Hunger games

Women and food.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch via Pexels

I started this week’s Wednesday email with a short (Italian) story from a working holiday in Sicily a few years ago. When I took the trip, I was two years into a new way of eating. The meal plan was set by a food coach I’d engaged to help me get my body out of the tailspin it was in at the time. The plan was heavily plant and protein-based and very light on carbs. And it worked — most of the issues I had cleared up. Over time, I didn’t think twice about it. I wasn’t hungry and didn’t find it restrictive. By the time I went to Italy, I didn’t even consider how I’d eat when I was there. I figured I’d lean into fish and vegetables with the occasional dish of pasta and some good Italian bread.

That delusion lasted less than 24 hours. The morning after I arrived in Trapani, I set out to find something protein-rich for breakfast. I strolled down the narrow pedestrian street, past cafe after cafe. Then, I found one that I thought had potential. When I asked the hostess/server if they served eggs, I received an unapologetic “no.” There were smoothies on the menu, but they had more sugar than I’d had a year. I thanked her and turned to walk away. Then she laid out her hands and said, “You’re in Sicily.” I walked a few yards and said to myself, “Ah, you’re in Sicily,” then turned around and ordered my first of many slightly tweaked smoothies.

But this question stayed with me, “What would I allow myself to eat?

And where is the power to choose?

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On gluttony.

In Elise Loehnen’s book, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, the fifth chapter is titled, “ GLUTTONY: Believing Gluttony to Be Sinful, We Deny Our Own Hunger.”

She dives deep into an exploration of what she calls our “fat-phobic culture” and “thin as the cultural standard-bearer for beauty.”

We love to judge the worthiness of women on the basis of factors we can apprehend with our eyes, and, in my lifetime at least, that worthiness has been pegged to litheness, a body under control… we equate thinness with obedience, with being someone who cares — about acceptance, desirability, discipline.

I think some perspective is helpful here because it wasn’t always this way. There were periods when curvy bodies were desirable. They reflected wealth, the money to eat well and not have to move much. Thinness was for those who labored and were not privileged to have more than enough food. The current culture is a construct, just as it was in earlier eras. Someone is passing judgement, making the rules, holding tight to the power based on the goals they want to achieve. And yes, there’s usually money involved.

Loehnen goes on to say:

The body is the way that we contact the world and each other. Food is simply a medium through which many of us express ourselves, almost as an antidote to the poisonous expectations that are projected onto us about what we should look like and how we should be…