Hello everyone!
I have been in Italy for the last two weeks, stuffing my gapping maw with whatever pasta and seafood came near it (and wine – so much wine) so I have been sadly absent from this wonderful place. I also haven’t been cooking much, obviously, so while I gear up for my next great recipe to share, I thought I’d swing by and talk a little about my feeeeeeeelings. I’m not big on the whole hugs-and-special-snowflakes bullshit, but food, and the way we feel about it, is extremely important.
When it comes to cooking and eating, we have a million different factors influencing our experience. Personal preference, dietary restrictions, health and nutrition concerns, convenience, body image issues, good science, bad science, cultural mores, emotional and psychological needs: all of these come into play when we try to figure out what to put in our faces. Food is never simple; it is one of the most profoundly important and complex parts of our lives.
Understandably, we have a lot of feelings about food. We use food to comfort, to console, to express love or security; we have intense emotional reactions to specific food experiences. Every time you eat watermelon, you think of spending a summer day at the beach. Turkey sends a chill through your spine; you can practically smell the bite of cold in the air as summer slips into fall which settles into winter. I could name a million generalities and you, I’m sure, could come up with a million specificities: particular and highly personal experiences of foods and the feelings that they leave you with.
The one thing that I cannot condone, though, is food judgment. Food, in itself, is never bad or good: it is merely a collection of nutrients, macro and micro, and our feelings about them can be surprisingly damaging, harmful and cruel. Food is never the enemy.
Let me break it down: have you ever seen a chocolate cake touted as ‘sinfully delicious’? Or heard women (or men) talk about how they were ‘bad’ on the weekend and ate a bacon cheeseburger? Or how people on diets feel proud that they were ‘good’ and ate a handful of kale for lunch? This kind of loaded language – the language of judgment and morality – has no place in food. Calling food good or bad, choices right or wrong, whole food groups ‘dangerous’ or ‘safe’, well, it fucks us up. And frankly, my dear, we don’t need any more fucking up.
Our diet culture labels certain foods as good or bad based on nutritional information and popular theory. Unfortunately, food science is notoriously bad and the ‘rules’ about what is healthy or unhealthy change all the time. In the Western world we’ve gone through cycles of food theory: either low-carb is healthy or high-carb is; either we’re supposed to eat plenty of meat or none; either we avoid fats or stop worrying about them, because the old rule that “eating fat makes you fat” is no longer in vogue.
Our feelings of guilt or satisfaction follow whatever rhetoric is popular at the moment. Take, for example, an apple. In a low-fat paradigm, the apple is a healthy choice: morally superior, and we should feel good about it. In a low-carb paradigm, the apple was a terrible mistake: we’ve fucked up, ingested too much sugar, and now we must pay the price in remorse. In a ‘paleo’ paradigm, the apple is fine: our ancestors ate in thousands of years ago, and therefore it is an acceptable food item. Pat yourself on the back, kids.
Problem is, it’s the same damn apple.
We do this all the time, with everything; approving the salad, frowning in consternation at the deep-fried Mars bar; chuckling indulgently when our friend orders the seafood Alfredo – it’s alright, she’s going to the gym later, she’ll work it off, make repentance for the calories and cream and fat and salt and carbs. Well, thank goodness.
The fact is, food is nothing to feel guilty about. It just is, and it exists independently of all the weird psycho-social ways we use it to make ourselves crazy. Nobody is ‘bad’ for eating chocolate. Nobody is ‘good’ for eating a salad. These are not moral choices; they are innately neutral. Yet this neutrality is almost impossible to accept: we want some moral code to live by, some guiding principles to keep us feeling righteous and safe, but safety is an illusion and morality, especially of the nutritional variety, is absolutely relative.
Now, certainly, there are times when you might have a legitimate reason to feel guilty or ‘bad’ about food: maybe you’re allergic to something, but you ate it anyway, and now you feel ‘bad’ because you know it will cause a flare-up or discomfort or whatever. Maybe you are genuinely appalled at factory farming conditions but then you got drunk and ate a cheeseburger from McDonalds and now you feel guilty because you don’t want to support that industry. Those are fine, perfectly valid reason to feel a little guilty, if you really want to. But if you’re living inside a diet paradigm – “I’m bad because I ate chocolate and chocolate is high in fat; I’m bad because I ate a piece of bread and bread is high in carbohydrates; I’m bad because I ate a steak and that much protein is bad for you” – you’re being kind of ridiculous.
Food paradigms change all the time; food doesn’t. The truth is, you need a balance of all three macro nutrients – carbohydrates, protein and fat – and an assortment of micro-nutrients – vitamins, minerals – to continue existing. Beyond that, everything else is speculation and fad. Today, red meat kills: tomorrow it’s hailed as the cure for cancer. Fish lowers blood pressure, fish is full of mercury. Apples are good for digestion, apples will spike your blood sugar and trigger an insulin response.
So, where does that leave us? And specifically, where does that leave me, writing this food blog for you, and thinking, all the time, about all the layers of meaning and value that food gives us? Well, here is my philosophy, in its briefest form:
If you want the damn thing, eat the damn thing, and give up feeling bad about it.
If you want a cheeseburger, eat a cheeseburger. If you want a salad, eat a salad. If you want ice cream, have ice cream. If you want soup, make soup. If you want wine, drink wine. If you want to eat a handful of kale, eat a handful of kale, and then let it go.
Before anyone gets mad at me: I am not suggesting that everyone run out and eat thirty donuts a day, every day, until they explode. I am not suggesting that a diet made up entirely of fast food because ‘that’s what you want’ is a good idea. Like I said: you need a balance of nutrients to survive and be happy, and you may have a cultural or personal reason to avoid certain foods. Yet most people, even when given the option to eat thirty donuts a day, will chose not to.
Many of us have this idea that if we relax around food, if we feed ourselves with love and give ourselves permission to eat what we want, then we will eat nothing but candy and junk food until we slip like a greasy manatee into our early graves. We have to police food, we need a moral code to guide us or our natural gluttony would grow so enormous that nothing could ever stop it. And for some, all of these conflicting messages about health and food and morality have been so ingrained that they reality of what they want has been completely lost in the noise.
Think about it: would you really want to eat candy all day, every day? Of course not: you’d get sick of it. You’d be sick of McDonalds if you ate it every day: you’d start craving a salad, just to taste something different! We are not, as an organism, designed to eat ourselves to death: no organism could be. Many people are surprised to find that when they give themselves permission to eat literally anything, they don’t just eat pizza all day.
Anyway, all this comes back to why and how I am writing this blog: as a celebration of food, delicious and wonderful and full of fat and carbs and protein and vitamins and minerals, and utterly without judgment. You will see many recipes in here that are high in fat and many that are high in calories. I am not going to apologise for eating the way that I do, but be reassured that sometimes I just have a bowl of cereal or an apple or some yogurt. Some days I will eat a steak the size of my face. I have learned to listen to my body, to feed it the things that taste good and that make me feel good, and I will share them with you. Hopefully they will taste good to you too, and give you inspiration for making the things that you love and that feed your body and your soul. Hopefully, they won’t make anybody feel bad, because frankly, my dear, we have enough to feel bad about.
And ultimately, if you feel the need to control or monitor or track or measure your food for whatever reason, I wish you the best of luck. I have tried once in my adult life to diet, and it made me crazy and distracted and stressed, so I would never recommend it for anyone else, but if it’s what you want to do, do it. My way doesn’t have to be your way, and if your way works for you, more power to you.
What I hope, more than anything, and what I want for everyone is a way of eating and cooking and existing around food that gives us more joy and freedom instead of more judgement and guilt. Food is a pleasure that everyone deserves and that no one, ever, deserves to feel bad about.
Happy eating!
Me.
