“I don’t want all this shit,” shrieks Logan Roy, characteristically hot-tempered, within the opening episode of Succession’s second season. The “shit” in query is platter after platter of shucked oysters, fat orange prawns, and lobsters smothered in garlic butter served up on beds of ice. “Pizza! We’ll have pizza,” Logan commands. And so his staff carry away the dishes teeming with crustaceans and unceremoniously dump them into the bins outside. The emergency pizzas are duly ordered and laid out on the dining table because the Roy family get right down to business, but these too remain completely untouched.

In Succession, status is signalled by what characters eat – or don’t eat. When Cousin Greg brings along his arriviste date to Logan’s celebration – the one with the “ludicrously capacious bag” – Tom Wambsgans quips that she’s “wolfing all of the canapés like a famished warthog”. Tom occasionally reveals his own middle-class greed and snobbery through his irrepressible excitement about superb food, as within the scene where he introduces Greg to the pleasures of eating deep-fried ortolan. Later, when he’s threatened with prison time, the very first thing he frets about is the “prison food” and the logistics of creating “toilet wine”. Against this, the Roys, the billionaires atop the Waystar Royco media empire, appear to barely eat or drink anything at all.

Succession is fiction, granted. Nevertheless it stays an impressively accurate (and well-researched) vignette of the lives of the mega-rich. Just like the Roys, the one per cent are increasingly styling themselves as having conquered and subdued their appetites: X co-founder Jack Dorsey once admitted to fasting for 22 hours a day, while multimillionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson has previously claimed to do a 23-hour daily fast. Many other Silicon Valley staff swear by meal substitute shakes like Soylent and Huel under the guise of “biohacking”. But extreme fasting isn’t just confined to tech bros: Bella Hadid’s morning routine video featured over 20 different supplements and vitamins and only one bite of a sad-looking croissant.

In fact, essentially the most obvious example is Ozempic, the burden loss drug du jour among the many elites, which works by suppressing hunger. Ozempic’s impact has been so seismic that analysts have reckoned the drug could have an unprecedented impact on food consumption. “I obviously don’t know when someone is doping up,” Anthony Geich, director of guest relations at Priyanka Chopra’s haute Indian restaurant Sona, told The Cut back in 2023. “[But] I’ve definitely noticed the trend of salads being ordered more, or people who find themselves boxing their food up at the top of the night.” 

An individual’s relationship to food has all the time revealed loads about their class. The English king Henry I famously died after eating “a surfeit of lampreys”. Within the UK, the connotations carried by different foodstuffs have all the time been “heavily depending on scarcity,” explains Pen Vogler, creator of Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. “The economists’ old friend, the availability and demand curve, is a reasonably reliable indicator of what foods are used to signal high status: venison and game, the sale of which were highly controlled, from the Norman invasion onwards; spices in Medieval and Tudor England; French food within the nineteenth century,” she says. “For hundreds of years anything imported was high status – and we still grant ‘middle class’ to imported foods resembling avocado or quinoa – despite the fact that they is perhaps peasant foods of their countries of origin.”

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As food selections are so closely linked to status, it follows that we also view certain body types as more ‘desirable’ than others. “Fatness was once an emblem of wealth and lack of need – and subsequently desirable – whereas thinness was related to poverty – and subsequently undesirable,” explains Dr Maxine Woolhouse, a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University with expertise in social class and eating practices. “In contemporary times, some trends have flipped.” Our work-centric society leaves little time for people – particularly people on low incomes – to plan, purchase and cook healthy food or exercise, and as Dr Woolhouse says, “it is a key reason why fatness is now more related to the working classes versus thinness.”

Today, despite the ‘body positivity’ movement’s best efforts, Western culture continues to valorise thinness. It is a trend which has had a devastating impact on public health: within the UK, around 1.25 million people within the UK have an eating disorder and the number is rising sharply. Society has never prized thinness more, and yet it has never been so unattainable. “We’re surrounded by a lot food now, it’s harder not to eat than to eat,” Vogler explains. “So many things push food upon us: marketing, social media, TV promoting, delivery apps, supermarket meal deals, low cost ultra-processed food which is designed to make us eat more.”

Things are very different for the elite. “The mega-rich don’t need to eat obesogenic food,” Vogler says. “It is perhaps quite tough in our food and social media environment to be slim – and healthy too – but the mega-rich have the resources they should do it: access to good fresh food, education, space, time, social validation.” It’s also price noting that Ozempic continues to be primarily utilized by the rich, with reports claiming that users of the drug are concentrated in affluent areas like Manhattan and Hollywood. Elon Musk, the third richest man alive, has also admitted to using the drug.

“Having the ability to reveal a scarcity of need for material goods, like food, suggests social transcendence” – Dr Maxine Woolhouse

Consequently, hosting a lavish banquet or ordering lobster is not any longer a sufficient signifier of status; today, an indication of true wealth is the power to forgo food entirely. Eating essentially betrays an individual’s most elementary human needs; in an era obsessive about ‘self-optimisation’, not eating suggests that an individual is in some way ‘beyond’ needs and has achieved total mastery of their body with a heightened capability for efficiency and focus.

“There’s a history in Judeo-Christian societies – and certain in lots of other religions, hence the widespread practice of fasting – where demonstrating a scarcity of need for material things, especially food, and with the ability to reveal self-control and discipline are signs of spiritual transcendence,” Dr Woolhouse says. Famously, Italian saint Catherine of Siena would quick for prolonged periods of time as a way of demonstrating her devotion to God through extreme self-control. “But there’s also a category dimension to this,” Dr Woolhouse continues, “because with the ability to reveal a scarcity of need for material goods, like food, suggests social transcendence too; it’s symbolic of living a life whereby our material needs aren’t a every day concern.” She adds that “fad diets are most unlikely to take off in societies where there are food shortages or food insecurity.”

It’s still jarring to look at celebrities openly admit to fasting for 23 hours a day or taking 14 different complement pills in lieu of a balanced breakfast. “It normalises and sanctions practises that in other contexts can be thought to be eating disordered,” Dr Woolhouse says. “When eating practices are packaged as ‘done within the name of health’, they’re more socially acceptable and difficult to contest.” She points out that a standard teenage girl restricting her eating regimen in the identical way as Johnson would likely be thought to be sick and in need of medical intervention. “What we, as a society, regard as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ eating is contextual and largely rides on how those eating practices are framed.”

It’s obvious but bears reiterating that extreme, fad eating regimen trends are each ineffectual and dangerous. But this trend isn’t really about food or health. It’s about performance. It’s a way for the moneyed classes to signal their wealth and standing and posture as above us mere mortals who debase ourselves by eating. Ultimately, though, there’s no such thing as a jab or pill or meal substitute shake that may totally eradicate the necessity to eat – so you would possibly as well enjoy it.