the Feminine Food Condition

Well, there certainly have been some interesting articles about food in news sources over the last week. NUVO's informative article about factory livestock farming had me, as expected, nodding my head in agreement and admiring Hoosier advocates for healthier farming practices. The widespread reporting on KFC's new double down "sandwich" has me doing less head-nodding, but such is life. What has me thinking the most and reflecting on my own life is the NYTimes Magazine article "The Fat Trap." This article, which is essentially about the hand-wringing challenge of trying to raise a daughter who is healthy and does not possess a "complicated" relationship with food, made me really sad.

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Not sure if this approach is advocated by Orenstein or me.

Essentially, Peggy Orenstein writes a lot about the Obama's public conversations about the health and weight of their daughters, the statistics of both eating disorders and obesity, a little about the problem of Berkley moms (why not dads?) being overly competitive and judgmental about food sources and a little bit more about her own attempts to raise a daughter who "watches her size and accepts her body". Her approach is a "conscious antidiet" and "studied unconcern" when dealing with food and her weight, tossing out the scale and not fetishizing food. But, despite these efforts, she still has a six-year-old daughter asking her to stay slim. 

This is all just depressing for me, as a woman who loves food and who tries each day to make food a health or enjoyment choice and not a moral choice. I made it through years of childhood dance classes, recitals and competition as a perfectionist kid who, amazingly, never adopted a lot of the diet dysfunction of many dancers who surrounded me. I also grew up in a house where we had lots of food choices, mostly healthy, and with parents who seldom, if ever, commented on people's appearances. Though my dad ate lots of junk food and took me along to eat with him, we always had fruit around, too. And none of our choices felt morally coded.

To be honest, I've usually been a little bit on the "rounder" side of healthy, maybe because I love food, maybe because I'm less active than I'd like to be. I've had moments where I've been unhappy about how I look, but in the end, I'm most unhappy that I care so much. What I've found as an adult is that it's hard to spend much time with talented, accomplished, whipsmart women without hearing a lot about diets or calories. I've also found, at times, that it's hard not to join in. I'm not a mother, might not ever be, but I do know that I don't want the girls I know to spend their energy on worrying about looks, obsessing about the scale, or experimenting with unhealthy diets. There's much more to life.

I would really like to live in a world where we would address issues of women's weight as health issues, not as moral issues. And I'd like us to begin seeing boys' and girls' health on equal terms. If we want girls to stop pleading with their mothers to remain not-fat, then we need to realize that this is in many ways a gender issue and one that women tend to self-perpetuate. We also need to recognize that two parents are involved in raising kids, typically, and that it's not just up to mothers to help kids develop healthy relationships with food and exercise.