How Food Makes Us Feel: Consuming Digital Texts W23

Below is my final essay! Thank you for joining me this quarter.

My winter quarter research was inspired by my original and arguably vague question “How does food make us feel?”. Brought about after a quarter of studying the intersections of food and gender, I was ready to look further into what it is about food that can inspire such visceral reactions of all kinds, joy, disgust, even fear. These reactions are one some level, an unavoidable part of our human chemistry. But alongside nature we must also look at the ways in which we have been nurtured with food, and the ways we ourselves have nurtured our relationships with food.  

Combined with a query on the ways in which we absorb texts differently when read digitally, I used thirteen individual sources throughout the course of the project, a variety of books, research studies, scholarly journals, and published articles, each holding their place in the overall story of how food makes us feel. I wanted to begin to understand the relationship between food and feeling, and food writing in the digital and our response. I used ten individual sources throughout the course of the project, a variety of books, research studies, scholarly journals, and published articles, each holding their place in the overall story of how food makes us feel. 

My first reading was the second chapter of Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn, the text I use that pertains to digital reading and annotation. Using the hypothis.is software to annotate my texts over the past year or so has been an experience I have really enjoyed, it has made it’s way not just into my ILC but into most academic work I have done in recent months. This particular chapter was specifically on the comparison of a physical book vs a digital text in academic settings. 

  Cohns research, both that she has read and conducted, proves that digital reading is not the preferred method among students, there is an affinity for it among certain kinds of texts, those that are considered more analytical. Students have a preference, seemingly not based on the length, age, or subject of the text, it was more the format and the state of mind needed to consume it. As well as the identified academic preferences, there was also an emotional attachment that went further than grades. I wrote in my weekly update about my sister Spencer and her love of books old and new, she would be one among the devastated if we lost access to our physical libraries. She agrees with my final takeaway from this chapter, which is that we must chose the way we read our texts in the context of the text we are reading, but that for sake of record and accessibility everything should be digitized.  

At one point Cohen pulls a quote from Psychologist Daniel Willingham (2017), as he discusses the attitude we have towards reading as adults based on how we were exposed to it in adolescence. “one source—probably the primary source—of positive reading attitudes is positive reading experiences. This phenomenon is no more complicated than understanding why someone has a positive attitude toward eggplant. You taste it and like it” This quote directly ties into what I am looking at this quarter, the nurtured relationship with food in relation with the nurtured relationship with digital reading. As children if we are forced over and over again to eat a food we don’t like, we don’t tend to develop a taste for it, same it seems with reading. But the same way that a child can develop a taste for a food they once didn’t like if it’s properly re-introduced, could we re-introduce reading to a generation that may be falling away from the practice and elevate digital reading as we do so? 

As I moved further into the quarter I started to look more into our emotional responses to food. I wanted to uncover the impacts of diet culture in America, where the messaging in our food came from and how we react, and how the food makes us feel before we have even decided what to consume. Michael Pollan makes several compelling statements in his 2004 article, “The National Eating Disorder”, including “America’s food industry, more than happy to get behind 
any new diet as long as it doesn’t actually involve eating less food…”. The basis of most of his claims in this article are that for the sake of profits, we manufacture highly processed foods that are easily adaptable to a cycle of dieting fads and trends. He easily backs this, referencing the sudden shifts in marketing from day to day, the same ingredient both a lifesaver and a toxin in the eyes of health magazines.  

Pollan also references a study done across France and America, conducted in a collaborative cross continental study on food perception. In this study it is revealed the dramatic differences in the associations Americans have with certain pleasurable food, such as chocolate cake or heavy cream. While the French would be prepared with a word in association with the nature of the food (celebration for cake, whipped for cream) the Americans answers pertained to the unhealthy nature of the food. Pollan describes the “French paradox” which is the idea that though the French eat traditionally “unhealthier” foods than those that American dieticians would prescribe, they tend to be thinner as a country. He claims this to be to linked to their portion sizes and meal culture rather than their food choices, leading the problem of American obesity back to the way we set our dinner tables.   

Throughout the quarter I found myself wondering how the fad diets messaging was reaching people, if it was a word of mouth social type reasoning, or if we were receiving some form of subversive messaging online or in the grocery store. While there are arguments for all of these, in Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me by Virginia Sole Smith I learnt about the new wave of diet culture specifically hitting children. These kids are not receiving their weight-loss advice from social media or some other unverified source, but instead from doctors. The American Academy of Pediatrics is now recommending “Lifestyle Treatment” for two year olds, weight loss pills at twelve, and surgery at just thirteen. It is my opinion that this style of medical treatment sets a precedent around our social implications of food that will lead to an unmeasurable amount of damage if left unchecked. The guidelines are countered by the Health At Every Size (HAES©) guidelines put out by the Association for Size Diversity and Health. Not only do these guidelines counter the strict regime of calorie restriction, high impact exercise, and medication, but each section is accessibility written and cited with multiple scientific sources.  

The two readings combined allow me to look at another two articles, How a Pre-Wedding Diet Led to an Eating Disorder by Kelsey Herbers and Female College Athletes Say Pressure to Cut Body Fat is Toxic by Alanis Thames and Jonathan Abrams, with a lot more intensity. Both are stories of women who felt incredible pressure to lose weight, one for her college sports team and another for her wedding, and how easy it was to slip from dieting to an eating disorder without realizing. When we have a medical system that prioritizes weight loss over the actual health of a patient, it is no surprise that we are conditioned to push our bodies to the point of vivid discomfort in the name of a diet. Thinking back to the metaphor of the eggplant, you tried it and you liked it, or you didn’t. But what if you loved it, and were taught to be ashamed that you did so? 

My hope for myself is that I can reconnect food and joy. My personal journey with food is long and detailed far from over. I tried the eggplant and I liked it, and now I am older and cooking it every which way to recreate those childhood tastes and smells. If we can change the social eating dynamic among our friends and family we can develop happy, healthy, social kitchens.  

“Social eating, then, is often heavily politically symbolic, particularly when carried out on a national scale” (Evans, 2018)

For my last week of readings I decided I wanted to look into social eating. I was curious how community played into concepts of food and feeling, and while I can write my personal experiences and opinions on eating with and cooking for other people, I wanted more historical context, as well as something more scientifically backed than my own ideas.

I used two sources, the first was “The Social Facilitation of Eating or the Facilitation of Social Eating” by C. Peter Herman. Published by the Journal of Eating Disorders, I was initially surprised by how much this paper was focused on overindulgence, but it didn’t feel like he was parading around obesity like some other writings. Instead, Herman focused on uncovering the many potential roots of why we eat more when we eat in groups. He tells the reader about John de Castro and his studies, and the theories that came from them.

One was simply that exposure to the food over time makes us eat more, that while it is in front of us we will eat until something stops us. Another suggestion was that group meals take longer as you’re socializing, but as Herman points out if we are talking are we still eating? Another interesting theory was that the presence of other people lead to arousal, raising hunger levels. This last one seems unlikely as we all have such different hunger swings with out emotions.

The last theory is interesting and leads to some interesting questions. We are modeling those in front of us, we want to please them, and we know people hate when others eat less than us. While a convoluted theory, I would love to see the rabbit hole that lead there. Why do we hate people for eating less than us? If we are already overconsuming why are we concerned with each other plates?

The next article was more historical, simply called “Social Eating” by Bryce Evans. This piece weaves together historical, political, and philosophical ideas and instances of social eating and their impact on their community.

Covering the world wars, Evans discusses the first government-subsidized food kitchens and pseudo restaurants. Across multiple countries and continents, she first highlights programs that were directed at the very poorest of their nations, to the dismay of many struggling middle-class workers. The British government hired a prominent athlete and vegetarian as a spokesperson of sorts to combat bad geopolitical stereotypes that surrounded vegetarianism, as many of the soup kitchens served meatless dishes that felt far from homey.

This leads into a more political look at social eating as Evans briefly mentions the long communal dining times observed in the Soviet State, and the network of comedores who were feeding people in pop-up kitchens during Perus civil conflict. Many of these women were put to death by either side of the conflict, both too radical and not radical enough. It is incredible that throughout history we have politicized food without fail, even when the food itself is not in discussion we must still defend how we set out tables, the way we eat, and who we eat with.

The last section is on more modern day social eating, but instead of sharing from Evans I want to share my own story. In the 2020 Seattle Autonomous Zone there were a lineup of meal trucks that were all a part of the same organization, I wish I could remember their name. All they did was show up and feed people, for free, every day. The cops smashed their stuff up pretty badly for no reason, and the city refused to pay damages because the witnesses weren’t cops. We are still oppressing social eating because it is an avenue to conversation.

I have really enjoyed this quarter of readings, I am exited to make my last update with my summary post.

“From the human labor of animal and plant husbandry, to the multiple life forms that must make space for agriculture, eating cannot happen in isolation” (Davis 2003)

My first reading was “The Wonder of Bread: Teaching University Students the Cost of Eating with Their Hands” by Eric Pallant, it’s a reflective writing published in Gastronomica, written about a class that seems akin to one that may be taught at Evergeen. I was interested in this reading specifically because it was tagged as “experiential learning” which has come up a few times over the last few quarters as a piece of Evergreen’s future planning.

Pallant started his garden of wheat in the Spring with help from the grounds gardener and worked with students through the summer to tend to and grow the plants. He mentions their beauty when they start to harvest noting “The small sheaf of gold I held bunched in my hand splayed like fireworks, each tiny seed bundled in a husk peaked by a single, spiky awn.” It really felt as if he held his crops in high regard, he was not only proud but in awe of his crop. When students in his class would complain about the heavy labor of the many stepped ordeal, he would inform them of ways the job has already been made easier for them with modern inventions and community support.

We are walked through the story of this crop, from early spring to it’s summer harvest, each step the students take to prepare it to be milled to flour and then combined with salt, water, and Pallants 1893 sourdough starter. After noting that fresh flour defiantly makes a difference, we are offered this mouthwatering description.

“Glenn, our cultivar of hard red spring wheat, must have produced extra sweetness because this bread wafted molasses and possessed a brittle crust and caramelized bottom. The smoky sweet overtones and dark, almost pumpernickel-like color appealed to the dozen students and colleagues who made very short work of it”

While not a long read, Pallant tells a compelling story of his class and their journey from seed to fresh bread, noting not only what surprised his students but also the places he surprised himself, or could not answer their questions. I appreciated not only his genuine tone and radical honesty for what he was still learning, but also that he was so wholly student-focused in ways in which they may not yet see or appreciate but that they will be grateful for in the future.

My second reading was entitled “Chewing the Fat: “Unpacking” Distasteful Encounters” by Suzanne Hocknell. The keywords tagged in this one included “distaste” and “visceral”, and the abstract at the top of the page was very promising “I demonstrate that for my research participants the distastefulness of a yellow fat did not rest in any straightforward way on a visceral disliking of the flavor of that same product.”

This journal article reveals the findings of Hocknells’ research study, in which she uses “planned discussion groups” (PDG’s) to bring out natural conversation between the research participants. The groups were groups of five and selected based on their relation to each other instead of in a random selection pattern, I think to ensure the best conversation and the most “unpacking”, a term the author makes much use of throughout. The one specifically covered in the article had two people with a preference for margarine, two for butter, and one who didn’t use either.

While taste seemed like the obvious driving force of choice, Hocknell quickly picks apart the statements of the group member, observing their body language and tone when they talk about their preferred or not preferred members, and pulling out instances of the participant sharing related details of their lives that influenced their opinion on one spread or the other. One of the participant, Ruth, shared a story that I felt was highly relevant.

“Ruth described the experience of eating margarine as “horrible,” “synthetic, really fake.” Yet Ruth did not experience distaste because margarine had made her sick, nor because of a primary reaction to the flavors, texture, smell, or appearance of margarine. Indeed she explained that “as a child, we just never had butter, so I never really, just, we had Flora, and I was fine with that.” In the intervening years something had shifted in Ruth’s experience of her embodied encounters with the stuff of margarine”

In week 1 while reading Cohns Skim, Dive, Surface I read a metaphor for a child’s enjoyment of reading.

“one source—probably the primary source—of positive reading attitudes is positive reading experiences. This phenomenon is no more complicated than understanding why someone has a positive attitude toward eggplant. You taste it and like it” (Willingham 2017)

Reading and enjoyment, eating and enjoyment, they’re both things that have to be nurtured correctly as a child or we won’t carry it into adulthood. Digital reading is to books and physical texts, is as the search for a balance of all kinds of health is to eating. I hope to further refine this metaphor but I feel it’s a good start.

Next week will be my last full week of reading, and week 10 will be for finishing up final writings, evals, and working on my Spring ILC.

“Our results fit with our impression that Americans are particularly appreciative of choice at many levels, and that, as well, there is a substantial sense among Americans that foods should be modified to meet individual tastes; hence, the wider range of choices in American menus, including extensive options for matching side dishes with the main dish according to individual tastes” (Rozin, Fischler, Shields, Masson, 2006)

This week I read a research report done by the same researchers mentioned by Micheal Pollan a few weeks ago. While I was not able to find the exact study they were referencing I did find another interesting study that I wanted to read. It is entitled “Attitudes towards large numbers of choices in the food domain: A cross-cultural study of five countries in Europe and the USA“ by Paul Rozin, Claude Fischler, Christy Shields, and Estelle Masson. I was drawn to this article because it was posing a point that I had yet to really explore, I have looked at what a lack of choices in our diet can do, but this report dove into what happens when we are presented with an overwhelming choice for every item on our grocery list?

The report starts off with background information on why humans look for a variety of food choices in the first place. It seems to be a variety of biological and evolutionary factors that influence us as generalist animals (animals that can survive on a variety of diets or in a variety of habitats) to seek out options to both seek out nutrients and limit the chance of over-consuming a toxin. They also explain “micro-variety” in grocery stores, which is having a variety of products that are the same thing such as apples or yogurt.

The study was conducted to find the country-by-country variation in consumers’ preference for quality over quantity and included France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The two questions proposed were roughly, “would you go to an ice cream parlor with 10 flavor options or 50 flavor options with no price difference?” and “If you were to go to a high-end restaurant would you expect a large or small choice of dishes?”

The results found that for the first question, consumers from the United States were the most likely group to seek out 50 options versus 10, and for the second that the United Kingdom would expect the most options at a high-end restaurant. Both countries come second in the category the other was first in, but I do not have enough background information to make any inferences about this specifically. Do the USA and UK have higher populations of large grocery stores, or digital food marketing? Is it something to do with the way food gets from the grower to the table?

I also spent a few hours this week on my summary paper. Not all my texts will be reflected in there as there were so many tangents but I have a good structure with room to add as I finish my readings. I’m not sure what I will read next week but I am exited to pick out the last texts to close out my ILC.

TW: Dieting and weight loss

“Enlightenment-era rationalism elevated food to the moral plane of asceticism required for intellectual pursuit.” (Hannah Carlan, 2020)

At the end of last week I had planned to spend most of this week drafting my final paper, but as I did that I realized I wanted to build it as I did these last few weeks as I still feel I am missing some important pieces for my final summary. After last week’s article about new obesity guidelines for children, I decided I wanted to do a little more research on the proposed alternative, the guidelines put out by The Association for Size Diversity and Health, Health at Every Size (HAES). Their guidelines were originally put out in 2013, but are currently under review for an update, and the version I read was released a few years ago with an explanation of where they wanted to make some changes. While reading these guidelines they referenced fatphobia as being based on historical racism against Black women’s bodies, something I knew nothing about but wanted to make sure I had at least some context on before the end of the quarter. I decided to make my second reading for this week a book review of one of the books referenced by the HAES guidelines called “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia”. The book is by Sabrina Strings, and the review was done by Hannah Carlan.

The thing that really struck me about the HAES guidelines was actually in the opening paragraph when they say “…health exists on a continuum that varies with time and circumstance for each individual.” As someone who has navigated a variety of health issues over the past few years I can say that my health is not a straight line, and my healthy probably doesn’t look like your healthy. Individualized healthcare is the only humane way to run a healthcare system, last weeks article and the HAES guidelines both point out that the lifestyle change care that has been the norm in the American healthcare system is completely ineffectual at helping people lose weight, as well as keep the weight off.

The HAES guidelines have five main principles at current. There are weight inclusivity, health enhancement, eating for well-being, respectful care, and life-enhancing movement. They plan to rework eating for well-being and life-enhancing movement into “tools”. The reason they give it

“Lastly, the principles of Life-Enhancing Movement and Eating for Wellbeing are likely to be removed as principles and instead be included as tools. These are approaches to health that are congruent with the Health at Every Size® framework. However, because many people do not have access to or do not prioritize these aspects of wellbeing, they don’t t as a core principle of Health at Every Size®. Health at Every Size® should work for all people, regardless of their health goals.”

It was in the health enhancement section that they mentioned that fatphobic policies were built after race discrimination laws were banned, and how fatphobia has anti-black roots. This wasn’t something I knew about, and I felt like if I was going to do an ILC that looked at medical discrimination, even briefly, it was important to understand the roots. I found a review of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” a book by Sabrina Strings, knowing I didn’t have time to read the book in its entirety.

Carlans review makes mentions to renaissance art, the ideal body type for women at that time being a plumper, rounder shape. She describes the way in which art changed as Black enslaved people were added into paintings, though Black women were depicted as frail, servant types. With the introduction of sugar or “white gold”, there was a shift in European culture that lead to a fear of overconsumption and extra body fat. It moves then into how the 17th century brought word from scientists and philosophers that made awful comparisons to Black women’s bodies, and worked to bind being lazy and dumb to being fat, and then being fat to being black. I do not have the space to outline all the history I learned from the book review but I hope I will have the chance to read the whole book at some point.

Next week I will be reading a research study on the results of having too many choices in our diets and the results in the U.S and Europe.

TW: Mentions of eating disorders, dieting, and suicide.

“We cannot solve anti-fat bias by making fat kids thin. Our current approach only teaches them that trusted adults believe the bullies are right — that a fat body is just a problem to solve. That’s not where the conversation about anyone’s health should begin” (Sole-Smith, 2023)

This week I read two texts. The first was a guest essay published in the New York Times. While this was not on my original list, it was published at the end of week 3 and I felt it fit perfectly with what I had lined up for weeks 4, 5, and 6. Entitled “Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me” by Virginia Sole-Smith, this article responds to the comprehensive guidelines for evaluating and treating children and adolescents with obesity published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in January. Having had first-hand experience with being a fat child and adult in the American medical system, I was curious to see what the guidelines now were for a child or teenager.

My first eye roll, although not a surprise, was discovering that they are still using the B.M.I scale, even for children. This scale has been debunked many times, and for reference, I used to register as obese, although no medical professional considered me such, I was overweight. So with so much evidence that it is not an accurate measure of health, why is it still so commonly used? We will come back to that.

The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines start for children as young as two years old, with different suggestions of what can be offered as the child gets older. Starting at two with “intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment”, a vague and ominous idea. What could intensive lifestyle treatment possibly look like for a two-year-old? And how will this kind of treatment affect their long-term relationship with food? Teaching children from a young age to be so conscious of what they’re eating can’t be healthy. As someone whos studying food, is it reasonable to say that perhaps we are looking too much at our food?

Moving up to twelve and older they introduce the option of weight loss pills, and at thirteen, weight loss surgery. I wrote a pretty personal annotation on this section that I would like to share, although I would like to add an additional content warning as it contains specific memories and ideas from my childhood that were signs of disordered eating.

“This is a direct pipeline to increased eating disorders in kids. Not only is the B.M.I scale incredibly outdated and many times debunked, but using it on a child as young as two seems barbaric. Offering a 12-year-old weight loss medication could go so many ways depending on the child, but I cannot imagine any of them have a healthy future. I would have taken it, 100%, but now that I have experienced sudden weight loss I know that it is never what you really want. There is no number on the scale that equals happiness and this feels as though we are teaching kids from a very young age that their health and worth are able to be measured on a chart. And I don’t even want to think about what I would have done if I had been offered weight loss surgery when I was 13. I used to dream of waking up with a “perfect” body, I promised myself if it happened I would never do anything to risk losing it. And those thoughts came from trying to decide what my genie wishes would be in the 5th-grade production of Aladdin, the option was never actually put in front of me.”

My experience is not everyone’s, but I know that I was not an outlier for these thoughts, and I can’t imagine that there aren’t hundreds of thousands of 5th graders across the world that could attest to having realized in that late elementary to early middle school time that they were not happy with their bodies. Now imagine that you have been feeling this way since 5th grade and in 8th grade, your doctor offers weight loss surgery. As I said, we are teaching happiness comes from something you can quantify in a single number.

This brings me back to the earlier question, with so much evidence that it is not an accurate measure of health, why is B.M.I being used? Sole-Smith sums it up well in this article. The American healthcare system is waging a war on obesity by focusing on weight loss. The B.M.I scale is easy for doctors to quantify a healthy range of weight and not much else, streamlining essentially. But this combats moderate and severe weight gain as the problem, and not as what it normally is, a side effect or a symptom of another health condition or life change. Instead of villanizing weight gain, we need to view it as both a normal and natural part of life, our bodies changing as our lives change, but also as a potential symptom instead of as the problem needing to be treated. Sole-Smith summarizes a solution much more eloquently than I do.

“What should the obesity guidelines say instead? Stop classifying kids and their health by body size altogether. This would involve a paradigm shift to weight-inclusive approaches, which see weight change as a possible symptom of, or a contributing factor toward, a larger health concern or struggle.”

The second text I read was entitled “Food Sovereignty and Farmer Suicides: Synthesizing Political Ecologies of Health and Education in Karnataka, India” by David Meek. It was a photo essay, and much more focused on business practices than I expected. It did not truly fit with the work of the ILC so I will not say much but I did enjoy it, and it left me with many questions about the idea of farm ownership and a farmer’s access to the means of production.

As it is mid-quarter I will also be writing and uploading a midquarter summary/evaluation of my work, and next week instead of new readings I will be focused on drafting the first half of my summative writing piece. I am in the process of reworking what it will look like as I plan for my Spring 23 ILC.

TW: Discussion of eating disorders, and dieting

“The koala bear certainly doesn’t worry about what’s for dinner; if it looks and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, then it is dinner. His culinary preferences are hard-wired. But for omnivores like us, a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential dishes nature offers are safe to eat.” (Pollan, 2004)

This week I read “Our National Eating Disorder” by Micheal Pollan, one of my favorite authors. This piece is from 2004 yet I think its relevance has only grown over the last 19 or so years. Pollan covered a few important themes and ideas in this writing, I am going to cover a couple of them that I feel are most relevant to my topic of food and feeling.

One of my ILC questions is about how digital reading affects the way we consume texts and food, but I would like to pose this as a secondary question deriving from the first. How do digital advertisements of food change our sensory experiences with it? How does seeing a food advertised on the internet affect the wants and cravings we have around food, as well as the social-emotional reactions we have in our grocery stores and kitchens? Pollan touches on this, highlighting the ways in which having a cycle of trending diets and ideas of health continues to spin the wheel that funds the food industry. By overproducing processed foods, manufacturers can quickly adapt to the newest fad by changing the fat, sugar, carb, or calorie content to reflect the newest fad. Pollan multiple times reference the food marketing industry, and it seems almost an industry of its own, separate from the sales in the way the public perceives the food and the brand. Food marketing is closer to running public relations with people’s perceptions of their own health and bodies.

This article in particular, published by the New York Times (I did not intend to do so many NYT articles in a row it’s just how the chips fell in the end), was amid the anti-carbs craze. Cutting carbs was my introduction to eating disorders, joining my dad on a no-carb diet which my mother encouraged and even showed me carb-free recipes that she would make us for breakfast. I was about 12 at the time. And I really don’t think they knew what they were doing, I was a fat kid who had finally expressed some interest in losing weight, but the fact is that these diet trends spread so far, they are unavoidable even for children. Disordered eating has been glamorized, advertised, and now monetized. These cycles have not improved since 2004, with major celebrities making marketing with juice companies for surgery payouts and the rise in social media, they have in fact been pushed further into every corner of our lives. The addition of digital advertising in food marketing has been a setback for facing the disordered eating epidemic.

Pollan also discusses the ways in which Americans perceive food and health concepts as opposed to those in France. He mentions “the french paradox” and the following passage stood out to me.

“The “French paradox” is the most famous such case, though it’s worth keeping in mind the French don’t regard the matter as a paradox at all; we Americans resort to that word simply because the French experience—a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters with lower rates of heart disease and obesity?!—confounds our orthodoxy about food. Maybe what we should be talking about is an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.”

He goes on to talk about a study done, another passage I think is worth reading for context:

“A few years ago, Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, and Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, began collaborating on a series of cross-cultural surveys of food attitudes. They found that of the four populations surveyed (the U.S., France, Flemish Belgium and Japan), Americans associated food with health the most and pleasure the least. Asked what comes to mind upon hearing the phrase “chocolate cake,” Americans were more apt to say “guilt,” while the French said “celebration”; “heavy cream” elicited “unhealthy” from Americans, “whipped” from the French. The researchers found that Americans worry more about food and derive less pleasure from eating than people in any other nation they surveyed”

And then a few paragraphs later:

“The French eat all sorts of “unhealthy” foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: they eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone, and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs.”

While we could argue all day about whether the food itself is better in Europe, I feel as though the biggest difference is the culture around food. Would we have such a need for easily adaptable, fad-following, highly processed foods if we had built a culture around food focused on meals as a social and celebratory time, food not as a reward for exercising but as something that adds joy to our lives for being alive. We have created a society where we crave highly processed unhealthy foods often due to the stress of our daily lives, shame ourselves for overconsuming or eating the “wrong thing”, and then get sucked in by digital marketing campaigns that offer you your ideal body in a cardboard box labeled “low fat”.

I am going to invite all my roommates to sit down and have a long, tasty home-cooked meal this weekend. I am still teaching myself to live to eat, as much as I love food, and putting my community behind me while I do it is as simple as sharing a meal with my loved ones. We could put this on a bigger, more culturally expected scale and all lean to live to eat.

Next week I will be reading about obesity guidelines in kids, and reading a photo essay on farmworker suicide. In week 6 I will be taking a break from new material for my mental health as these topics have been rather heavy and personal, and working exclusively on drafting my writing piece. Take care if yourself and eat dinner on time tonight 🙂

TW: Disordered eating described in detail, dieting

“Knowing that eating disorders don’t go away on their own has been hard for me to accept. I find myself frustrated that even though I had previously spent nine years in therapy, I was never once told that my history of anxiety and depression predisposed me to developing an eating disorder. No one warned me that dieting would be a slippery slope. Instead, I was left with a chronic disorder I’ll have to be conscious of the rest of my life.” (Herbers 2023)

This week was focused on looking at stories of eating disorders. I knew that it would be a difficult week but I was not prepared for quite how intensely I would feel the stories of these women, not just in my heart my also physically and painfully in my stomach. Eating disorders are one of the biggest unsung horror stories of being alive, rarely talked about, and often ignored, eating disorders are often overlooked as the disease no one really wants to touch.

I have had an eating disorder for as long as I can remember. I consider it a gift from my moms’ side of the family. Disordered eating comes in a variety of forms, it rarely looks like the T.V. image of a girl getting smaller and smaller as she eats three almonds a day as no one notices. But finding stories published by a mainstream news site that depicts an eating disorder otherwise is hard to find, and while these women’s stories are as accurate and valid as any other, we will never destigmatize eating disorders if we are unwilling to talk about them.

Both articles that I annotated this week do depict stories of young women with anorexia, or anorexic tendencies. The first was entitled “How a Pre-Wedding Diet Led to an Eating Disorder” by Kelsey Herbers and the second was “Female College Athletes Say Pressure to Cut Body Fat is Toxic” by Alanis Thames and Johnathan Abrams. Both were published by the New York Times.

The first story is a first-person account of a woman developing an eating disorder as her wedding approaches. With new compliments from friends and family and the added pressures of being home due to the pandemic, she finds herself on a slippery slope from dieting to anorexia. She highlights the way that she discovered and quickly mastered selective fasting, a fad dieting trend that has shown up in many “health” magazines and blogs in recent years. With input from Robyn L. Goldberg, an author specializing in eating disorder writings, Kelseys article warns of the dangers that come with the diet culture we find ourselves consumed with. She describes in detail the different forms her eating disorder took, and it was here that I found myself in physical pain in my stomach after her writing.

The second looks at several young girls on a college track team. This article does a very good job of describing the feeling of having someone monitor and critique your weight.

“The upperclassmen told her to stay away from the dessert table at team banquets. Coaches, they cautioned, would be watching. The cookies and other treats were not there to be eaten.”

The article goes into detail on the treatment these girls received from their coaches, the food monitoring, the weigh-ins and bodpods that measured body mass index, and having their private medical information shared without their consent. They share their feeling of being violated, and the struggles they’ve had after. I texted my track team friends to have lunch together after this, I hope they never go through this. A sports team is never a reason to treat another human being like this.

I’m not sure what I will pick for next week but I have a few options so you’ll just have to wait and see.

“There is a certain irony to this point given that paperbacks are just as mass-produced as iPads at this point, but the persistent cultural attachments to print still have an impact on where and how students approach reading tasks in different contexts.” (Cohn, p.82) 

This week I wrapped up my “Skim, Dive, Surface” annotating for this quarter although I have no doubt I will be back to it next quarter as it is the perfect text to read slowly alongside my ILC texts. I am excited to use this chapter to further build my ideas around this parallel between how we eat and how we read. 

This chapter highlighted some of Cohns own research into this idea of digital vs physical reading in higher education I was reading about last week. In her own research she was able to discuss with college students the different contexts in which they would use physical vs digital reading. And this was a theme of much of the chapter, contextualizing where and when we use different forms of reading. Cohn found that in brainstorming or reading novels, students heavily leaned towards a physical book or pen and paper. But when it came to essays and analytical reading work there was a preference for digital texts. The intimate connection with the paper seemed to be a driving factor in any task that was deemed pleasurable with the research group, which makes sense, but how then do we drive a connection with the digital? Can we even do so? 

She concludes the chapter by asking the reader, as an educator, to struggle with our own feelings about books? Where our ideas and feelings around print come from within our identities, and then the same with digital texts. She asks us to consider how we can leverage an emotional connection for good in the classroom, and how we can use this historical precedent to drive their students interests. 

“Taking stock of our own feelings is critical to understanding what messages or ideas we may communicate to our students in turn as we likely aspire to help our students understand and make sense of their own feelings for reading. We should aim not to impose our own feelings on our students. In some cases, our feelings about what kinds of reading are appropriate can be harmful and discriminatory” (Gierdowski 
& Galanek, 2020). 

And secondly, how can we use this information about where students apply what form of reading and why to evaluate the emotional responses to different academic tasks, and how to push back against ingrained ideas that don’t serve students’ interests. As Cohn so neatly puts it, “If we give our students both the agency to make the choices and the tools to empower them to make those choices in ways that may allow them to assess their reading, writing, and learning situations appropriately, we can move forward from instrumentalist arguments to critical ones.” (p.89) 

“Just as children’s skin ages and wrinkles with time, so too do the pages of books. A digital file, on the other hand? When it ages, there’s not much to see- perhaps some extra pixelation, an error message, an out-dated file extension, and then ultimately, nothing at all.” (Cohn, p.67) 

Welcome to Winter quarter, it only goes up from here. I am starting with the same text I ended the year with, “Skim, Dive, Surface” by Jenae Cohn . This second chapter entitled “The Held Book” is centered around the question of how our feelings and emotions towards our texts affect the way in which we consume them. I was very excited about this chapter not just because it is so relevant to my ILC but also because my sister is going to school in Scotland studying to be a Librarian/Archivist and has such a fond attachment to her physical books. She has two floor to ceiling bookshelves in our parent’s house that she couldn’t take with her but can’t bear to part with and for good reason, I’ve watched her compile those books over years and years. But as the earlier chapter stated, if she keeps collecting like this, one day she will not have enough physical space to store her books, and how will she pick out the important ones? 

All is to say I was excited about this chapter because I had already formed so many ideas from watching my sister. This is not to say I do not enjoy a physical book, I have many I would never part with. But this idea that the way we consume our texts changes the way we think about them or remember them is the exact parallel I am looking for this quarter, the way we consume changes the way we taste, the way we read changes the way we think. 

The first half of this reading looked at multiple studies done across various higher learning institutions that asked students their opinions on physical vs digital reading, with most results being that students preferred physical books over digital reading formats. Students are quoted saying they like having a book in their hands, and referred to it as “real reading”. 

This chapter also looked at the way our interactions with reaching in early childhood affect our feelings about reading now. I very much liked the quote: 

“one source—probably the primary source—of positive reading attitudes is positive 
reading experiences. This phenomenon is no more complicated than understanding why someone has a positive attitude toward eggplant. You taste it and like it” (Willingham, 2017, p. 138) 

This again is looking at the parallel I want to explore this quarter, and here we have it laid out in the metaphor of an eggplant. In what ways is reading like trying a new food? And as we grow and our tastebuds adapt to adulthood how do our food preferences and reading preferences shift with our maturity? I am exited to finish this reading next week!