The Emotional Politics of Food
by Marla RoseWhen I was fourteen, one July day I ate more food than I had in months: I binged on eight grapes and was so consumed with self-loathing I balled up my fist and punched myself over and over on my stomach. I was disgusting and weak, with the grape juice filling my veins with calories and adding pudginess to my cheeks, plumpness to my thighs, inches to my waist. As each minute passed by, I could feel it happening on a cellular level. That evening I added a hundred sit-ups to my regular routine, with my bony spine burning bright pink as it rubbed against my bedroom carpeting, and I walked around the block for an extra hour, as fast as I could. This will teach me to be weak, I scolded myself as I rounded the cul-de-sac again, This will teach me to eat eight whole grapes.
That summer was highly ritualistic. I would weigh myself twice a day, writing all the numbers down in a spiral notebook, along with all I had consumed that day: 4 segments of an orange, 3 diet sodas - those counted too -, two squares of a graham cracker, three bites of stuffing and exactly 1/8 of my Hershey bar. Each night in my bed, I'd calculate as best I could all the calories I'd racked up in a column running along the side of the page, circling the bottom figure in a red pen: that was the one to beat.
Meals with the family were also ritualized, especially once my parents started to notice my weight loss: I'd need a handful of napkins, and the dog to sit under the table. I even took off his collar before meals so he wouldn't jingle when he was jumping up to retrieve food from my hand or gobbling it up from the floor. I used sleight of hand to bury the food in the napkins; either I spit into the napkin when it looked like I was wiping my mouth, or I subtly dropped it into one waiting on my lap.
After my weight dipped below 90 pounds, I stopped getting my periods, which I didn't mind. It made me feel like I was powerful, like I'd defeated my body's control over me. After I dipped into the 80 pound range, I started to grow hair on my back, on my stomach, as my body struggled to retain heat while it was starving to death. For the first time in my life, I'd become vain, so I didn't like the hair but I was willing to take it if I could be thin. In the bathtub, it was a great source of pride for me that instead of sinking like a sack of potatoes, like a fat, ugly girl, I floated at the top, and no matter how I would hold on to the rim of the tub, struggling to push myself down with stick figure arms, I couldn't. I was lighter than air. I was sallow, my hair was dull and my heart was always racing from all the diet pills, but I was winning the war against my body.
After I dipped into the 80 pound range, I started to grow hair on my back, on my stomach, as my body struggled to retain heat while it was starving to death Subconsciously, I started to mimic the behaviors of the skinny, popular girls at my school, the ones with perfectly feathered hair, the girls who never had a worry. I started to make fun of the fat kids the way that I'd observed the others do it, with a sneering, cruel sense of enjoyment. I ditched classes, smoked behind the gym and flirted with older boys; I was infused with a tingling defiance and confidence as I made my way down the school hall. I began stealing diet pills and eye shadow from the corner drug store, charged with a euphoric rebellion. The old me was shed like a skin: I was a bad girl for the first time in my life, and I liked it. During the time of my voluntary starvation, the time when I was the most physically frail I'd ever been, I also felt the most powerful. I was filled with a new vigor, a new sense of pride: I had asserted myself over my body, over my hunger, over my parents. I was in control for the first time in my life.
Control was the central theme for me the summer of 1981. I collected dozens of recipes, mostly of high fat, rich desserts, and I loved to make them for others, eating the smallest of bites while the rest went into napkins or the dog's mouth. My notebook of recipes became quite thick, full of the glossy ones I'd clipped from my mom's magazines. When my friends and family ate the gooey caramel brownies and raspberry cream cheese bars I made, it nourished me to resist. Subsisting on little more than air and diet soda gave me strength; food weakened me. When my mother threatened to enter me in a hospital, I wanted her to, not because I wanted help but because I wanted to see the doctors and nurses try to subdue my fierce determination. I wanted to laugh in their faces when they pleaded with me, tried to force me. I wanted to see them just try to shove a tube in my arm.
I never got the opportunity.
I ended my diet about eight months after I began it, weighing in at 74 pounds, when my grandmother looked at the skeletal stranger who had hijacked the once-robust body of her granddaughter and simply cried. I couldn't bear the guilt, so I promised that I‘d eat more, and I did. Over many months, and not without anxiety, I returned to the normal weight range for my size. Obviously, this bout with anorexia didn't kick-start my distorted attitudes toward food and body image: it was the result of these attitudes. All of the factors that contributed to my eating disorder were lined up in a row and ready for it to take root: It was born of a desire to exert a sense of control over myself and the world around me. It was a way to punish others, and, although I didn't realize it at the time, to punish myself. It was a way to assert my independence from my parents, and a way to reject them. It was a way to get people to worry about me, and a way to get attention. It was the result of thousands of images and thousands of tacit suggestions conveyed to me through advertising, movies and television for fourteen years. It was a way for me to become the perfect, skinny, popular and invulnerable person I'd always wanted to be.
About a month ago, I watched an episode of the CBS news show 48 Hours, expecting to become upset, but not aware of how much it would affect me. The segment detailed the various ways that Americans are trying to combat obesity, through diets, drugs, and radical surgeries. Watching this program confirmed for me something I'd always suspected: people suffering with obesity are not opposite of those with anorexia; rather, they're two sides of the same coin. Across the world, but especially in industrialized nations, many women and girls are embroiled in a love-hate relationship with food. Food becomes the source of love, of supplication, but also of weakness, self-hatred, and punishment. In the case of obesity, this dynamic is even more pronounced. A person whose emotional state is entangled with food and body issues can momentarily quell feelings that cause her pain through food, and she can feel comforted, a fleeting sense of something akin to love. Soon afterward, however, she is flooded with a staggering tide of the very emotions that the act of eating helps her subdue. This, in addition to all the other factors that make one feel ashamed of one's body and being, sets the whole vicious, cruel cycle in motion, forcing it to turn again and again like a Ferris wheel.
Food becomes the source of love, of supplication, but also of weakness, self-hatred, and punishment As I watched 48 Hours, I found myself crying along as the 500 plus pound teenager tearfully tried to describe her feelings of helplessness, her addiction to food and the emotional force of what she was entangled in. She was so tired of being ostracized, so tired of being on an endless emotional roller coaster that seemed to be stuck in a continuous downward plunge that she was willing to have gastric bypass surgery. In this surgery, the stomach is divided into two parts: a small one ounce upper portion and a lower 95 percent of stomach, which is bypassed so that it is no longer available to receive food. The upper stomach is reconnected to the intestines with a small opening, and only a few teaspoons of food can be consumed at a time without the individual feeling uncomfortably full. She wanted so desperately to be a normal girl who went on dates and shopped with friends that she was pinning her last hope on an expensive, dangerous surgery. She had such a distorted, fundamentally flawed relationship to food and self-image that she couldn't trust herself to eat in a reasonable way; the only option she felt like she had was to drastically and permanently alter her physical being.
Although the girl on 48 Hours was an extreme example, this thread of a toxic and painful relationship with food is woven through many people's lives. I suppose that the reason why I am writing this is to say that when we as advocates for a plant-based diet address the issue of obesity, we need to look deeper than merely food and exercise. Yes, the fast food industry has more than a tacit role in the prevalence of heart disease, obesity and premature deaths in this country. Yes, if we all turned off our televisions and computers and went for a bike ride or a walk, that'd be incredibly helpful. Yes, the pharmaceutical and surgical industries are getting rich exploiting another's misery. But an eating disorder, literally an inability to eat normally and without distress, is a highly complex psychological state. For us to point fingers at the obvious culprits without addressing that there is a deeper, insatiable hunger that drives eating disorders is to only have a superficial understanding of why anorexia, bulimia and obesity are rampant in this country. We need to learn how feed ourselves, literally and figuratively.
When we as advocates for a plant-based diet address the issue of obesity, we need to look deeper than merely food and exercise. From time to time I think back to a woman who was a family friend and neighbor for years. She was talking to me, lamenting yet another failed diet and subsequent weight gain when she said, with a small bitter laugh, "You know, I wish I could have some of what you had a couple of years ago. I could use a little anorexia."
I knew that she was utterly serious. The fact that I knew anorexia from the inside out, that I understood the grim reality of when this sickness takes over one's body, that she had the nerve to aspire to attain the disorder that almost killed me, didn't make me angry.
It made me want to cry.
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