“Don’t forget, ladies. Your usual meal is 1500 calories. Beware of overeating.” Listen closely, and you’ll hear that announcement play in the background of various episodes on the Netflix original series “Orange Is the New Black.” The words are familiar to the average viewer in this health-crazed day and age, but they come off, in the context of inmates fighting for their everyday survival, as completely absurd. Adhering to the government’s opinion of proper caloric consumption is of absolutely no concern, for example, to Red in Season 2, Episode 2, when she enters the cafeteria to the instruction’s blare for the first time since a botched power play last season left her completely ostracized by the other prisoners. The idea that the people in charge at Litchfield, the same ones that regularly throw women in solitary confinement for nonviolent offenses and force them to use showers stained with human feces, would take the time to police food intake only serves to underscore their complete disregard for the inmates’ actual needs. But outside of its absurdist function on an episodic level, the announcement also serves to clue us into a bigger undertaking at the heart of “Orange Is the New Black”: to counter the mainstream narrative of bodies that fall outside the thin cultural norm.

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