food-farming justice who have been educated and socialised through colonial values – also did not notice that while anti-coloniality was named, coloniality was enacted? Perhaps this misdirection escaped us because, at face value, the report seemed – finally – to promise the justice we yearn for? I hope that interrogating the mismatch between theory and strategy contributes to growing the movement we long for.
What Is Coloniality?
If, like me, you were trained in biomedicine, coloniality’s relevance to the planetary health diet, or public health/ nutrition more generally, may not be immediately apparent. We may disregard it because of unfamiliar vocabulary, because it’s outside our expertise, because we think we’re unbiased anyway. We may persuade ourselves and group that doing nothing is a reasonable, professional option. This sort of meaning-making that justifies inaction through a rationale of false innocence and pretending away harm emerges within a colonial matrix. The empire works through us deciding who gets to live and who is killed by our in/actions, whether from unsafe food, agrochemicals, social murder, structural violence (i.e. necropolitics). However much we don’t understand (yet), however confused we are, we can still work with the knowledge that coloniality is anti-Black and reproduces other oppressive ideologies. Clearly, that means it warrants the attention of all of us concerned with food justice because we are here to support that which is life-affirming.
Colonialism is a practice of exerting full or partial political, social, economic, and cultural control over a territory and its people by another people. It involves occupying the colonised territory with settlers, and exploiting land, people, resources, knowledge to serve the coloniser.
Colonialism is often misunderstood as a thing of the past: something that went away when colonised countries fought for and won their independence. The erroneous ‘in the past’ perspective means that colonial harm continues unchecked, including giving a free pass to business-as-usual in knowledge creation – as happened with EAT-Lancet. The violence of colonialism endures through the logic of coloniality, a term coined by Anibal Quijano. The logic of coloniality exists wherever systems are ordered through white supremacy. Here, whiteness is not referring to skin tone, but to a value system.
Binary Thinking
Coloniality divides the world into binary hierarchies: healthy/ unhealthy foods for instance, something I expand on here. Denying inter-connection, it extracts people and foods, for example, from any context such as land, place, seasons, relationship. It understands through separation. Hierarchical binary thinking taxonomises humanity into the categories Ideal and Devalued. In this framing, the ideal standard human is a white, cis, elite, non-disabled, neurotypical, thin male: everybody else is deemed lesser, a deviation from this ostensibly superior, ‘neutral’, category.
Binary thinking underpins the (colonial) approach to ‘nutrition’ in EAT-Lancet with its over-reliance on isolated nutrients as a means of improving global health. The separation inherent in binary thinking turns food into a commodity. This is one example of how ‘thinking with coloniality’ (‘thinking with’ is a concept from feminist theorist Donna Haraway) impedes food sovereignty and much regen work and destroys the knowledge infrastructures that nurture the traditional, place-based food ways EAT-Lancet is keen to protect.
From ‘One Right Way’ to Pluriversalism
In a second example, rather than valuing many ways of building knowledge – called pluriversalism – coloniality assumes there is One Right Way of building knowledge – the colonial way – and devalues all other ways. If we’ve been inculcated with colonial values, we will likely experience EAT-Lancet as a pre-eminently reliable source of knowledge on sustainability and food. Its scholarly integrity seems self-evident and with this, its objectivity and global benefit. All those experts, so many peer-reviewed references, such widespread acclaim! Detractors are surely misguided in their analysis, or surreptitiously in cahoots with Big Ag or Big Food.
The aura of authority surrounding reports like EAT-Lancet means it might not even occur to us that there could be other valid, (more) useful ways of doing ‘planetary nutrition’. We’re likely to think that what we know is all there is to know and act as if us not knowing about viable alternatives to western nutrition confirms their non-existence. Or perhaps we read subaltern approaches and summarily dismiss them, because if it doesn’t make immediate sense to us it must be nonsensical (‘subaltern’ refers to colonised populations denied agency). Whereas if pluriversalism was the norm, we’d read EAT-Lancet as one possible (partially) useful approach among a range of other possibly partially useful approaches. And we’d be primed to approach the unfamiliar with humility and curiosity.
Coloniality’s values of hierarchy and division make it a faulty template for any sort of social justice, health equity, or earthcare. It permits food system reform but its values mean it cannot underpin food system transformation, usefully illustrated in this graphic on anthropocentrism and cosmocentrism.
Rethinking EAT-Lancet Beyond Coloniality
To reiterate, we enact colonial logic when we present our way of knowing as self-evidently the one credible, incontestable way of knowing a topic. This approach – universalism – characterises EAT-Lancet. The dominant biomedical reductionist paradigm is a vector of scientific imperialism. Presenting its atomistic (separated out, like an unattached atom) constructs of the body (known as liberal humanism Man), health, and food, as universal, it destroys other ways of knowing and world-making (destroying knowledge is known as epistemicide; epistem=knowledge). As a reminder, this destruction impacts ‘traditional diets’ and agroecological knowing. As well as harming through destruction, epistemicide forecloses the creation of new, liberatory imaginaries for food and flourishing. It is therefore relevant across (but not considered in) different dimensions of justice named in EAT-Lancet. Reconsidering the usefulness and rigour of EAT-Lancet’s framings of justice is another entry point for deepening community knowledge at the nexus of coloniality, equity and ethics.
Skimming the report left me marvelling at the vast amount of cognitive power behind the data modelling alone, and I’ll use this for examples. I was keenly aware of the corresponding investment of money, time, and thought required for all these models, every one of which was fashioned from the same colonial cast. I am curious to know what would happen if an expanded or entirely new team/s designed models that explored different questions capturing ways of relating that are impossible in the world mapped by EAT-Lancet. Such as ‘what if water were sacred?’ The process would require the respectful and full engagement/ leadership of marginalised and Indigenous wisdom keepers, relying on different methodologies, and pluriversalism. As such, it would reposition biomedicine as one – partial – way of knowing food and flourishing among many other ways of knowing grounded in different values.
Gender Equity
A second question for data modelling is ‘what is made possible around and through food and nutrition in a world with gender equity? First, poverty and poor nutrition are feminized – 70% of the worlds’ poor are women. An analysis of nutritional status in 63 nations found that improvements to women’s education, access to health care and living environment was responsible for 75% of the total reduction in childhood malnutrition between 1970 and 1995. Plus, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death among adolescent girls in low income countries (presumably including other adolescents erased by the colonial gender taxonomy). Wouldn’t it be useful to know what is made possible around and through food and nutrition in a world with gender equity? Gender equity would mean reproductive justice and require interrupting patriarchy to end violence against women, girls, and people of all marginalised genders. One in three women worldwide report experiencing violence committed by a male intimate partner (physical, sexual, psychological) and/ or sexual violence by a non-partner violence. Gendered violence contributes to cardiovascular disease in women yet although a relevant and significant variable, it is designed out of models that understand non-communicable diseases through the metric of isolated nutrients and that frame ‘health’ and ‘the body’ through the value-system of separation and extraction that underwrites binary thinking. A systems wide approach to food and equity, seeking social justice, needs different framings for health, and the body, and must acknowledge data that shows so-called diet-related diseases are also strongly power related.
It is important that EAT-Lancet has named gender-equity as vital to transformation. But rhetoric is not enough, their paradigm embeds gender inequity. Transformation requires that we interrogate coloniality and learn new ways of thinking that refuse the gender binary it relies on and reproduces.
Building Knowledge for Racial Justice
The third question I would like data modelling to consider is ‘what is the impact on heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension of centering racial justice (rather than nutrients)’? Reports around food system change and public health nutrition invariably open with statistics to underscore the need for urgent action. Thus, variations on the claim that ‘unhealthy diets cost X … are responsible for X excess deaths’ are circulated relentlessly in commentaries urging action to reduce ‘diet-related disease’ and (although it is framed differently) eradicate fat people. We are urged to rethink behaviour change, address structural factors, and think through inter-connection. These are three crucial points, but they are not interrogated in Big Nutrition (‘Big Nutrition’ alerts us to the ways that ostensibly neutral healthy eating messages in fact reproduce a particular set of values and political ideology, and these are the same neoliberal values and capitalist logic driving Big Food and Big Ag).
A new model would acknowledge links between cardiovascular disease and gendered violence, for example. A larger point is that living with oppression, and privilege, has a metabolic impact (entangled with, but never reducible to, what we eat) that is designed out of (unscientific) conventional models. Social factors, power, shape the aetiology of diet-related disease (aetiology refers to the interconnected variables that impact the pathways of a disease). There are strong links between racism and heart disease, racism and hypertension, racism and diabetes, that cannot be adequately explained by ‘lifestyle’ or genetics.
Every time we repeat an ‘unhealthy diets’ price tag claim that costs up heart disease and diabetes, for example, as overwhelmingly caused by diet, we embed a racist imaginary. This is never ‘just’ theory: again, our models decide who lives and who is killed. We need to revisit our knowledge creation processes to integrate the physiology of oppression in metabolic pathways linked to diet-related conditions.
Turning from theory to practice for a moment, what does this mean for a dietetic consultation, for example? I am suggesting that we use new models that (1) meaningfully accommodate context and the wholeness of someone’s circumstances and (2) align with liberation and earthcare. This means, unlike the current lifestyle model, they must not mobilise ideologies of gender, racial, or class inequity, fatmisia (hatred of fat people), ableism, or other forms of binary casteism. That is to say, there are ways of talking about heart disease/ nutrition, or food and flourishing, that support the status quo and ways we can talk on the same topic to challenge the status quo. Drawing on decolonial thinking and vocabulary, unsettling the status quo entails co-creating new, more equitable ways of being in relationship with knowledge, place, each other. A process captured in the term ‘liberatory un/becomings’.
EAT-Lancet for the Compost?
If you were excited by EAT-Lancet’s potential as a lever for change, these ideas may seem churlish, confusing or overly theoretical. It could even feel like betrayal. After all, the report has been enthusiastically welcomed by esteemed organisations at the nexus of sustainability/ food poverty/ food security/ community food and regen farming, and colleagues in academia and dietetics. And why not? As per people’s comments, it calls for a shift to food systems that are environmentally and ethically sound and recognises the critical importance of a socially just transition. It ostensibly propels justice to the forefront, names gender-equity, recommends financial support for sustainable agriculture, makes links to colonialism and racism, draws on hundreds of scientific papers to show today’s food system is operating beyond several planetary boundaries and uses this evidence to outline the case for dietary shifts within ecological limits. It felt good to read. I get the impulse that seeks comfort from finding something redemptive in the report, and community response. We want to be confident in our experts and in the integrity of establishment knowledge.
But this comfort comes at the expense of acknowledging the enormity of what we missed as a movement. We cannot cultivate a socially-just transition furthering a Right to Food agenda within a colonial and racist matrix. It matters that among the hundreds of peer reviewed papers there was nothing that prompted the team to own and interrupt their own colonialism or identify anti-Blackness. Assuming that we (again, readers educated in colonial values and committed to food system transformation) are ‘not interested in conversations that pretend nutrition exists outside of colonialism and racism’ then we need to develop our collective decolonial criticality and a self-reflexive curiosity to understand and dismantle these structures.
What Now?
I’ve shared reading ideas below and recommend the recently published collection Nurturing Food Justice for relevant scholarship and real-life examples of liberatory practice.
Something to sit with could be: How does it feel to hear EAT-Lancet described as a tool of coloniality? Responses may include resistance, relief, overwhelm, confusion, clarity, grief . . . . etc etc
If these ideas are new to you and your group, what do you make of them? Is there anything you feel drawn to reconsider among your current workstreams or practices? Where does coloniality show up in your decisions and assumptions? Is there a group or people that you already organise or engage with that can support you to nurture the conditions that favour an anti-colonial stance?
References
It’s also helpful to be familiar with the concepts of healthism, lifestylism, nutritionism and scientism. Learning to identify when these ideologies are at play is a useful route for exposing deep, hidden assumptions that wend their way back to a divisive, individualistic colonial logic. You might want to search for decolonial scholars first for more of a grounding.
Da’ Shaun Harrison Belly of the Beast. The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness.
Hospicing Modernity Vanessa de Macho Oliviera
Alkon, A. and Agyeman, J. (2011) Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. MIT Press, USA.
Dennis MK, Robin T. (2020) Healthy on our own terms: Indigenous wellbeing and the colonized food system. Journal of Critical Dietetics. https://doi.org/10.32920/cd.v5i1.1333
Galdames C, M and M D Nuñez Burbano de Lara. (2015) Gender and Food Sovereignty: Women as Active Subjects in the Provision of Food and Nutrition. Right to Food and Nutrition Watch:31. www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/node/32
Hernandez BC, Luzbetak A. (2023) Fat in food and environment justice: lessons from fat studies scholarship, Fat Studies, 12:1, 55-71.
Krieger, N. (2014) Discrimination and Health Inequities. International Journal of Health Services. 2014;44(4):643-710. doi:10.2190/HS.44.4.b
Lucas G. Nalgona Positivity Pride https://www.nalgonapositivitypride.com/ An Indigenous harm-reduction approach to ‘eating (dis) orders’
Okun T. (2021) https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html
Strings S. (2019) Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. US: New York University Press.
Queering as Process: Disrupting Scientific Imperialism for Health Justice Using Kitchen Table Pedagogy. (2024) Journal of Critical Dietetics. (7)2: 250-278.