As I was preparing this morning to go to my lily-white safe space, that 10 am Friday yoga class that I missed last week due to work, and hence am attending for the first time since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, I thought to myself: "I don't know if I can go on doing this."
 
It's not a safe space because of its whiteness, per se.  It's a safe space because this is the culture of yoga teachers, to surround us with unconditional love and supportiveness, to encourage self-love.  It's a very feminine space.  Today, there were three men present, and they all stuck together in a rear corner.
 
All three men were white.  And all the women there were white.  The teacher was white.
 
I live in one of the most diverse areas of the country.
 
So, in my lily-white safe space, two things make me uncomfortable.  One is the monolithic whiteness, only rarely interrupted.  And the other is the idea of self-love, of self-care.  Who am I, privileged white bitch with an easy life, to give this to myself?  To allow someone else to caress me with soothing words?    What even is this feel-good crap?
 
And yet the breathing, the movements, the resting, even the chanting--about which I still feel awkward-- they do calm me.  It is a conundrum.
 
Do I deserve more calm?  After the election of a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, xenophobic, tax-dodging billionaire and climate-change-denier, is more calm something to be desired?  If this mode of increasing calm is not available to everyone, is it something of which I should avail myself?
 
All fair questions.  As a white woman at this moment in time, I feel squeezed.  I feel squeezed on one side by white male and other Trump supporters who said, at best, No, white women, it is not your time, and-- at worst-- it will never be your time, you stupid fucking cunts.  I feel squeezed on another side by women of color who point out, over and over, that 53% of white women voted for Trump, that we are, as a demographic, traitorous or duplicitous-- and make it clear that this is what they always expected of us.   They seem disappointed but not surprised.  I feel squeezed by sadness that an eminently qualified woman lost the election, that the small progress we were making on climate change will be reversed, that we will lose progress on LGBT rights, women's rights, health care, criminal justice reform.  I feel squeezed by the conviction that my sadness is selfish, an undeserved luxury, the personal stake I felt in Hillary Clinton's election insignificant compared to the stakes of others.
 
Sometimes it feels as though, squeezed from all these directions, there is nowhere left to inhabit.  Even action, even activism, feels potentially self-serving, is regarded with suspicion from within and without.  Maybe rightly so. 
 
Under the circumstances, what do we do?  Help others, is one answer.  I've been trying to do more of that.  Listen, obviously.  Take care of ourselves?  Do we do that?  Should we do that?  Is yoga OK?  Cups of tea?  Naps?  How about shouting, is that OK?
 
One thing I've learned over the years of being a white woman: we are so self-hating.  Nobody can hate us more than we hate ourselves.  Many of us, if we could shrink down to the size of a pin, if we could disappear altogether, we would do that.
 
But that is a cop-out.  When I'm mad at my husband for doing or saying something sexist, and he retreats into self-hatred, it makes me madder.  By yelling at himself, he is preventing me from yelling at him.  Then I have to turn around and reassure him.  He means well.  It is infuriating.
 
So maybe this answers my question.  White women should engage in self-care, whether or not they think they deserve it, if only so that others-- others who may be even wearier, with even fewer fucks to give at this point-- are not forced to do the caring for them.  Whatever, yoga on your own time.  Go sleep on your couch, just don't tell me about it (and yes, I'm aware of the inherent irony of this piece, squeezing away).  Eat avocadoes, while also bearing in mind the funniest protest sign ever.  Kvetch with friends.  And stop defensively flipping out every time someone points out that you are, like, the living stereotype of a liberal white woman.  That is what you are, own it.  And take care.

This is a bad time. 

President-elect Donald Trump, who did not realize he was going to have to staff the White House and come up with names for so many appointed positions, is busy finding the most ill-qualified and white-supremacist candidates available to supervise the executive branch of our government.

Controversy rages among our high school students, parents, teachers, and superintendent of schools about whether the constant student protests in the past week are worthy, permissible, or safe.  The superintendent, after a few days, puts out this message.

My dry cleaner has to reassure me.  "We will be okay," he says.  "We will organize."  I want to ask him: when?  where?  Is there a meeting in the back among the racks of shirts?  He is there six days a week, twelve hours a day.  
Lacking clear organization, I volunteer for everything at random.  I go to the PTA meeting.  I look up the date of my next city council meeting.  I put my name on lists that other people are organizing.  I write emails to the principal, other parents, the school superintendent.  I sign myself and my kid up for a seminar training women to run for public office.  I agree to sell tickets for my kid's school play.  I volunteer to make dinner for 45 kids, to be served during dress rehearsal.  I drive other teenagers home, give $2 (which is all the cash I have in my wallet) to the guy standing on the median, decide to buy a subscription to the New York Times.

I argue with white Facebook friends about racism.  I argue with Bernie Sanders supporters about Hillary Clinton.  I argue with a cook in my restaurant about whether Islam is an inherently terrorist religion.

Making pasta salad, as well as a green salad, for 45 people turns out to be a lot of work.  It takes about 3 hours, given that I have to boil water for pasta four separate times, blanch broccoli in a giant pot, and do lots of chopping, slicing, and grating.  Plus washing dishes.  In the end, there were four foil trays of pasta and two big bowls of tossed salad.  On the plus side, I managed to make all this food for about $75 in groceries, a good value compared to the catered or pizza dinners that other parents have brought.  That is less than $2 per person, and the food is healthy, with lots of vegetables, a little cheese, pasta and a balsamic-and-olive-oil dressing (plus lemon-and-olive-oil for the green salad).  My kid said that some students complained it was too healthy.  Fortunately for them, due to our current spirit of volunteerism, another parent brought sandwiches as well.

Vive la resistance.

​Finally, after a significant vacation and a lot of extra time spent at my restaurant job after my return, I have time to do some serious grocery shopping, and then actually make something from a recipe.  My first foray back into Real Cooking is the Strawberry, Balsamic & Olive Oil Breakfast Cake from Food52, posted 3+ years ago now.  I think it sounds delicious, but I talk to my mother on the phone while it is baking and she balks at the idea of balsamic vinegar in a cake.  Then she confesses that she balks at balsamic vinegar in general, which is obviously a giant error on her part, so I dismiss her opinion.  Has she ever had strawberries with balsamic vinegar, I ask her?  She hasn't. 

​The cake involves layering an entire pound of strawberries on the bottom of a round cake pan, pouring on a substantial quantity of balsamic reduction, and then layering the cake batter on top, batter which itself contains both buttermilk and more balsamic vinegar, for maximum tanginess.  Warning: bake this cake on top of a cookie sheet, because vinegary strawberry syrup will boil up and pour out the sides, and boy does that stuff smoke.

​Second warning: I don't really recommend baking this cake at all.  The quantity of strawberries on top is kind of excessive, and the amount of balsamic vinegar (3/4 cup in all) is really excessive.  The cake was quite moist, on the level of a pineapple upside-down cake, but most of that moisture consisted of a vinegar reduction: strange, sharp, and much more reminiscent of salad than a cake should be.  That said, my husband loved it.  Kid and I ate our slices-- it was not inedible, certainly-- but we lacked enthusiasm.  The bites with a lot of vinegary strawberries were especially difficult to get through.  If you do try this recipe, try halving the amount of berries and also-and-especially halving the balsamic syrup-- less topping might bring this cake into better balance.

Cake was for dessert, of course.   (Not breakfast.  It would be quite a... bracing... breakfast.)  Dinner was fresh corn-on-the-cob, little boiled potatoes from our CSA, and open-face egg salad sandwiches.

In the first half of August, kid and I went on a road trip through parts of the country where we have never before traveled.  We drove from the Washington, D.C. suburbs, where we live, down through Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, in order to visit friends in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Then we drove on into east Texas to see my former foster son, now grown, and his girlfriend at their home in Santa Fe, near Galveston.  On the way back, we returned through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

It was, in some ways, a different world: not only more desperately hot and humid than I'd imagined, but full of American flag clothing, churches in obscure denominations, shiny white trucks, billboards advertising Jesus, and... surprisingly few Trump signs.  That last made me wonder.  My kid was at times uncomfortable, nervous that they would be singled out for disapproval or, worse, confrontation, on the basis of their purple hair and unconventional gender presentation.  Nothing like that ever happened, though. 

The food was different, too.

Things we ate included: at least 3 meals at a Waffle House.  McDonald's ice cream cones.  Burger King milkshakes.  Fried crawfish po-boys.  Lots of french fries.  Fried catfish.  Steamed shrimp and crab.  Seafood boudin balls.  Something that I ignorantly referred to as "gumbo" but which was actually called "sausage, okra, and shrimp."  Crawfish etouffee.  An amazing caprese salad at a fancy cheese shop in New Orleans, with real bufala mozzarella.  Beignets and cafe au lait at the Cafe du Monde.  Actual gumbo.  A sort of crawfish etouffee- Eggs Benedict.  Pulled pork and more fried seafood, potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans at a barbecue joint in Texas.  Caramel apples covered in additional things like chocolate, marshmallows, and nuts.  Fried shrimp po-boys.  More french fries.  Subway sandwiches (twice) and chips.  Chicken, fried fish, corn fritters, mac & cheese, mashed potatoes from a supermarket deli in Louisiana (eaten in the car with the air conditioning running).  Pineapple soda, Cokes.  Several beers. (On this trip my child learned to like both unsweetened coffee and Coke.  They were also offered beer at least three times-- they declined-- and made their peace with stopping regularly at McDonald's.)  A number of biscuits.  Gross bagels from a motel, sausage and egg sandwich from a motel, Holiday Inn omelets.  Hot chili and lime Takis.   A very nice sushi dinner on a balcony overlooking a river in South Carolina.  Endless cups of bad coffee, an occasional apple or handful of baby carrots or cheese stick or packet of almonds purchased in desperation for something wholesome.

​My kid said they really liked the food in the South, particularly in Louisiana.  I myself feel that I could now go without more fried seafood for at least six months.  And, honestly, I don't really enjoy the plain steamed stuff much.  We never go for crabs here in Maryland.  Maybe I was spoiled by New England lobster and now can't appreciate anything else.  And, while I love french fries, I had enough to satisfy me for a long, long time.  (I could eat more biscuits, though.  I could always eat more biscuits.)

Reading back through the list of things we ate-- now almost two months later-- it sounds sort of decadent and amazing.  At the time, it was just cloying, overwhelming, like swimming in a vat of fry oil.

It's fall now, as of this writing.  But I thought I'd share a couple of photos to give you some inkling of how delightful our farm boxes have been this summer.  Here is a particularly photogenic example:

After ending the daily food diary, I found myself still taking photos of food, but having no text to accompany them.  

Oh, wait, that's really it.

I hadn't thought this through.  I wanted to illustrate a post with side-by-side comparisons of portion sizes in U.S. restaurants (and other food establishments) vs. portion sizes in other countries.  But, of course, I don't have a source of those side-by-side illustrations, and I don't find them readily available elsewhere.  Clearly somebody needs to pay me to do some international travel and take pictures of my food.

So, we do what we can.  Let's just talk portion size a little bit.  I've recently complained about the insanely huge portion sizes I received the other day at a traditional American diner, on an occasion when I was deliberately trying to order something small.  Imagine if I had tried to maximize my value!  What a platter I could have had!

It seemed to me that the best way to gain perspective on our American restaurant portions was to consult the impressions of international travelers and freshly minted residents who may be new to our overstuffed way of life.  My reading immediately became anecdotal and complicated.  However, one theme immediately leapt out: behind our backs, foreigners joke among themselves about how "everything is bigger in America." (That's a link to a 5-minute video of young people browsing the produce section for the first time at an American mega-supermarket. Oh dear, oh dear.)  Not only platters are bigger, but onions, cars, houses, and waistlines.  As well as the country itself, whose sheer land area defeats the imagination of travelers from many smaller nations.

But, definitely, platters.  And drinks.  Because McDonald's gives us a standardized product against which to measure relative portions, much has been made of the difference in soda cup size among nations.  In a short and unnecessarily manic video, the Daily Mail shows us that U.S. "large"-sized cups are 1.5 times the size of those sold in Japan.  "'For soda, the glasses [in the U.S.] are huge," says [Anne-Pierre] Pickaert, a native of France. 'It's like a vase. I can't see how somebody can be so thirsty. [...] A milk container here looks like a petrol container in France,' says Pickaert, 'even the way it has that handle.'  In France, the biggest [milk container] you can get is a liter and a half."

International visitors also express shock over the American custom of taking food home from restaurants in doggy bags (a custom that is only possible because we routinely serve more food than many people can eat).  A French restaurant-goer: "What surprised me in several states of USA was, over volume of food, very low price, & the special amazing culture to take the reminder of food well packed to home! this is something unimaginable in France even if the food was much more than habit."

Another way that Americans are encouraged to eat more: buy in bulk.  And the thing is, we are so accustomed to this cultural phenomenon that we do not even notice that it might seem irrational to others.  For instance, this Indian immigrant says: ​

Well, of course! we say as Americans.  Of course unit prices decline as the size of the package gets larger, or store specials sometimes offer a lower price if you buy 2 or 3 of the same item.  That's the way sales works!  But why?  Clearly this Indian observer expects unit price to stay consistent, independent of quantity.  There's no reason that is not perfectly logical.  And the economic incentive to buy larger quantities of food almost certainly translates to greater consumption and portion sizes once the food is brought home.  We have often commented on this phenomenon in our family: if we have what we perceive as an overabundance of a certain food in our house, we will consume it like crazy, thereby at least partially negating any cost savings.

Moving away a bit from portion size, international visitors comment on other aspects of the American diet that lead to overconsumption of calories.  Asian travelers, in particular, complain about the calorie-dense nature of American food.  A Chinese nutritionist who had recently relocated to the U.S. said "'I couldn't get full [...] I'm used to the bulk in the Chinese diet'— clear soup with a lot of vegetables, for instance, that lend satiety without adding a lot of calories."  A skinny Chinese international student was astounded by the amount of sugar on offer: "The desserts in America are much sweeter than I expected before I actually came here and tasted it. Some sweets are like choking on sugar and American chefs are really generous on using sugar. [...] Looking back, I was amazed by how sweet my shake from Dairy Queen was compared to the same thing that I got in China; same with the regular cookies, donuts, etc. But by now I have totally gotten used to the sweetness and enjoy it."

​"Choking on sugar."  It is almost painful to hear that, and yet I know she is right.  When I have given up sugar for a few weeks or months on a cleanse diet, the first sweets that I reintroduce seem almost shockingly, unpleasantly sugary.  Everyone knows that we can become desensitized to salty tastes, so that some people like their food very, very salty; we don't talk as much about how we are desensitized to sweetness.  When the Korean immigrants I work with offer me something they define as dessert, sometimes my American palate cannot even discern sweetness in it.  On the flip side, the fancy cakes and cookies I sometimes bring to the restaurant probably overwhelm them.  The heavy-set Salvadorean cook eats that stuff up, as much as I will bring her, but the skinny Koreans take a tiny slice, smile, and say they'll "have it with coffee" (meaning: later, and diluted with some non-sweet taste to make it bearable).

(Incidentally.  There is a large Salvadorean immigrant population here in my area, and, man, do those people have a lot of bakeries and pastry shops.  And pupuserias.  Mainly serving other Salvadorean immigrants.  So I can't claim that the U.S. is the only country with such a calorie-dense food culture.  But even the Salvadorean sweet buns, of which there are many varieties, seem to me only "lightly sweet" compared to your typical American pastry.)

Finally, I will leave you with the words of another, possibly Brazilian?, commenter, who focuses on the overall infantilization of American food culture: "Infantile and convenient food (and I'm not talking about the fast food): no bones, no spines, hardly ever find an entire fish, it's mostly filets, very little diversity (little lamb, or duck, hardly ever rabbit, and for fish it's almost always tuna, salmon, haddock and bass), seedless everything. A lot of things (not desserts) are sweetened, like honey smoked, glazed, etc. Even desserts sometimes look like 5-y.o. were left alone in the kitchen: cookie dough ice cream, oreo cheese cake..."

I will attest that I am, as charged, by-and-large too lazy to eat fish with spines or grapes with seeds.  Even watermelon is a drag.  Does this mark me as quintessentially American: a nation of elementary-aged picky eaters who have grown up to consume adult quantities of fish sticks and "baby" carrots and ice cream sundaes?  I sell plenty of chicken tenders to adults in my restaurant, lots of macaroni and cheese.  There are people who want us to butter their toast for them, or cut their sandwiches into quarters.  Maybe this guy has a point.  Everybody's a baby in America.  A giant baby.  

This childlike food culture idea is making me rethink the whole smoothies-for-breakfast habit we have established lately.  Could there be a more labor-free food delivery system?  Fruits and vegetables you don't have to cut or peel yourself while eating, raw greens that don't need to be cooked or dressed, no utensils required... heck, you don't even have to chew.  I recently bought us some stainless steel straws, in case sipping is too burdensome.  Giant babies.

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while.  Somehow I never feel like getting around to it.  But yesterday morning I read that it was "World Eating Disorders Action Day"-- whatever that means, really-- and so it seems like the right time.  Time to get it over with.

Ladies.  (And gentlemen, but I don't feel qualified to write about gentlemen.)  Is there anyone, at least anyone of our generation (I'm 44), who has NOT, at some point in their lives, developed fucked-up eating patterns (or starving patterns, or purging patterns, or food-obsessional patterns) that would qualify as an eating disorder?  Obviously, some of us have suffered more intensely, or endangered our health more seriously, than others.  But, on a very large scale, something went terribly wrong with the way whole generations of women interacted with food and nourishment. 

Here's a quick history of me.  When I was a little girl-- about 10 years old-- I started counting calories.  I had some baby fat, the kind that hangs on right before you hit puberty and sprout into a lovely teenager.  Most of my friends were a bit older, and I think I felt that, like them, I should already be a lovely teenager.  I don't remember anybody pointing out  that I, too, would probably become lovely in a couple of years.  Probably they didn't really get what my problem was: that I still looked soft and formless in a way that didn't fit right in designer jeans or bikinis.

Among my mom's recipe books on the shelf, she had a paperback that purported to tell you exactly how many calories were in things.  How many in one chicken breast.  How many in 1/2 a cup of ice cream.  How many in one grape.  This was part two of the problem.  The grownup women of this period were collecting diet books, going to Gloria Stevens at the mall to have their thighs jiggled, and trying to cook without fat.  Ultimately, the grownups moved on from these trends, but-- unbeknownst to them-- many of them have daughters who now know, off the top of their heads, exactly how many calories are in everything.  Just like the capital cities of the U.S., which I learned at about the same time, this information is in my brain forever. 

When my mom tried to diet with her calorie-counting book, she aimed for 1200 calories a day, so I did too.  I remember evenings when, looking for an after-dinner snack, I parceled out my remaining 33 or 56 allotted calories into a certain number of peapods or strawberries.  1200 exactly, that was the goal.  I don't know if my mom was this precise in her own diet, but I doubt it.  Calorie counting fitted in nicely with my general tendency towards monitoring, measuring, regimentation.  I am still this way.  At 44, I have figured out some ways to make it work for me, but compulsive monitoring is still a beast that needs to be carefully tamed.

So... yeah, I write this blog in which I record absolutely everything I eat.  That is totally different.

Anyway.  Back to 10.  I probably overestimate in my mind how much of the time I was "on a diet" at this age.  Because there were also plenty of times I came home from school and whipped up a quick bowl of "cookie dough" (really just the flour and sugar and milk, I rarely bothered with butter or eggs), and ate that while I watched my soaps and late-afternoon comedy reruns.  Or ice cream.  Lots and lots of Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream.  Afterwards, my beloved cat Louie licked the bowl.

I was a pretty enough teenager and young woman, neither fat nor thin.  I would give a lot to be able to go back and appreciate the way I looked then, enjoy that body while I had it.  But, like most of us, I spent much more energy on hate and disgust.  With my short, solid build, my thighs looked thick in a bathing suit.  I had a weak double chin in profile.  My hips were wide in relation to my waist, making jeans-shopping difficult in the juniors' stores.

I knew I looked more or less okay, though.  So the disgust was about much more than looks.  It was about lack of self-control, the essential wrongness of eating secret candy bars and chips from the vending machines at college (I hid them in my shirt so people wouldn't know how many I was buying), the shame of whole pints of Ben & Jerry's.  I realize that my version of binging was pretty tame (a whole box of macaroni and cheese?  Two apple fritters from the supermarket?).  There was no purging, only guilt.  But the pattern remained, throughout high school and college.  There was the bad, uncontrolled girl, the weak girl, who ate ice cream and giant bowls of buttered popcorn and, that one time, hoarded an entire birthday cake and giant fruit basket in her dorm room and didn't go to class or the dining hall for a week, preferring to stay in the dark and reread Jane Eyre.  And then there was the virtuous girl, who tried to undo all that by diets and resolutions, by choosing, on one occasion when she went to her mom's house for a meal, to have only a single glass of milk for dinner.  Which one of these was the real girl?  Oh surely, surely the former. 

For me, as for so many people, none of this was front-and-center, not really.  The drama of food was a backdrop to the drama of life, making me feel vaguely bad about myself and filling up the empty corners of time with little binges and little pledges.

And then there came anorexic autumn. 

What happened was simple enough.  I got sad.  First, I graduated from college.  A summer ensued, a summer of drifting and flailing.  Plans were made, plans cancelled.  I attended half of a Chinese poetry course, then dropped it.  My best friend and I admitted we were not actually going to move together to Portland, Oregon.  I drove around Maine and Vermont, looking for a town I wanted to move to, by myself.  I took a road trip with my college boyfriend, who was an emotional leech I couldn't wait to be rid of and couldn't seem to unequivocally dump.  Then, I was alone in the house, my parents' house.  They had gone away on some international trip, for several weeks.  I was meant to pack up in the meantime, drive to Brunswick, Maine, find an apartment.

Instead, some other stuff happened.  I hooked up with an old boyfriend who lived in town, finally dumped college guy once and for all.  The hooking up was more emotionally gripping for me than for old boyfriend.  It made me a) not want to leave town, b) not want to leave his couch, and c) feel very sad when it became clear he was not serious about me, as usual.  Also.  If I was not leaving town, I had to find a fucking job.  All the stress and sadness made me not feel like eating.  Actually, it became a struggle just to ingest something, to chew and swallow.  The new routine, while I sat in my parents' empty house, in my stepfather's favorite armchair, became this: coffee, coffee, coffee.  Cook a frozen burrito for lunch, cut it in half, eat half very slowly.  Save the other half to choke down for dinner.  Coffee, coffee.  The other half of the frozen burrito.  Cry.

I found a job through the unemployment office.  It was a terrible job, working nights in a basement in the dark, answering phones.  Soon it also involved two other factors: 1) sleeping with my boss, and 2) an awareness that the business was somehow a cover for something else.  Something was wrong-- wrong with the business, and wrong with the boss, who carried a little pistol in a fancy holster under his jacket.  I'd wondered why he always went into another room to take off his clothes.  This is a true story.

All of it didn't do much for my appetite.  I'd bring lunches to work that consisted of things like: 3 cherry tomatoes, a few slices of cucumber, and 6 saltines.  But I skipped most meals.  Occasionally my coworkers would send me out for fast food (for them) and I'd randomly eat a bacon cheeseburger.  But mostly I lived on coffee and adrenaline.  And I lost a lot of weight, along with a certain amount of hair.  All kinds of jeans and other clothes fit perfectly now, even those in the juniors' section.  Even while miserable in my sinister job, first dating and then not-dating my confusing and well-armed boss, pining for my erstwhile boyfriend who wasn't interested in anything besides hooking up, and facing an entire adult life full of uncertainty-- even while looking in the bathroom mirror at the way my hair had gone flat, and my skin dry and colorless-- I celebrated my weight loss.  It was a victory pulled from the jaws of defeat.
​
After a few months, I left that job for something healthier, and the ability to eat also gradually returned.  But now emotional not-eating was part of my arsenal, along with emotional eating, and it was a weapon I could sometimes use to deal with pain.  I still got to express my feelings somatically, but not-eating had the advantage of making me feel strong, not weak; virtuous, not guilty.  Chaos, stress, and sadness, bad break-up?  I could go the ascetic route, eat very little, sleep on the floor, refuse to indulge in ordinary comforts until I was ready to feel comforted.  I learned to moderate not-eating so that I could cast myself as waif-like but not become ill or unattractive.  In my mid-twenties, cigarettes made an inevitable entrance.  By then, I ate what I wanted, but at unreasonably long intervals, and smoking (and, still, coffee) filled the gaps.  Smoking was perfect because it was both emotional eating and not-eating.  Oral fixation?  Check.  Waifish?  Check.  Zero calories?  Check.

Fortunately for me and my health, in my late twenties I also got married and then got pregnant.  I quit smoking.  I started eating more.  I gained 10 pounds at first, then another 70 pounds  in nine months of pregnancy.

As a mom and a woman running a household, my relationship with food changed utterly then.  Suddenly, food was a resource to be managed for the good of all; it was a source of positive nourishment; for a family of four living on a low income, it was not to be taken for granted.  I stopped engaging in either emotional eating or emotional not-eating.  I ate what was available to eat and what would not take key resources out of the mouths of my family.  And I ate regularly, in order to keep my energy levels consistent, and function as a parent, worker and student all at the same time.  It finally became apparent to me that food was fuel.  Food made milk for my baby; a banana or piece of cheese kept me from losing my shit when I was forced to be awake at 2 am.  My then-husband came home on his lunch break and fueled his insanely high metabolism with eggs, peanut butter, and cereal.  Our foster teenager asked nothing more than a bottomless supply of ramen noodle packets, and this worried me, because he wasn't getting proper nutrition.  What kind of hypocrisy was this?

Most of the 70 pounds fell right back off again, but the new attitude stayed.  I was still neither fat nor thin.  I was still short and sturdy.  But there were now so many things more important than my weight. 

But wait... wasn't I still obsessed with food?  I can't remember precisely when I first decided that I would cook every single recipe in the cookbooks I owned (an impossible task), starting with... which one?  Maybe this one.  I read book after book about organic gardening and farming.  I began to write regularly about food politics on the progressive blog Daily Kos.  I thought about food.  I watched documentaries about food.  After I split up with my first husband and had more disposable income of my own, I bought better quality food, joined a CSA, spent three years as a professional cheesemonger.  I worked out regularly and ate pretty much whatever I enjoyed.

That was a (relatively) healthy time.

And now... I am not sure.  Some things have changed.  I still like cooking my way through cookbooks (okay, feel compelled to cook my way through cookbooks); I belong to a CSA and buy high-quality food for the most part.  I write about food still, though in a different way.  But middle-aged spread means I have gone back to worrying about my weight, and I don't work out or run as much, and I am prone to going on "cleanses" or special diets (while claiming they are healthful diets and not for weight loss).  A focus on nutrition or food-as-medicine, and in particular our national focus on eliminating certain foods (sugar, gluten, dairy) has become a preoccupation to replace counting calories (though, shh, I still make approximations of calories in my head).  In extreme cases, this preoccupation even has a name: orthorexia.

People!  Please take note of this.  I find that almost no one I know has heard of it, even though everyone knows, in a sense, what I mean.  But I am a waitress in a town filled with health nuts and vegetarians, and I can definitely affirm that this disorder is becoming more prevalent every moment.  It is encouraged, too, in the media, who have largely replaced a discourse about the desirability of thinness with one about the desirability of healthy or "clean" eating.  It doesn't matter what exactly your obsession is, whether calories or organics or gluten (and yes, I know some people really have celiac disease-- my sister, for example)-- if you are spending all your time thinking about what you put in your mouth, and don't have a good medical reason to do so, you are flirting with an eating disorder.

When my husband is depressed and my first instinct is to nag him about whether he's been drinking too much milk, my perspective may be skewed.

So here I am, with my blog (almost) entirely about food, and my time-consuming daily food diary, and my compulsive approach to recipes, chronicling the story of how I finally developed a healthy relationship with food.  Eating is important.  Yes.  But is it that important?  A question I should remember to ask myself periodically.  If you have bothered to read this far, perhaps you should too.  Happy (day after) World Eating Disorders Action Day.

love, your host

*I have just discovered that the famous "who among us" construction that was used to paint John Kerry as an elitist in 2004 was a total fabrication by Maureen Dowd.

An hour or two ago, I was looking at Yelp reviews for the restaurant Traders, which we visited this weekend in Chesapeake Beach.  Traders has 3 stars on Yelp (which is not very good) and was panned by me.  Imagine my delight when I came across the following review, from last month: 

A drink cup lid!  I love it!  I noted in my post that the lights were kept strangely low in this restaurant, so low that even the waitress was complaining about it.  Perhaps, if the lighting were better, the server (or the cook!) might have noticed the drink cup lid before serving it to the customer.  It's these little details that matter.

​So, I now feel inspired to find and post some of the best-worst Yelp reviews of places we have visited on this blog and been unimpressed by.  (Out of fundamental loyalty, I will leave out my own restaurant, which has some doozies of its own, believe me.) 

These are just a few links to articles that have stuck in my mind over the past few weeks.

What's for Breakfast?  How About Some Monsanto Weed Killer?
​Measurable levels of glyphosate (aka Roundup) show up in almost half of breakfast foods-- including organic breakfast foods-- tested in this study.  The cage-free organic eggs they tested exceeded federal limits for this chemical.

US Government to Crack Down on Imported Olive Oil Fraud
I guess I missed the memo.  Apparently regulators have been aware for some years that cheaper, nutritionally inferior, or adulterated oils are being passed off and bottled as extra-virgin olive oil by foreign producers, often under the influence of the Italian mafia.

Chobani Could Make Some of Its Workers Millionaires
I had mistakenly assumed that Chobani was just another brand name under the big umbrella of one of the handful of big food companies, like Kraft or General Mills.  Not so.  Chobani was founded only 11 years ago by Hamdi Ulukaya, a former sheep dairy farmer from Turkey, who moved to NYC in 1994 to study, and ended up buying an old Kraft yogurt plant with an SBA loan.  And his yogurt is taking over the world.  I feel a little better now about buying it so regularly.

If You Are What You Eat, America is Allrecipes
Worth reading just for this: "...at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals. The site is awash with close-ups of sludgy-looking soups; photos of stuffed peppers that look like they’ve been captured in the harsh, unforgiving light of a public washroom; and shot after shot documenting the myriad ways that melted cheese can congeal."

I think of that "public washroom" remark every time I post flash photography on this site.
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