My book this week was recommended by a mentor from high school, who after hearing how much I had enjoyed The Vegetarian by Han Kang, told me that this absolutely had to be my next read. It wasn’t what I had planned on as my last read but I found it at Last Words Book and Press in downtown Olympia after a failed search for several other books, and for the low price of $2.50, I concluded it was probably fate. I have previously read two other books by Margret Atwood, The Handmaids Tale and The Testaments, which are her more well-known works due to their topicality and TV adaptations, and Atwood herself is in my eyes one of the authors that will define this time period.
The blurb is incredibly short with just four full sentences, but I can understand why it may have been recommended to follow The Vegetarian. The main character is finding herself unable to eat following her engagement and feels like she herself is being consumed. But that is really all we get for the description, giving me very little to work with as far as guiding questions in the readings. Knowing that her eating patterns change following her engagement, I will look for ways her relationship with her fiance may mirror her relationship with food, as well as the way those around her respond to her loss of appetite. I will also look at the way her relationship with her fiance may make her feel “consumed” and how food and identity overlap thereafter.
I also want to identify some key questions surrounding my learning process this quarter and how food and pleasure and reading and pleasure have cooked together in this ILC. I want to use these questions not just for this weeks and next weeks reflections, but also to guide my final presentation and self-evaluation. But before that I want to add a note about my learning disabilities and how they have impacted these last few quarters, and what has come into play over the last 8 weeks. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 13, and finally at 21 I have been prescribed some ADHD meds that actually help me. Realizing the impact my ADHD has had on my college career after just a few days on these meds has really given me a new perspective on pleasure in academics, and makes me realize how many of these problems could have been avoided if I had been presented with ADHD meds well the first time. I pushed back against my meds when I was younger because I didn’t have a say in starting them, and much like introducing a child to a new food, after being pushed and pushed and pushed I began to detest the idea of medication altogether. Side by side I am healing my relationship with both food and academics, but more and more I can identify places where neuro-divergent people are more likely to experience struggles around either, and how many ways the world is not set up for us.
As I read I want to make notes of what invokes feelings of pleasure, and where in my reading and reflections I experience the most pleasure. I want to identify ways in which my reading patterns and pleasure from reading have changed over the quarter and how it parallels my relationship with food.
Post Reading Reflection
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood follows Marian, a woman in her mid-twenties who finds herself losing her appetite following her engagement. Throughout the book Marian interacts with multiple characters that present different ideas of what her identity should look like, with a heavy focus on her “feminine identity”. Her long-time friend Clara seems to be less and less of herself as she prepares for her third child while internally despising the loss of her freedom, her roommate Ainsley is determined to have a child without a father, claiming her feminine duty was to have a child but that a husband was not necessary. Then there is her fiance Peter, who seems sweet but cares more for the idea of a wife than a family than he seems to care about Marian herself. Following their engagement, the book shifts from the first to the third person, a metaphor for Marians’ own loss of identity and disconnection from the story. She truly notices her change in appetite at dinner with Peter, watching him devour his steak puts her off the rest of her meal as she becomes disgusted with the idea of meat.
Her eating patterns change throughout the book as food coincides with negative emotions and stories. After a story of a live chicken in a friend’s eggshell, she won’t eat eggs, and one by one foods are crossed off her list until all she is consuming is milk and vitamins. Meanwhile she has met a graduate student named Duncan, who is incredibly honest often to the point of unkindness. Despite her engagement to Peter she is quickly attracted to Duncan, and he seems to counterbalance the many voices trying to influence her identity as he is wholeheartedly invested in the present moment and his own enjoyment of it, seeming unbothered by any consequences that could follow Marian.
The switch in perspective the book is written in and her loss of appetite go hand in hand when parallelling her relationship with Peter. As her fiance further smothers her image of her identity and ideas of her future she begins to lose touch with her feelings of personhood and soon ignores the needs of her body allowing it to deteriorate with her relationship with food. By the end of the book Marian is convinced that her fiance is trying to devour her, to destroy her. She bakes a cake of herself in a bikini and offers it to him to eat instead. He refuses it, quickly leaving and effectively ending the engagement. Her appetite returns and she hungrily eats the cake, with the final chapter switching back to first person.
The reading itself was a pleasant experience, as the quarter has progressed I have found myself falling back into wanting to avoid my reading, a little overwhelmed with academic dread, but once I start I always get the pleasure and satisfaction from reading that inspired this ILC. Pleasure itself is at the center of not just this ILC but has been a key theme in much of my past food studies work at Evergreen, playing a huge part in studying food and social-emotional well-being. The avoidance of something that brings one pleasure, such as reading or eating, is always going to connect back to some social-emotional experience that applies some kind of fear or repulsion to the act that brings pleasure. Months ago I used a quote about an eggplant and the way we are introduced to new foods as a comparison to the way we treat food and social dieting as a whole. The idea behind the comparison was to examine the way that our initial and past experiences with food transfer over time and are also exaggerated in the health industry, as well as to question how much of that behavior is nature vs nurture. The eggplant metaphor fits in perfectly with pleasure and reading, as well as the way I used it in past quarters. Getting pleasure from reading is something that can be developed with similar positive means as trying new foods, as well as something that often begins to deteriorate in teenage years as it becomes mandatory for school, and more outside stressors are applied.
My own relationship with food is something I try to be very open about as I hope it will help me evaluate where I am and what I need as well as possibly help others who may feel similarly. Similarly, I have tried to be very open about my history with reading, academic trauma, and pleasure in learning. In doing this I have noticed that while I constantly allude that the healing process for both could be similar, I personally don’t practice what I preach, and approach them very differently. While I was excited for a chance to heal my relationship with reading, there is much more reluctance around my journey with eating. After thinking about it for a while I came to the conclusion that while healing my journey with reading was something that felt highly encouraged, I equated healing my relationship with food as gaining back the weight I lost over the last few years, something defiantly not societally encouraged. I do not have perfect insight on this yet but it makes me wonder what a society in which we celebrated achievements of food and self as much as grade awards and academia would be like?
I will be uploading a last reflection on food reading, and pleasure in the learning process as well as my final presentation and self-evaluation by the end of week 10!