Hi! Before I begin!
A couple things:
-CW examination of disordered eating
-we know this, but just to say: I am only speaking from the perspective of my own body. This is one that is cis woman, white, meeting conventional standards of thinness.
-I am not a doctor! Just a thinker, after all.
Waking up
Hopper, A Woman in the Sun
I hadn’t read Bourdieu since college, till I was sweetly sent a passage from Outline of a Theory of Practice about two things I love: mornings and magic. He writes that the morning “would be entirely favourable for its marking of the victory of light, did not its position confer on it the fearful power to determine the future to which it belongs… it can decide, for good or for ill, the fate of the day.” In other words, the morning is relief, in that the sun comes up, but there is a very real moment that exists before it does, where one wonders if it will.
He urges us to “take a closer look at this logic, that of magic, which has perhaps never been fully understood, because it is all too easily half understood on the basis of the quasi-magical experience of the world which, under the effect of emotion, for example, imposes itself even on those material conditions of existence”. This is an invitation to consider that unknowing between dawn and morning, and morning and day, a type of magic. This is an ask to notice things. The more that we invest emotionally in what we see around us, the more the world may become magical. There is a joy in paying attention without trying to understand.
What he says about mornings is definitely right. I’ve never really been able to sleep late, but I have found that when my body wakes me up before morning, it’s for a reason. Mid-day is when the sun has been shining for a minute and we can move and bask. But morning, an empty stomach, is where a person reckons with the honest possibility of the day. The morning is for the truth of magic, which might be the digestion of the most painful parts of reality and the hunger to change it, the utter lack of control, the immaculate waiting.
I have been so so so scared to write this piece. Avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. I’ve written it in my head in the nighttime, and it has made me scared of the dark. I have written it in my head in the light of mid-day, my favorite, where its significance feels next to nothing. I’ve ended up writing most of it on planes, where the hour is always morning.
There are moments, funny and strange ones, where I’ll
notice a full table of food I’ve made, or of the produce delivery in my hallway and filling my fridge, or an unclean edge, or three burners on at once and three sheet trays in the oven, and I’ll truly wonder how my life became so deeply about food. It’s the medium of my work, in my vantage point at all times, residue on my clothes and under my fingernails.
Food is a symbolic object. Like any other form of art, we can make meaning from it. This means that we often underestimate the significance of food, assuming that it is either simply fun or fuel. Instead, each object is a signal toward some shared reality, meaning something. I can ask you what you had for breakfast and know infinitely more; about your palate, where you find your food, how much time you have to eat, what you grew up eating, how you learned to start your day, how you desire to start your day. If this sounds like a stretch, which maybe it does, I recommend reading the section in Distinction called “The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles”, or considering the madeleine that Proust ate that came to be synonymous with the deep nostalgia of sense memory. Even less pretentious, spend a moment asking yourself how you may have learned to like the restaurants you like. These tastes, though real, don’t come from nowhere. I famously love being in school (though also famously have no masters), but observing and analyzing food and where it comes from has been the closest thing I’ve felt to being in my favorite classes. Endless interpretation. This makes food poetic and elusive. It also makes life a lot more meaningful.
When I’m doing something that feels important and right, but I’m not sure why I’m doing it, I often tell myself ‘Bring your body there and your mind will follow.’ That’s the way that I feel about how I ended up being a chef. Another thing I say to myself a lot is ‘Rosa, you can’t outrun the law’. This usually means that I’ll be trying to avoid some challenging lesson, but it shows up no matter what I do. In making food, the goal is to move fast, but some thoughts have caught up with me and I’m happy they have. There was a reason.
CHAOS MODE
In cooking, no matter if I’m working a line or an event or in my home, no matter how slow and meditative it’s been, nor how fast and invigorating, there is always a level of chaos. This means that you can be stressed and incredibly prepared, hyper-stimulated and with more than enough mise prepped, and something inevitably will be out of control. This doesn’t mean that something always goes wrong (this is not the we plan and God laughs vibe), it means that someone will come talk to you and you’ll laugh a moment too long. Maybe the number of people you’re feeding will change, so you’ll have too much or too little food (unfortunately, both always feel at least a little shameful, no matter what). Inevitably, something always goes awry!! Or at least differently than you’d imagined.
There’s is something about food that you really can’t control. It may not always be about chaos, but it definitely is about power. It requires ego loss to submit to that weird fate, and the point is that it can’t really be explained. Why else do cooks famously live such intense, sensorial-based lives? Because you somehow begin to worship earthly delights, realizing that if you try hard enough you can sleep less so that you can cook more. You fall in love, in a way, with this thing that you know you can hold so tight and must let go of. Food is a force, and to cook it well doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily achieved a mastery– it may mean, instead, that you’ve located inside of yourself some gorgeous submission.
^^Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit
I love Dutch food still lives because they symbolize this inherent tension in the object of food: that it is a momento mori aka painted before it deteriorates aka emotive symbol of the passage of time.
Recently, I’ve been overwhelmed wondering if maybe I’ve submitted too much to what cooking professionally asks of me. Of course, it’s a privilege to even have the time and space to ask that question, but I think it comes for us all to different degrees at whatever point. How to regulate what feels like chaos? How to maintain a sense of vitality while preventing burnout? How do I control the hold that food seems to have over me and the way that I live?
I’ve realized, actually, that I’ve been asking the wrong question. What I should have been asking instead was why I thought that food, a force, could be hyper-regulated in the first place?
A lot of the reason that I thought there was a right way
is because of the language that we use around food.
Almost every person that I’ve talked to in my life has, or has had, an emotionally-charged relationship to food. They all have different bodies, different minds, different memories and attachments. One theme, though, as someone that people talk to about food, is that food contains a lot of emotions. Not only in sweet nostalgia, like the Proust madeleine, but in joy and in pain. Lots of fear lies in the mystery of the potential consequences of the pleasure of eating.
sweetie…. ^^ u shall never know.
Every time I’ve had these conversations, there’s always some exhale. There is some level of relief that a thing that is supposed to make sense actually does not. If I was really going off, I would say that we might be recognizing an element of the collective unconscious :)
What I’m saying is that maybe we’re all thinking about something at the same time, more than we realize. We eat food, let’s say, at least three times a day. This means that we think about food, at least a little bit, at least three times a day. We’re taught that food is logic-based: calories in, blood sugar steady, belly (moderately!) full, problem solved. But actually, the question of hunger is also inherently psycho-social. The meal is a nexus of a lot of very real pillars of our lives that interact: how we spend our money, how our bodies may appear, how we negotiate our own health. A pressure builds: how do I meet my needs the right way? Will there be a moment when I know that I’ve done it right? Does that arrival exist?
The exhale
In these food chats is both a whisper and a gasp. A whisper because it feels like some failing to have food be complicated at all. A gasp that we never talk about this.
As someone who has randomly surrounded her life with food,
And as a literal chef! I will say that, from my own specific and humble perspective, 1. It is one of the stupidest taboos that we don’t talk about, colloquially, the charged space that food can occupy, especially since it can contain a spectrum from pain to joy. 2. There is no universal order, and no real constant control. The only thing, kind of, is recognizing that the body is constantly communicating new messages, paying attention to those, taking care, and recognizing that each object of food and feeling it may cause is temporary.
I’m not sure if we have language to talk about what I’m talking about.
This frustrates me. Early on in puberty, we’re presented with the concept of eating disorders, or disordered eating. I personally was pretty mesmerized by the idea of eating disorders, mostly because I loved eating so much (particularly, at that point, mayonnaise sandwiches).
This was one of my favorite books when I was around 9, about a sweet tween who had bulimia. It weirdly didn’t do too much for me emotionally, but it was the first time I learned about eating disorders and Cliff’s Notes, and how bad they both were. It definitely presented me with the idea that when girls are sad, and they don’t know any better, they decide to go to the local diner and eat stacks of chocolate chip pancakes and throw up together outside in the dumpster. Hm.
In 1873, the phrase ‘eating disorder’ entered the medical canon. The literal definition of the word “disorder” is “a state of confusion”. A state of confusion, so: a haze, a misunderstanding of how to interpret, a holding pattern, a lapse in judgement.
If food is a powerful force, how are we necessarily supposed to understand it always and never be confused? Especially when we consume it and then it goes away? Again, as a literal chef, I think food is confusing! In many ways, that’s why I love it!
So many things don’t make sense. How have such beautiful vegetables come to be? When did I become lactose intolerant? I have known chefs, and been a chef, working a line and on a cleanse! How should a person be, and how should a person be around food? We rarely get confused about things that don’t matter to us. If there’s a pre-occupation around a question of food, wouldn’t that be because the object itself can be meaningful? This conversation doesn’t really want to exist because why would a person want to talk about how food can evoke complicated emotions when the word ‘disorder’ is on the table at all times? The abyss feels a lot better.
As I’ve looked into more psychoanalytic interpretations of the object of food, I’ve been disappointed at the lack of nuance. I’ve read that if a person keeps craving candy, they’re really looking for sweetness in life. A very common discourse is that if you eat when you’re not fully hungry, you’re emotionally hungry. That’s of course not inherently untrue, but it does make it the responsibility of the person in conflict to problem-solve their emotional self so that it all goes away. Sometimes you want candy all the time and IT IS complicated. Sometimes you eat when you’re not hungry because IT DOES feel good. Sometimes you can do either or both of those things and feel very good or very bad. If food were logical and not emotional, we would have figured these things out by now.
I’m really not sure that we can. This is not to say that we cannot heal painful relationships with food! Or that the science of nutrition (when presented in a productive, holistic, ethical way) isn’t helpful, because in many ways that form of logic can serve us well. But I think we undoubtedly would benefit from more space through language. This is because food is always changing. No same particles go into our systems twice. We collaborate with our bodies on regulating food, endlessly.
Even further, it is impossible to love food, to regard it for how expansive it is, without acknowledging that hunger and the soul are connected. We are insatiable, and the object of our edible desires disappear too quickly to hold tight. Food is built to go away, to be converted energy, to go to someone else, to fuel and re-enter the earth. What stays in us is the memory of the thing. Very similar to human life.
I am not saying
That eating disorders aren’t real, medical, scientific, and painful—whatever that means for the person reckoning with that term themselves. What I am talking about specifically is a space outside of diagnosis, that is purposefully opaque, a probing and amorphous communal question.
Shame is the most expedient way to teach someone something.
As I’ve written before, it can often be the language of kitchens. It’s also imbues a lot of messaging around how we feed ourselves. It stores itself in the body, hoping that we don’t make the same mistake twice.
Very quickly: there is nothing shameful in having stress of any sort around food. There is nothing shameful in identifying with the diagnosis of an eating disorder. There’s nothing shameful in reckoning with how to develop any type of synchronicity with your body. There should truly be no shame in any of it. Our culture teaches us our bodies are inherently worth capital if they match set unattainable standards etc., and food is one way to aspire to control that destiny, and then the hyper-modification and propagandization of food makes it look really easy to control our bodies! (I chalk this one up, in many ways, to my mom—who I love, with whom I disagree on many things, and also to whom I am deeply grateful for having this truth as an immoveable pillar of my consciousness).
This world makes controlling food seem so possible that insatiable hunger can come as a surprise. Our bodies are always changing, asking something new of us. So of course we would think about food and feel at least a little unsure about it some of the time!
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
Is one of my favorite books, whose title I think about almost every time that I cook anything.
^Magritte, Les Jeunes Amours
The effort to control food, I think, is some aspiration towards levity. It means cutting through a lot of layers of gravity, driven by the aspiration of doing something right. This means the pursuit of alignment: the prayer that the will of the brain finds rhythm to match the wilderness of the body.
Sometimes this happens! Sometimes you can just drink juice for a day and feel really good! Sometimes, as a chef, you can prep two days in advance for a dinner service and everyone you feed is overjoyed! But truly it is rare. Those moments are special because they are not built to happen all the time.
I don’t think it’s super necessary for me to
Explain my personal journey in my own charged relationship to food. This may be avoidant, but I kind of see it as an act of some resistance – what I’m thinking about right now is not my personal tension around food, but in fact that of the collective.
What I will say is this: I have had times in my life, especially as a teenager and in my early twenties, when I have done my best to eat as little as possible throughout the day. I have known the feeling of the frantic high you get when you’ve ignored hunger for long enough, and I also know the futility of feeling like you cannot change your body, that it runs you. I understand the uncanny phenomenon of the brain distorting itself to project an image in mirrored grotesque refraction, and then a vastly different, gentle one within the same day’s span. It is an uncanny sensation not to be able to trust your own mind’s eye. I understand the desire to be both stuffed and empty, a ghostly heartburn, a profound exhaustion.
In those times, I always thought about all the thinking I could get done if I wasn’t so distracted by something as silly as food.
Again, this is some sound logic to reckon with some vast emotion. It’s a pretty common line of thinking, the dismissal of a pre-occupation as useless and a mind’s space as fixed and scarce. At worst, a qualifying of a probing question that is usually a ‘woman’s problem’ as superficial and a waste.
It actually brought me to a word that fits nicely: rumination.
Is gorgeous in definition,
1. A deep or considered thought about something.
2. The action of chewing the cud.
Can you believe it? I could not.
This is a word that’s bridged a lot of gaps. I do my best to let myself chew on things. When I understood my fascination with food, my love for it, its power over me, its force, I let myself engage with it more freely. I let myself hyper-consider these things that seem fleeting or meaningless, or too heavy to hold. Zero attempt to create order, but definitely a submission to a focus in pursuing its meaning. This has been freeing and also sometimes very psychologically challenging! Because it has meant that sometimes I look up from my work or down at my hands and find myself surrounded, inundated by a substance that is inherently complicated, especially to me in my own body, which I always feel compelled to mediate and master. But also: it has been so deeply fun! I do ruminate! I do think about food a lot! I do think about bodies a lot! I get to touch and play and experiment and consume something that challenges me always! I’ll never understand it :) I’ll never understand my body and myself :) but boy is it fun to think about.
Bourdieu ends his passage, ‘magic is fought with magic’.
When I say that food is magic, it sounds twee and I hate it. But it must be said. Magic in the invisible pull, an unknown force within the object, the insane alchemy of satisfaction that food holds inside its material vessel. Conjured from the unknowable, dissolving into life itself. Food is the only sensory pleasure that is inherently necessary for one’s individual survival.
Rumination is cool because what comes next is that you spit something out. And then what do you have? A palate cleanser, after all.