bless yr heart for this one lys

i can harp on for hours about the phrase "content warning" not being value-neutral. a straight up tag of "food" is fine for muffling or for discovery, but in general i end up agreeing with this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21677026231186625

(tl;dr: content warnings, for the most part, are demonstrated by meta-analysis of several studies to add to anticipatory anxiety without doing much to reduce stress or prevent harm.)

there's a lot i can say but i don't necessarily have the emotional or mental wherewithal to articulate those things in an adequately safe and considered way, since qualifying a statement like "maybe we overuse content warnings in a way that can have effects like making a negative value judgement about food in general, and that can amplify anxiety about topics" is ... difficult to do delicately

anyhow, your space is yours, and that extends to something like your profile and posting history on a microblogging platform

this is all really well put, thank you for articulating this, you're great

food is a hard topic, people have opposite needs around it and both are real. we don't have any blanket solution. honestly, we just don't make public posts about food...

thanks for writing this. i gotta admit that my reaction to cw:food culture has just been "well i guess i just won't ever post about food" (other than my recent post about getting force femmed by a mcdonalds) but you've convinced me to reconsider. food is good!

Thank you for sharing this. I have some mixed feelings (edit; not towards not tagging food, just being reminded of things that happened in the past) as someone who struggled with disordered eating, but never was triggered by seeing food.
Back In The Day, I got some anon hate on Tumblr for tagging foods I reblogged as just food (not adding cw/tw. just #food), saying that I was enabling eating disorders. It caused a several day back and forth between several people in my area of Tumblr and I just kinda.... just stopped interacting with food posts for a while. The only reason I started tagging food was because I had a friend who was literally dying of cancer and would become violently ill almost every time she ate.
I don't think there is anything wrong with tagging food as food, but I could never at this point in my life feel okay putting a cw or tw in front of it.

But also in general, the more I am expected in a space to cw things, the less I find myself participating. I don't mean normal, actual cw worthy things. I remember leaving a "friend's" discord server because any time I wanted to talk about a new piece of media I was into I needed to go and to check and see if it was on anyone's "cw needed list" because we couldn't even talk about fucking Cookie Run without a CW. And most of the time I would just rather not talk than accidentally miss someone's triggers. And then that becomes even more messy when it is something that should be morally neutral, like oh i dont know. food.

This post kinda makes me want to talk about cooking and baking again more though! so thank you for that!

thank you for this post, I feel just as strongly and you articulated it better than I could. food is good!!!!

thank you. I've been repeatedly Irked by just the concept of food CWs lately... just, every time it comes to mind, without even being someone who posts much food or sees many food posts. it's something if I were asked to comply with, rather than taking seconds to add tags that would put someone a little more at ease, I'm pretty sure I'd instead spend an hour going off to someone's face about not wanting to do, and I don't like that there is something that would make me feel like that is the path I'd rather take. there's a line somewhere. food is just too much of a Core Human Experience, and as much as possible, I need to be able to Do The Walk Of Human Life without having to consciously pause and evaluate everything about it at every step.

The unfortunate widespread adoption of content warning for food as if it's the same thing as warning for the various kinds of what is generally and commonly a literal viscerally upsetting sort of content (gore, blood, death) or for the horrifying iterations of abuse that humans unfortunately often suffer has been something that has personally irked us for nearly 10 years, now, I want to say. As a system who has also suffered through (multiple!) eating disorders and knows very well and fully that (in our opinion) they do not ever fully go away, because it does change the way you think, we think it is so important to not tag food. It should not be the standard that others peer-pressure into normalcy. Perhaps it is unkind of us but we do think ED-havers should expect to generally encounter it wherever they go. Those are feelings they obviously should confront. And expecting people widely, socially, to enable their ED is so fucking bizarre and really, scary?

On the other end of this, it does "teach" non-ED-havers that food could be something that isn't good. And our society is deeply fatphobic, so it's not as though even if they don't have an ED that they wouldn't develop harmful thinking about food. Normalizing food as something that shouldn't be seen online is so utterly insane to us. That it's so commonly added as part of the "standard set" of triggers on Discord servers makes us feel insane, and not just that we're living in an insane world. (In our own server we have with just a few friends, all of them have told us repeatedly over the years that they appreciate we forbid CWing food because it is so dreadfully commonplace now and it has been complicating further harmful thinking for our friends).

Anyway, thank you for writing about this and putting words to this. This is so, so important to talk about. -Dr

Feeling grateful to whatever chostie posted something about how cw food ain't it, so I don't cw it any more but I used to, kinda thoughtlessly "oh if that's what people want, sure I can try to be sensitive to that," but I'm so glad to know this now. I appreciate this post so much.

I haven't heard the idea before of not even tagging food? I suppose nothing is truly neutral. I will sit with this, but (please disregard if you don't feel like responding here, the writing you've done does stand on its own and i aint tryna ask for a lot more work from you on this) would you be willing to say more about what it means to tag or to not tag food?

this is it. food is good.

yeah this, like "cw: snakes" or "cw: spiders", only really makes sense when cw / post hiding is the only tool in the kit - when per-user tag muffling is available, it just makes sense to tag it and people can hide stuff as is relevant to their needs

I like the tag system of cohost a lot because tags can be used for several different things, such as for searching and grouping stuff together, summing up themes/content, and also so people can muffle or silence things they don't want to see, without having to rely on those things being considered "cw" topics by anyone other than the person who is filtering them out on their personal feed.

On my nature blog, I do tag pretty much all the major things that appear in my photos, and I do it in the same way both for trees and for bugs, for example. I think bugs are great. And I think looking at pictures of bugs is also great even and especially for people who have a hard time looking at them. I used to be way more creeped out by spiders before I started looking at spider pictures often and on purpose. Tagging the thing makes it possible for people to look at the picture on purpose when they feel up to it.

As for the food tag.....I have a lot of generic food-related tags muffled. I love food, I have a pretty good relationship to food, it's just that most people consider some things to be food that I do not, and I have feelings about that, and those are things I would really rather not see if I can avoid it. It makes me unhappy to see them. Therefore, it is very helpful for me personally when people use food tags, and to me it doesn't really matter if these tags are generic or more specific because I can control which tags I have muffled. If I see something with one of those tags on my feed, I either don't look at it at all, or if I can tell from any other tags it comes with that it's gonna be chill for me, then I can choose to click on it.

good post. i have struggled with an eating disorder for a LONG long time and i detest the concept of both cwing food and also asking other people to do it on my behalf. many good reasons are laid out here, tho i especially relate to the idea that positioning something that is so vital and universal as FOOD as unsafe and harmful is a locus of harm and unsafety in and of itself.

Thank you for this. I'm a home baker who's going to start culinary school in the fall and I post a lot of food! And I'm going to be posting even more when I start getting graded on it! I tag it "food" and "baking" and that way the people who want to see more of it can follow it and the people who don't want to see it can silence those tags. If that's not good enough and someone expects food to be hidden under a CW on top of all that, they can block me.

Like... I get it. We live in a society and that society keeps pushing some fucked up ideas about food and weight and shit like that, and it's almost impossible to escape from, and if that shit takes hold in your head it is super, super hard to uproot. Believe me. I get that.

But food is good, dammit! Your body literally needs it in order to function! And while I can sure understand how a glamour shot of my latest batch of cookies might make someone who's internalized those shitty ideas about food uncomfortable, it makes ME uncomfortable in the "huh maybe I haven't quite uprooted all those shitty ideas after all" way to have some rando yell at me for not CW'ing food!

(Which, I should stress, has not happened here at all and I've blocked the handful of people who tried it on the hell site but y'know.)

At one time I read an article that spoke of the shift from us ragged old queers' 'freedom-to', IE, the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to express who you are without fear of being harmed, etc., to 'freedom from', IE freedom from fear, freedom from bigotry, etc.

I'm much more, because I'm old and weird as shit, for 'freedom-to'. I think it's more important to be free to act than it is to be free from fear. Even though I realize that these things are often both necessary to get where we're going, I'm always gonna be working on the 'to' half of that equation.

For some reason that feels aligned with what you're writing here. I also have an incredible, lifelong, bone-deep love and adoration for food, the making and sharing of same, etc., etc. In my most-traveled RP space, I work in a brothel... cooking meals for everyone and catering all the big festivals our arm of the government is responsible for. Even in fantasy, I'm still -completely about- food, even with other excellent shit right next to me.

Content warnings produce (and are produced by) taboo.

A general call for content warnings for a certain type of subject will always serve to stigmatize that subject, or to turn that subject into taboo. (There's a slight difference between taboo and stigma, but it's not too important.) The reason we don't like "cw: lesbians" is because that obviously places lesbians into a stigmatized category. The reason cw:food is contentious is because food is unfortunately stigmatized for some people, while other people find that stigma problematic (because it is).

Of course, the reasons to provide content warnings isn't just taboo. But to get people to always give a warning for food, to position food as something that you have to be careful talking about, is precisely to make food taboo.

We're keen on giving content warnings for sexuality, suicide, some sorts of violence but not others, egregious displays of discrimination, etc, because those are all taboo subjects. Generally speaking, I think people will give content warnings for things they wouldn't discuss at a dinner party with people they don't know.

And there ARE things that are good to be taboos! A perfect society isn't one without taboos, far from it. It's pretty good that murder, for instance, is taboo. (I don't think that talking about murder is very taboo though, given the popularity of true crime media.) And there are many stigmatized topics that we want to be sensitive about, and a lot of those things SHOULD be stigmatized. Homophobia for instance should not be something that we take lightly; stigmatizing homophobia is good. Using a content warning for homophobia not only helps to ensure that everyone engaging is prepared for it, but it also stigmatizes homophobia itself. Content warnings are a great tool for being able to have important discussions about those important topics, rather than just always avoiding stigmatized topics for fear of upsetting or triggering people. In other words, "cw:homophobia" communicates "homophobia bad".

Food is not, or should not be, one of those topics. We shouldn't be hesitant to talk about food at dinner parties... okay that analogy doesn't work as well there. We need to be careful with the taboos that we create. They can do real harm.

THANK YOU THANK YOU so much for this post. i literally had no better ways of explaining it but this is a godsend for anyone who doesn't understand the frustrations i have with food cws ❤️❤️❤️

thank you for this post, I've felt very strongly about not tagging food for a while, especially now that I'm in active ED recovery. Any server that asks me to tag food, I leave.

And Mastodon as example is really accurate too because I've been invited to mastodon servers where you could get banned for not tagging food and I had to be like "yeah fuck off I'm not doing that" and didn't join.

It's especially important to me because my ED is ARFID, so a large part of it is genuine fear of food. I am tired of people encouraging that fear. Food is beautiful and important and I want people to let me work on recovery and reinforce that food is good.

i had often wondered just how far i'm supposed to censor myself with food?
like, in different spaces, i have ”🍬“ in my name or as my name (or pronouns or etc.), and, like... that's technically a picture of food, right?
and there's not really much way to put your name behind spoiler text or content warnings…
never had anyone call me out on it in certain discord servers with a cw food rule, but the uncertainty was enough for me to just gradually not participate as much in those servers as i'd like.

i could just…. stop using this emoji, but that kind of stings after feeling a certain identity with it after all this time.
it's fundamentally value‑neutral, so it's weird how keeping it makes me kind of feel like a bad person.

..kind of wish that someone who needs these warnings could tell me whether or not my name/identification is okay  but i know that one person wouldn't be representative of everyone struggling with this…

i get not cwing it but not tagging it seems silly? tags are also used for searching, looking at the food tag is a way to seek out tasty meal ideas or laugh about other people's culinary disasters to know you're not alone.

This is especially true on cohost, where by design tags are the only thing searchable.

thanks, that misskay video was something i needed

honestly the reason I need cws for food is not because of an eating disorder but because I’m ARFID and certain foods are so repulsive to me that even pictures and mentions of the food disgust me beyond belief
and then I stumble across content related to the squick food without any warning. one time a mutual on tumblr reblogged an untagged picture of a squick food, and then another mutual reblogged the same picture, and I was too nervous that they would make fun of me for it so I stayed silent out of fear
I guess that’s my own problem to deal with, but… I don’t know, it’s not that I think food is bad, in fact a lot of my limited diet consists of “unhealthy” foods and that’s another issue with ARFID is that your diet being further limited to “healthy” foods by whatever authority figures you have will lead you to feel hungry all the time which can be physically painful.
but I guess I’m just personally offended by the implication that cws for food are only helpful for those with eating disorders