Trendy Eating.

Whole wheat bread, organic yogurt, baby spinach, cage free eggs, antibiotic-free herb turkey and preservative free chicken sausage. 25 minute line, $13 bill.

This describes a typical Monday night trip to the 14th street Trader Joe’s. I must admit that I have recently become a Trader Joe’s and healthy food enthusiast. However, somewhere on my journey to become more health conscious, or maybe during my nearly 25 minutes in line, I have noticed something. This week in class we discussed the process of hegemony and how ruling class ideology can trickle down and infiltrate down through the rankings of society. While standing in line I cannot help to think that perhaps I too have been subjected to the influence of the ruling class.

Healthy eating and lifestyle is something that has undoubtedly been on the rise. And while many attribute this sudden change to the rapid rise of obesity and the desire to get healthy, I think that this epidemic can be accredited to something or someone else. Yes, I do believe that people genuinely want to get healthy and subsequently live longer, however, I believe the bigger motivation for this has come from the pressure and newest fad of the “ruling class.”

With the opening of grocery stores such as Whole Foods, the opportunity for healthy eating has seemingly been made readily available for everyone. Whole foods, nicknamed in the New York Times “whole paycheck” is notoriously known for its high prices and therefore limits the types of customers that come through its doors. Most of these customers could be considered in the “ruling class” and consequently set the tone in the early 2000’s that would ultimately become today a health food mania.

This trend propelled by the ruling class happens to be a positive one, the ruling class has set the standard that of fit, healthy, and more importantly SLIM as one of the ways to separate the lower classes from the higher classes. And despite this trend being one of the more positive ones it does indeed show that the ruling class does promote their ideology over the lower, less powerful classes, myself included. So as I stand in line at Trader Joe’s, healthy food in toe, I must realize that everyone here has made the choice to become more fit and healthy, but at the expense of once again being influenced and overruled by the dominant ruling class.