Is Mockery Of The Moon Juice Lady Health-Shaming? Or Wealth-Shaming?

If there is even a difference anymore

The Internet went briefly but entertainingly splenetic recently over Elle’s interview with 1%er Amanda Chantal Bacon discussing the high-end food-like substances with which she sustains herself, at an estimated cost of, according to one video analysis, $1000.

Here’s Julieanne Smolinski’s takedown:

Sample quote:

I’m kind of a freak about quality, so all of our elixirs are passed through an onyx cock ring and ingested via douche. One of our interns had a birthday, but since none of us eat cake, I whipped him mercilessly with a studded turquoise belt.

Dinner was a bouquet of tulips with my husband. We flash-boiled those in a marble cylinder full of rose quartz schmaltz and iron filings salvaged from the deck of the sunken French battleship Richelieu. My husband has been dead for eleven months, after [my son] Protein and I sacrificed him to the Egyptian God of death in a beautiful Equinox blood ritual.

So yeah, we giggled heartily about this lady, her eating habits, and the tone-deaf way in which she described them. All in good fun, right? Well, no, says Racked, which suggests that the interview with Bacon has been “causing the internet to lose all chill and turn into actual bullies.” We are, in other words, “health-shaming.”

Sure, by 8am she’s consumed more exotic elements than your most complex chemistry experiment (she tells Elle that her morning chi drink features “vanilla mushroom protein and stone ground almond butter, and also has the super endocrine, brain, immunity, and libido- boosting powers of Brain Dust, cordyceps, reishi, maca, and Shilajit resin”), but why not respect her dedication to health rather than make a mockery of it? After all, the girl has incredibly glowy skin and — if you’ve ever met her — is in a state of permanent zen, so she’s clearly doing something right.

My take was that people weren’t outraged by “her dedication to health” — which, btw, could as easily be catalogued as orthorexia — but rather rolling their eyes at the amount of unrecognizable stuff she put in her body in lieu of food, and at how much that kind of diet must cost. The Frisky crunched the numbers and determined that, by eating this way, she could spend almost $400 before breakfast.

Not “health-shaming,” in other words, but “wealth-shaming,” maybe. After all, where is the evidence that eating this way does actually make her healthier? Her glowy skin? Cmon. I have glowy skin too. It comes from being too tired to wash my face. We are prone in this country to assume that we can judge a person’s health from her looks, to think that something so complex is legible at a glance, and that’s reductive and dangerous. It’s often what leads us to condemn people on the basis of their BMIs.

Food is the new locus of conspicuous consumption. It is as fraught, as loaded with baggage related to class and sometimes race, as any other decision we make in our daily lives. In being so nonchalant about filling her shopping bags with cordyceps, reishi, maca, and the rest, Bacon may as well be sprinkling flakes of gold on her coconut yogurt.

Actually, flakes of actual gold seem like they would be cheaper.

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