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This article addresses keep-fit culture not as a collection of commercial images or as the product of broader cultural values, but as a set of situated body practices, that is practices taking place within specific institutions where these images and values are reinterpreted in locally prescribed ways and, to some extent, filtered. Relying on fieldwork, fitness gyms are revealed to be experienced as places with their own rules, pleasures and identity games. The ideal of the fit body is shown to be filtered from its wider, typically gender- and class-specific charges, transformed into a pure instrument of training, a machine which does not bear resemblance to the organic body of the changing rooms, an objectified utility which is beyond any social role specification. Social roles and their body requirements are both important for individual clients' structural chances to join the gym and locally neutralized or reduced to tension-release mechanisms. Similarly, the cultural ideals of a fit and toned body contribute to the legitimation of the gym; yet the actual capacity to train is less the result of the direct grip of culture, than the outcome of clients' adjustment to playing a particular game of involvement with and detachment from the mechanistic and abstract exercise body. Body definitions are not simply imposed on clients, but continuously negotiated and transformed.

A growing field of research is documenting the political investment of the consumer. Yet, consumers are invested of political responsibilities in many different ways, which respond to different visions of politics and consumption, culture and the economy. In this article we critically explore the particular stance of an increasingly international actor such as Slow Food, placing it in the context of current debates on the scope of alternative food networks and on the moral boundaries of the market. Starting from the Slow Food core in Bra, Italy, and through a variety of qualitative sources, both primary (interviews) and secondary (publications, public speeches), we show that while Slow Food contributes to the current political investment of the consumer, it does so in distinctive ways which bear witness to its gastronomic origin and middle-class constituency. Slow Food rhetoric works out a politically-thick vision of taste refinement: its imagined consumer is an ‘eco-gastronome’, someone who adds ecological concerns onto a continuously trained aesthetic appreciation of food. The article considers the scope of what Slow Food has defined as the ‘right to pleasure’ in the face of a tension between inclusion and exclusion running through contemporary consumer culture. It concludes by exploring Slow Food’s current shifts towards issues such as economic growth, access to resources and environmental protection — crucial in defining the complex world of critical consumption — through a politico-aesthetic problematization of food consumption.