‘Glow from the inside out’: Deliciously Ella and the politics of ‘healthy eating’

A recipe for success

Mills is positioned differently to many other ‘food celebrities’ (Johnston and Goodman, 2015) and ‘culinary personas’ (Johnston et al., 2014) in the contemporary UK context. While household names such as Lawson and Oliver have considerable business dealings, these are generally backgrounded so as not to distract from their identities as cook and chef, respectively. By contrast, Mills’ status as a businesswoman is continually highlighted in articles chronicling her entrepreneurial endeavours. A ‘day in the life’ piece for Business Insider is typical in this regard, promising insight into the daily habits of ‘the 25-year-old Instagram star who runs a food empire’ (Millington, 2016). Across the wider press, Mills is credited with having transformed herself ‘from typical student to the head of a health food empire’ (Osman, 2016) while at the same time positioned as ‘just a normal girl who stumbled on a way to help herself recover from serious illness and wants to share her secrets’ (Parker, 2015). In this way, she is accorded the ‘dynamic of exceptionalism and typicality that undergirds every star persona’ (Negra, 2009: 147).

The mode of entrepreneurship Mills crafts is assuredly feminine and resolutely domestic: centred around culinary pursuits, conducted from the kitchen table, compatible with but not dependent on or subservient to family life. Her celebrity partakes in a more general tendency to frame women’s entrepreneurship as tapping into ‘innate female skills, qualities and personality traits’ (Eikhof et al., 2013: 558). Mills actively aligns herself to this vision, declaring her admiration for ‘strong women who manage to stay wonderfully feminine while conquering the world’ in an interview with Red magazine (Rogalska, 2016). At the same time, this kind of entrepreneurship is outward-looking and fashion-forward. Media technologies – most especially the photo-sharing platform Instagram – enable food work to be amalgamated into the wider realm of ‘socially mediated cultures of creative production’ organised around ‘traditionally feminine domains’ (Duffy and Hund, 2015: 1). Any lingering association with drudgery or obligation is dispelled as cooking is framed as a creative endeavour, such that ‘reproductive labour [becomes] a site for potential investment … in a creative self’ (Taylor, 2016: 115, cited in Littler, 2018: 199).

One of the most striking aspects of the Deliciously Ella story, as relayed by Mills and reproduced by the wider media, is the concerted downplaying of any kind of calculated commercial ambition. There is a routine insistence that commercial success was never something Mills set out to achieve but, rather, something that accrued to her through a combination of good luck and hard work. In interviews with the press, Mills positions herself as a kind of accidental entrepreneur, describing her business as ‘such a personal journey. I’m literally just sharing what I like’ (Godwin, 2016) and claiming ‘I didn’t think anyone would read [the blog]. They weren’t really meant to’ (Rumbelow, 2017). Having won the ‘Rising Star’ category at the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, Mills (2017b) details her former lack of business acumen at length on her blog:

I didn’t know what a P&L (profit and loss) was, I’d never heard of a balance sheet, the only maths I could do was counting on my fingers and I had no idea how to create a spreadsheet, calculate a margin or conduct an interview … it would be fair to say that I was missing pretty much all practical business know-how.

Yet while Mills’ achievements as an entrepreneur are routinely framed as the unintended by-product of innate talent, emphasis is routinely placed on her capacity for hard work. Mills regularly refers to the ‘always on’ nature of running a business and the singular responsibility this brings. In a profile for Well To Do (Hill, 2017), an online magazine for people who want to ‘build incredible businesses and careers in wellness’, she explains:

The reality of building a business is that it’s hard. It’s amazing, I wouldn’t have it any other way but it’s really hard. It’s a 24/7 thing, but if you want to do it properly you’ve got to do it properly. Ultimately, you are probably the only person that’s going to be able to deal with your business issues 24/7. So, just understanding and recognising the reality of it and that there is no such thing as a weekend or an evening off is one thing I’ve had to learn.

At the same time, entrepreneurship is portrayed as deeply pleasurable and immensely gratifying. In this regard, Deliciously Ella taps into broader discourses of ‘passionate work’ (McRobbie, 2015a), encapsulated by the modern mantra of ‘do what you love’ (Tokumitsu, 2014). Although Mills works hard, this is not stultifying in the way work generally is presumed to be. Instead, labour and leisure blend together, to ‘create a notion of work that doesn’t seem like work’ (Duffy and Hund, 2015: 9). As Mills goes on to describe in the same piece,

Luckily it works because I am so passionate about it, but I do think you really have to have that. You have to love what you do and really want to do it – if you don’t I think that’s when it gets really, really hard. If you’re not passionate about what you do it’s going to get really difficult because you have to prioritise it over a lot of other things in your life.

Notions of ‘passionate work’ are further embellished by the collaborative nature of Deliciously Ella as a joint venture between wife and husband. Each stress the hard work they undertake as a couple, with Ella contending: ‘Matt and I have worked seven days a week for the last year and a half – this is our lives’ (Norton, 2017), while Matthew describes ‘18 hours a day serving food, cleaning loos’ (Millington, 2016). Where the demands of running a business together might seem to impinge on their relationship, such travails are made bearable and even pleasurable because they are shared. In an extended Mail Online feature about their first wedding anniversary, the couple recounts how plans for a weekend away were scuppered by supply problems, such that they ended up ‘in a Portakabin, finalising spreadsheets, eating about 30 kilos of granola’ (Blake, 2017). Such moments are made to seem that much less onerous because they are weathered together, ultimately providing fodder for humorous anecdotes. The ‘romance of work’ (Duffy, 2015) is thus enhanced through its convergence with romance in the more conventional sense. Insofar as entrepreneurship can be socialised, this is only through a heterosexual partnership underpinned by a strongly gendered division of labour, as Ella handles ‘the brand side of it – everything you look, see, eat, feel and connect to and engage with’ while Matthew manages ‘the business development and the finance and the operations – actually making it work’ (Millington, 2016). The objective is not so much work-life balance, but work-life integration, characterised by the ‘overlap, if not amalgamation, of domestic and business spheres and professional and personal lives’ (Eikhof et al., 2013: 557).

As her star has risen Mills has become a prominent proponent of women’s entrepreneurship, speaking at events such as the Cosmopolitan ‘Self Made Summit’ and a WeWork series dedicated to ‘Fierce, Female Founders’. In 2018, she participated in the Telegraph’s ‘Women Mean Business’ campaign (Cohen and Johnson, 2018) alongside well-known entrepreneurs including Mary Portas (Broadcaster and Retail Consultant) and Justine Roberts (CEO of Mumsnet). Mills is frank in acknowledging the difficulties women in business face, stating in an interview for the Times: ‘I never realised I was a feminist until I started working … People take Matt much more seriously than they take me’ (Godwin, 2016). Yet in diagnosing the source of the problem, her commentary entails a familiar turning inwards. In an Instagram post (@deliciouslyella, 2018) featuring Mills in a bright pink jacket with boxes of Deliciously Ella products balanced on her hip, she writes,

Only girl in the room for a massive meeting today so thought I’d wear fushia [sic]. The first time I walked into a meeting like this I was terrified, I was so young when I started Deliciously Ella and my own fear of everyone else’s judgements meant I undervalued my abilities […] finding a way to push past fear is something I had to learn to embrace (and am still working on, I think it’s a constant work in progress). I think that’s the thing that holds a lot of us back too much of the time. Today I was finally proud and genuinely confident to walk in as our founder, wear bright pink and be the only girl in the room.

Such pronouncements find ready parallel in exhortations for women to be confident in the face of and as a remedy for continued gender inequality. As Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad argue, confidence has become an imperative for women and girls, who are enjoined to realise this psychological disposition as a means to secure their place in the world and absorb the injuries that accompany it. There is a looking away from structural dynamics, as women are cajoled to look ‘inwards to solve external problems’ (Gill and Orgad, 2016: 330). One of the foremost proponents of such wisdom is Sheryl Sandberg (2013), Facebook COO and author of the phenomenally popular Lean In. Enjoining women to close the ‘ambition gap’, Lean In presents confidence as ‘the key to women’s personal career-related success and, more broadly, to realising the project of gender inequality at work and in public life’ (Gill and Orgad, 2016: 329). Yet while Sandberg is clearly an influential figure, there is reason to believe she may not be widely relatable, particularly to young women. As Dawn Foster (2015: 11) notes, although Lean In sold well, it was not necessarily read well; indeed, it featured on an Amazon Kindle list of books least likely to be finished. Elsewhere, Nicole Aschoff (2015: 27) contends that while Sandberg’s ideas evidently resonated with large numbers of women, the book’s popularity cannot be divorced from the fact that Sandberg has untrammelled access to ‘a massive media machine’. To that end, figures such as Mills – who has a comparatively smaller but much more engaged following – may serve as effective conduits for the kinds of ideas and ideals espoused by Sandberg. ⁵

While confidence is no doubt a useful attribute in business and other domains, the rendering of the problem in this way converts gender inequality from ‘a structural problem into an individual affair’ (Rottenberg, 2014: 3). Women’s lack of confidence is always already assumed as a barrier to career success, an assumption that is at best misjudged in the context of entrepreneurship, as evidence suggests that women who become entrepreneurs do so precisely because they are confident in their skills and abilities. ⁶ Moreover, this presumed lack of confidence is made to appear unconnected to wider social patterns, as though springing from within women rather than emanating from a ‘culture that produces self-doubt, lack of confidence, shame, and insecurity’ (Gill and Orgad, 2016: 339). Obscured from view are the broader structural conditions that limit women’s involvement in business, and little if any consideration is paid to the myriad ways in which entrepreneurship can perpetuate and indeed exacerbate gender inequality (Eikhof et al., 2013; Martinez Dy et al., 2018). Instead, women are encouraged to have ‘blind faith’ in their endeavours, despite the fact that entrepreneurship by definition involves risk, bringing with it the very real possibilities of depreciated earnings, irregular income, unsustainable debt and bankruptcy. ⁷

On the face of it, the Deliciously Ella story seamlessly perpetuates the logic of meritocracy, wherein success is said to result from a combination of innate talent and applied effort (Littler, 2018). Although financial reward was not something Mills set out to achieve, it is at the same time something she works hard for and therefore deserves. Her example fits with current governmental interests seeking to promote entrepreneurship amid ongoing economic instability (Ahl and Marlow, 2017), especially among young people. Very much in the background of this narrative is the fact that, as the daughter of politician Shaun Woodward and supermarket heiress Camilla Sainsbury – whose combined wealth has been estimated at £40 million – Mills hails from an exceptionally privileged family with ready access to huge reserves of social, cultural and economic capital. ⁸ Her experience of entrepreneurship – resulting in a six-figure income and multi-million pound brand ⁹ – contrasts sharply with the legions of young women bloggers who undertake extraordinary amounts of ‘aspirational labour’ (Duffy, 2015) without achieving anything like the success Mills has realised in just a few short years. In the process, extant hierarchies of class and ‘race’ are reinforced, as those with unparalleled advantage seek ‘to justify their position and success and to prescribe this route for others’ (Littler, 2018: 92), while at the same time ‘success is repeatedly celebrated and taken for granted as a preserve of whiteness, an unspoken entitlement to privilege’ (Wilkes, 2015: 24).

In a landscape marked by new feminist visibilities (Gill, 2016), large numbers of women are expressing an appetite for feminism, a taste for feminist ideas and a craving for feminist solidarities. The spotlighting of Deliciously Ella seems geared towards placating and appeasing such appetites, as notions of empowerment are yoked to logics of enterprise, rendering feminism compatible with if not subordinate to capital and commerce. The figure of the empowered and empowering wellness entrepreneur partakes in a ‘domestication’ of feminism, ‘securing … a legitimate space for a “moderate” feminism to be affirmed via a repudiation of an “excessive” feminism’ (Dean, 2010: 393). This vision of female success is distinctly non-threatening, as traditional modes of femininity are claimed, centred, celebrated. The ultimate effect is to sustain what Sara Ahmed (2017) terms the ‘fantasy of feminist digestion’, ‘as if feminism has already been taken in and assimilated into [the social] body and is thus no longer required’ (p. 112).

Food as medicine

At the heart of the Deliciously Ella narrative is a remarkable story of healing and recovery through food. Woodward, (2015) describes her return to health as ‘like a miracle’ and recounts the decision to change her diet as ‘single-handedly the best thing I’ve ever done’ (p. 9). Having recovered from a debilitating illness that left her ‘bedridden ninety-five percent of the time’ (Woodward, 2015: 7), Mills (2016) proffers her own example as a model for others, declaring: ‘Healthy living has totally transformed my life and I think it will transform yours, too’. Media headlines rehearse this narrative, heralding Mills as ‘the healthy-eating blogger who healed herself with superfoods’ (Slater, 2015) and describing the entrepreneur as ‘a picture of health’ (Parker, 2015) and ‘her own best advert’ (Rosseinsky, 2016). Any distinction between outer good-looks and inner well-being is collapsed, on the basis that the formerly ‘bedridden’ Mills now ‘glows with good health’ (Editorial, 2015). Through such hyperbole, the Hippocratic conception of ‘food as medicine’ comes to function not so much as proverbial wisdom but as a literal statement of fact. Self-care is elevated to the status of an imperative that women in particular must realise so as to ensure their own health as well as that of society at large.

Mills’ success as an entrepreneur depends upon her ability to convince others to take responsibility for diet and nutrition in the manner she herself has done. Commercial entrepreneurship is made to function in tandem with health entrepreneurship, as Mills makes it her business to model a healthy lifestyle and enjoins others to do the same. Recounted from the perspective of a healthful present, her history of illness is recast as an opportunity not only for personal growth but also for potential profit, with Mills stating in an interview: ‘I do wonder whether my illness hasn’t been a blessing. It helps people relate to my diet. They think if I can do it, anyone can’ (Slater, 2015). Triumphant headlines further reinforce this framing of illness as opportunity, exhorting readers to discover ‘how a rare illness led to a health food empire’ (Cavendish, 2015) and commending Mills for making the ‘transition from invalid to deli-owning businesswoman and media mogul’ (Curtis, 2016). Such narratives extend the more familiar idea of illness as something to be ‘beaten’, ‘defeated’ or ‘overcome’, intensifying ableist logics to realise heightened demands of ‘bodily capacity’ (Puar, 2012, 149, cited in McRobbie, 2015b: 6).

In promoting her message of health enhancement, Woodward, (2015: 7–8) very often strains to elucidate just how bad her diet used to be, referring to herself as a ‘former sugar junkie’ and ‘total addict’. In a feature for Mail Online, she itemises this saccharine excess, claiming to have ‘lived off a delicious mixture of Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream; mountains of Cadbury’s caramel chocolate, lots of fizzy pick-n-mix and millions of jars of peanut butter and strawberry jam eaten with a spoon’ (London, 2014). With these statements Mills invokes the most reviled of contemporary foodstuffs, sugar having recently displaced fat to become an ‘overdetermined node for social and medical anxieties about 21st century health, bodies and consumption’ (Throsby, 2018: 954–955). Indeed, Mills’ ‘addiction’ is more or less explicitly claimed to have precipitated her illness – despite the fact that PoTS is not a dietary condition – as it is stated that she ‘fully recovered ever since overhauling her sugar-filled lifestyle’ (London, 2015). The ultimate effect is to strongly imply if not outright attest that her return to health resulted from the elimination of supposedly polluting foodstuffs; that is, it was simply a matter of making the ‘right’ food choices. In this regard, it is notable that journalists often struggle to reconcile the professed deficiencies of Mills’ former diet with her privileged upbringing, resulting in continual references to Mills having had a bad diet despite her background: ‘Her childhood was extraordinarily privileged but her diet, by her own account, was appalling and she blames it for her poor health’ (Blake, 2017). Implicit in such statements is the assumption that wealthy people know how to feed themselves and their families ‘properly’, such that any deviation from this needs to be accounted for and explained.

One of Mills’ most consistent talking points is that ‘eating well isn’t a diet’ (Fillis, 2016). The inside jacket of her first cookbook declares,

Deliciously Ella is not about being hungry or deprived. It’s about counting goodness not calories. It’s about nourishing your body with real, whole foods so that you are consistently happy and energised, and can live life to the fullest. After all isn’t that what life’s all about? (Woodward, 2015)

Those who aspire to the Deliciously Ella lifestyle are exhorted to take pleasure in and enjoy food, as Mills calls on readers to ‘fall in love’ with plant-based eating (Woodward, 2016: np). In a list of ‘ten commandments for living a healthy, happy life’, the very first directive instructs: ‘Enjoy your food – no matter what you’re eating, whether it’s kale or pizza, love every bite and savour each flavour. Food should always be fun’ (Woodward, 2016: np). Such injunctions mimic a dominant motif in contemporary media culture, which Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias (2014: 185) refer to as ‘love your body’ or ‘LYB’ discourse. As with LYB discourse, where only certain kinds of bodies are deemed worthy of acceptance, only certain kinds of foods are appropriate for the Deliciously Ella diet. A list of ‘basics’ in the first cookbook includes apple cider vinegar, coconut milk, medjool dates, gluten-free flours, raw cacao powder, tamari and miso paste, all of which Mills claims ‘played a huge role in my healing process and really helped me enjoy clean, natural food, so once you’re using all of them you’ll see amazing things happen too!’ (Woodward, 2015: 13). Certain foodstuffs – notably avocados, to which Mills professes to be ‘totally addicted’ – are ascribed extraordinary properties, as they will ‘nourish your body, give you glowing skin, and make you feel happy’ (Woodward, 2015: 245). Thus, while telling readers to love what they eat, Mills simultaneously asserts boundaries over what can and should be enjoyed.

For all the emphasis on pleasure, the injunction to ‘love your food’ (‘LYF’) is ultimately pragmatic, as Mills declares: ‘enjoyment is the key to sustainability when it comes to healthy eating’ (Woodward, 2016: np). ‘LYF’ is thus less about gustatory delight in and of itself, and more about the health benefits that are supposed to – and supposed to – accrue from adhering to this lifestyle. Alongside the pleasure imperative is an anti-guilt directive. Further down her ‘ten commandments’ list, Mills stipulates: ‘Don’t feel guilty – if all you want is chocolate cake, then eat a slice and enjoy it […] Remember, no one is perfect!’ (Woodward, 2016: np). The clear implication is that eating cake amounts to a kind of downfall, a departure from the Deliciously Ella path. Again, parallels can be seen with ‘LYB’ discourses, which re-inscribe body hatred as part of the normative condition of femininity, as advertisements replete with body hatred urge women to love their bodies (Gill and Elias, 2014). In a similar manner, by continually telling women to love their food, Deliciously Ella reinforces the idea that there are some foods women really should feel guilty about eating. This point is evidenced when Mills claims that by adhering to this regime, certain foodstuffs will lose their allure:

It takes a few months for your taste buds to adjust … but once [they do] you just won’t think of ‘cheat’ foods, they’ll start to seem kind of gross actually, and you’ll feel so truly amazing that they’ll have no appeal at all. (Woodward, 2015: 246)

Perhaps the most important aspect of Deliciously Ella’s messaging is the emphasis on effortful change, as healthy eating is presented as something Mills had to choose to commit to and learn to enjoy. In this way, her transformation – from debilitating ill-health to luminous well-being – is made available to others. Mills (2016: np) acknowledges that it takes work to embrace the lifestyle she has chosen, admitting in the introduction to a collection of juice and smoothie recipes: ‘it’s normal not to enjoy sipping on broccoli and coriander straight away!’. Such humility enables Mills to seem all the more proximate and relatable: even she must strive to embody her brand. In this regard it is worth noting the comparisons often made between Ella Mills and Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress-turned-wellness-guru and head of the lifestyle brand Goop. These comparisons almost always favour Mills, who is praised for providing a less sanctimonious and more realistic approach to healthy eating. The Times describes her as ‘like a younger Gwyneth Paltrow without all the irritating ‘I’d rather die than feed my children a Cup-of-Soup’ baggage’ (Cavendish, 2015), while the Telegraph contends: ‘Ella is no Gwyneth Paltrow, proclaiming that we must drink dandelion juice because it’s today’s detox fashion’ (Parker, 2015). Through this kind of upward comparison, Mills is made more approachable. As a Hollywood actress, Paltrow occupies an entirely different level of celebrity; her wealth and status symbolically outstrip that of Mills. In the process, the very real material inequalities that separate Mills from the vast majority of people in Britain are again displaced and removed from view.

That Mills has found a way to manage her illness is undoubtedly positive for her personally, not least as by her own account conventional treatment failed to relieve her symptoms. Moreover, it is important to acknowledge the real tensions that exist between medical authority and embodied knowledge, particularly when it comes to women’s health. It has been suggested that the failure of conventional medicine to take women’s experiences seriously is one of the major factors behind the rise of wellness culture (Griffin, 2017; Petrzela 2016), a claim that would seem to be at least partially borne out by research on gender disparities in alternative medicine (Keshet and Simchai, 2014). Mills herself describes being dismissed by a GP who suggested her illness was psychosomatic and advised she seek therapy (Slater, 2015). However, Deliciously Ella is not simply a personal project or even a solely professional enterprise. Over the last few years, Mills has become increasingly vocal about her desire to cultivate wider change by fostering good health habits in the population at large. She frequently aligns herself with Department of Health dietary advice – specifically the guideline to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables per day – stating that she wants to get ‘people to be excited about healthy food’ so that they can ‘incorporate their five-a-day in a way that they’ll actually want to eat it’ (Norton, 2017). She routinely cites research which finds that ‘only 1 in 4 of us reach that 5 a day aim’ and contends that ‘with everything we’re doing [at Deliciously Ella], I hope to contribute to changing this statistic’ (Woodward, 2017). In an interview with The Cut, Mills further declares, ‘We need wellness because we have serious health issues, from childhood obesity to diabetes. We need to get people changing the way they eat and that’s become my mission and my passion’ (Spellings, 2017).

Such comments expose the biopolitical edge of Deliciously Ella, as Mills fashions herself as a ‘moral entrepreneur’ (Hollows and Jones, 2010) and ‘conscious capitalist’ (Aschoff, 2015) whose commercial pursuits are poised to provide profitable solutions to complex social problems. Yet in making such pronouncements Mills seems to assume that it is primarily a lack of inspiration and creativity that prevent large numbers of people in the United Kingdom from complying with the five-a-day directive. What does not appear to have occurred to her is the possibility that it is instead the fundamental unaffordability of this way of eating that prevents many people from meeting the five-a-day mandate, as public health research attests (Schrecker, 2016). To this extent, the Deliciously Ella ethos dovetails neatly with the project of lifestyle reform initiated in the United Kingdom under the New Labour government – of which her father was a part – which aimed to wean people off a perceived over-reliance on public services (Fitzpatrick, 2001). This still-dominant ‘new paradigm’ (Nettleton, 2006) is organised by logics of health promotion and characterised by a language of risk and responsibility, agency and empowerment. There is a strong focus on changing the everyday habits of individuals – such as the consumption of fruits and vegetables, the pursuit of exercise and so on – in a policy trend that has come to be known as ‘lifestyle drift’ (Popay et al., 2010; Williams and Fullagar, 2019). Such logics have only intensified in the context of austerity, a political project accelerated by the 2008 financial crash and marked by the prolonged starvation of public services under successive coalition and Conservative governments. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is now straining under the weight of market reforms, the effects of which are demonstrably ‘detrimental to both health and healthcare’ (Benbow, 2017; cf. Basu et al., 2017; British Medical Association (BMA), 2016).

The promise of wellness

Writing about the genre of ‘poverty porn’, Tracey Jensen (2014) argues that the stigmatisation of poverty in the media represents a key mechanism through which consent for austerity is being won. In her work on the dramatic expansion of charitable food provision – popularly dubbed ‘food banks’ – in the United Kingdom in recent years, Kayleigh Garthwaite (2016) makes similar points. While operating in a different register, the valorisation of figures such as Mills represents the other side of this same coin. In their spectacular visibility, Mills and other wellness entrepreneurs not only distract from wider economies of power through which welfare systems are being undone, but feed a logic of personal responsibility to actively plan for and ensure health, so as not to burden already-overstretched public services. Discussing the popularity of the Deliciously Ella cookbooks, Mills’ publisher Liz Gough states this explicitly:

The public are waking up to this idea that there are simple things that you can do that will change your life. You don’t have to go to a therapist or see a doctor; you can simply add in a little mindfulness, a little more fruit and vegetables. (Taylor-Hayhurst, 2015) ¹⁰

Demonstrating the ‘vastly increased speed of the adulation/abjection cycle’ (Cross and Littler, 2010: 396), shortly after arriving onto the cultural stage Mills and other wellness entrepreneurs became objects of ‘popular hostility’. Among their many detractors are (mostly male) celebrity chefs (Paskett, 2016), food writers (Tandoh, 2016; Wilson, 2017), feminist commentators (Freeman, 2017), doctors (McCartney, 2016), dietitians (Medlin, 2016) and food industry insiders (Warner, 2017). Documentaries have set out to expose the nefarious underpinnings of their fame, with titles such as Clean Eating’s Dirty Secrets (Rice, 2016) and Clean Eating: The Dirty Truth (Quinn, 2017). Of particular concern is the propensity of wellness trends to cover for or give rise to disorders such as orthorexia (McGregor, 2017). Comedian Bella Younger – creator of the parody character Deliciously Stella, who waxes lyrical over the nutritional properties of coconut water while clutching a bottle of Malibu white rum – criticises Mills and other wellness entrepreneurs for propagating ‘this absolutely unrealistic ideal that [women] have to constantly be perfect and lovely’, though softens the admonishment by adding that they have ‘done so much for female entrepreneurship – and that’s brilliant’ (Blair, 2016). Arguably, Mills has navigated this melee better than her counterparts and has been commended for forging ‘a New Labour of food’ that attracts criticism but still manages to occupy ‘a very sellable middle ground’ (Rumbelow, 2017).

Despite the ridicule and rancour these entrepreneurs face, wellness culture has gained a firm foothold in Britain, concentrated in but not limited to its urban centres. This can be seen, for example, in escalating rates of veganism and alcohol abstention, both of which are especially pronounced among young people. More anecdotal but conspicuous markers of change include Nigella Lawson premiering her new show with a recipe for avocado toast; high-street chain Pret a Manger selling turmeric lattes and charcoal shots; and famed nightclub Ministry of Sound launching a fitness studio complete with non-alcoholic shakes and smoothies. While criticism is not hard to come by, in order to understand this cultural formation it is necessary to examine its glamorous trappings as well as the more mundane entanglements these generate in day-to-day-life. For while its most brightly illuminated exemplars are White and exceptionally class-privileged young women, and the regimes of rarefied consumption they promote are plainly inaccessible to large swathes of people in the United Kingdom, wellness culture has demonstrably widespread appeal. By moving beyond tired tropes of female vanity or faddism, it becomes possible to ask how the impetus to cultivate bodily capacity informs women’s food choices and culinary practices and may function as part of a more general effort to bolster the self against the strains of contemporary life. To pursue this line of enquiry means evaluating how programmes of health enhancement come to seem all the more compelling under conditions of precarity – ‘an everyday sense of threat, vulnerability, and uncertainty’ (Wilson and Yochim, 2017: 20) – which increasingly extend across socio-economic lines while sharpening intergenerational divisions. For however elusive its achievement, the promise of wellness is one that speaks to deep-seated desires and real material needs.