I have a philosophy that goes something like this: you were born a complete, integrated whole of a being. Your mind, your thoughts, your body, your feelings, and your behaviours all converged in a single indivisible unit of you-ness.
When you needed food, you felt hunger, thought of food, and cried or reached out for it in one motion. There was no ambivalence, no questioning your own motives, no shame. You needed something — end of story. And if you were lucky enough, you got it.
I look back on the time I was dieting as a period of falling-out with my body. We fell out of synchronicity, and out of favour, with one another. We were no longer on speaking terms. And though the diet was a dramatic physical manifestation of the rift that had formed between my mind and my body, I believe the fault that led to the rift started much earlier.
The fault began to form when I started to feel the gaze around the age of 10 — when I began viewing myself from an external viewpoint, filtered through the preferences of my culture, and learned to continually measure myself against that standard.
The fault deepened when I first encountered food rules. Whether they came from the USDA or my parents or the school lunch program, the message was the same: there is predefined, normative standard for what and how much to eat. Any deviance from that standard leaves you vulnerable to criticism, ridicule, forceful re-education — possibly even social ostracization and loss of love.
In short, there is a right way to eat. Anything that doesn’t exactly fit that standard is, by definition, wrong.
Right is good; wrong is bad. And so, by extension, are you.
Ellyn Satter is probably most famous for her theory of The Division of Responsibility. It applies to feeding relationships between parents and children, and it states that while parents are in charge of deciding where, when, and what food to provide, children alone must be in charge of deciding how much and whether they will eat from what’s provided.
As the American Dietetic Association says:
Perhaps the best advice regarding child-feeding practices continues to be the division of responsibility between adult and child advocated by Satter (64). According to this division, the role of parents and other caregivers in feeding is to provide positive structure, age-appropriate support, and healthful food and beverage choices. Children are responsible for whether and how much to eat from what adults provide.
It’s a profound concept — one that successfully negotiates the gray area between guidance and control, autonomy and anarchy. And, as it turns out, it can be applied to any relationship where there is some kind of power differential.
The thing is, when you step all over someone’s autonomy — someone’s right to choose how much and whether — you have breached their boundaries, and you have done them violence. They may react to this by rebelling or, as in many cases of abuse, by taking on the role of doing that violence to themselves.
One thing is for certain, though, whatever the response: trust is lost.
A rift is established. Your mind and your conscious will, those parts of you that are indoctrinated into society, separate themselves from the rest of you — the body with its physical needs, the unconscious will and motives. The mind reins in the body to secure safe passage through society, and to synchronize its efforts with the larger body of humanity. The body is dressed, trimmed, made presentable, and its needs are secreted away in the private pockets of life.
Rules that attempt to tell us how much and whether (FIVE A DAY!!!) violate our boundaries. We, in turn, rebel in a desperate attempt to regain autonomy, while simultaneously learning to flagellate ourselves, to take on the role of the abuser in our own minds, and to view our behaviours from an external vantage point — the gaze that continually judges what we eat against our culture’s ideal of the mythical, perfect diet.
The mind has overstepped its boundaries, aided and abetted by cultural pressures. You begin to monitor your eating in ways that go beyond providing pleasurable food and adequate nutrition for yourself, beyond choosing and then respecting mealtimes. You count calories, or assign points. You deny pleasure, and embrace nutritionism.
You hush your body’s cries of hunger and fullness and desire until, eventually, you may find yourselves no longer on speaking terms.
Notes from the Fatosphere
Get Out of Jail Free cards.
I was making my coffee the other morning (I’m an apostate who drinks instant coffee at home, for various practical reasons, most of which have to do with me being a super-clutz who’s broken more coffee carafes than the coffee carafe industry can possibly keep up with) when I noticed something odd about the coffee label.
Let’s back up for a moment to detail my reasons for drinking coffee. Reasons which, I think, probably apply to the vast majority of coffee-drinkers.
You notice what’s not on that list?
Antioxidants.
That’s why it tripped me out to notice the big label on the can.
I mean, it’s been there a while. Sure, I’ve noticed it before. But I never really noticed it until that morning.
Inspired — and in a half-awake undercaffeinated haze — I decided to grab the nearest thing and look for a similar label.
Since we ran out of milk the day before, and since we drink Canadian-style wussy coffee (meaning with milk or cream, plus sugar — black coffee is an abomination unto the Lord and shall not defile this house), the nearest thing was a delicious powdered non-dairy creamer. Which we keep as back-up to avoid a potential coffee crisis.
(Priorities, people. We have them.)
So I grabbed it, and guess what?
CHOLESTEROL FREE, YO.
Which, you know, I suppose is useful information if you have significant dyslipidemia (that is, high blood cholesterol levels) and are sensitive to cholesterol in food (which not all people are, especially not at levels as low as a spoonful of cream or milk in your coffee. Saturated fat is now pretty well-known as the culprit in raising people’s blood cholesterol, and it’s been established that the dietary cholesterol panic of the 80s turned out to be misguided.)
The lactose-free label, well…I take no issue with that. It’s something useful to have, front and centre, if you want to expand your market to include the many folks wishing not to endure a torrent of gaseous mishaps in the course of enjoying their morning brew.
So, quick analysis, what’s up with these largely irrelevant labels on things? Especially things that I wouldn’t really think of as “food” in the first place, and which don’t contribute significantly to your total intake? (I mean, coffee is largely non-nutritive, and a teaspoon or two of fake coffee creamer is pretty damn close to non-nutritive. And, in any case, most people don’t drink more than one or a few cups of the stuff in a day.)
My hypothesis is that, rather than the default cultural attitude toward food and food-like substances being “it’s fine to eat this, and it probably has things in it which are good for me, or, at least, are not actively harmful” we’ve reached a point, collectively, where our default attitude tends to be, “Should I eat/drink/ingest this? Is it poisonous? Am I allowed?”
Coffee (and caffeine itself) has become a particularly loaded substance in certain dietary circles. When I was dieting, I also avoided drinking coffee…for no specific reason I’m aware of. Because it was The Thing to Do. Because coffee was vaguely regarded as A Bad, Unnatural Thing.
Part of the package of virtuous self-denial included giving up coffee (and diet soda, and and and…whatever not-particularly-harmful or not-particularly-nutrition-impacting thing someone enjoyed just for the sake of it. Because food had become a tool, and only a tool. Everything consumed required instrumental justification.)
That’s a whole lot of anxiety to carry around. Enough that it’s going to make you second-guess your habitual purchases. Which is not very good for the folks who sell instant coffee.
So, what can the food-industrial-complex use to smuggle its products through the barbed-wire fence of ambivalence erected by its twin sister, the diet-industrial-complex?
A label.
A label that, despite seeming to give you straightforward, useful information about antioxidants and cholesterol, is actually telling you, “Just this once, you’re exempted from guilt. You are granted permission to drink this coffee for Specific, Nutritional Benefits — not for the evil caffeine buzz, not for the comforting emotional associations. Not just because it’s enjoyable. Because it has antioxidants, and it’s cholesterol free.”
In short, it’s a Get Out of Jail Free card. From a jail I believe they helped build.
To you, the guilt-ridden consumer, from the food industry with love.
ETA: Awesome reader Bookwyrm made an equally awesome Get Out of Jail Free card. Read it and weep.