Food, fat & progressive politics: a saga

America’s foremost food evangelist, Michael Pollan, has a new article in the New York Times Magazine, decrying the decline of cooking in America and the outsourcing of our meals to corporations. He dips into history, biology, and even feminist theory as well as some recent social science, and comes up with a complex history of how Americans got to the point we’re at today: eating a whole lot of junk food in between our ridiculous working hours. Cooking as a pleasurable and intrinsically human activity has fallen by the wayside, even as we obsessively watch other people cooking on TV.

Food as a sensual pleasure is certainly not something lost on me, but the appeal of working in the kitchen to produce it is. Even when I had spare time, chopping and stirring a pot was rarely how I wanted to spend it. These days, in between a full-time job and writing on the side, all I want to do when I get home at night is collapse onto the bed with a book or a DVD. Hungry? I’m starved—and I want something quick and easy that will minimize the steps between me and my book.

Precisely because I’m broke, stretching my funds to allow me to work that full-time mostly-unpaid dream internship, I’ve gained weight. This irony is not lost on many Americans. Fat is as much an indicator of economic class as anything else. I can’t afford a fancy gym membership, so on days that it rains or is gruelingly, hot I don’t exercise much. I eat junk because it’s quick and cheap. I drink soda to keep my energy up at work.

And I’ve gained weight. Not sure exactly how much—I don’t own a scale. But enough so that half my skirts and jeans don’t fit, and there’s the other half of the double bind: I’m broke, I eat crap, I put on weight, and I can’t afford clothes that do fit. When I had a full-time job that paid in the mid-$30,000’s I could afford the kickboxing classes that allowed me to vent my stress and kept me toned, and though I had no more time to cook then than I do now, at least I could afford takeout meals that were better balanced (and more satisfying) than my pathetic attempts at healthy dinners now. I won’t buy microwave dinners or hot pockets, so I eat fresh apples and bread from the local farmstand—and even that’s a luxury.

As a feminist, I enter into another double bind: I am supposed to decry society’s unrealistic standards for women’s bodies, and I do. I don’t obsess over sizes, and eat dessert. I stop myself and my friends each time the words “I’m so fat” slip past our lips. I point out the problems with a world in which my 5’4”, hundred-and-something pound frame (somewhere between 130 and 145 now, I think) is considered a “large” in many clothing stores, and I cheer when Beth Ditto is on the cover of fashion magazines. Yet I want to lose weight. I want to get back into the jeans I don’t fit into now, and it’s not entirely because I can’t afford new ones.

Greta Christina wrote eloquently of this problem in her recent AlterNet article, “How I Reconciled My Diet with my Feminism.” As in many other situations, the feminism that Christina and I both agree is integral to who we are can feel like a trap. The bodily autonomy we fight for when it comes to reproductive choice is suddenly questioned when it comes to sex and now to weight loss or gain. Pollan even points out that cooking itself was a site of ambivalence for many second wave feminists, some (like me) finding it drudgery, while others finding it a source of great pleasure.

Christina, like Pollan, notes our deep evolutionary, existential attachment to food. A friend of mine once summed up her problems with her fluctuating weight thus: “When you’re an alcoholic, you quit drinking. When you have problems with food, you can’t just quit eating.” Not only do we need food to survive, we’re hard-wired to want to keep eating the things that taste good, whether or not they have any nutritionary value.

Christina wrote:

It’s really hard not to feel like a traitor about this. When I reach a benchmark in my weight loss and get all excited and proud, or when someone compliments me on how good I look now and I get a little self-esteem-boosting thrill, it’s hard not to feel like a traitor to my feminist roots, and to the fat women who fought so hard to liberate me from the rigid and narrow social constructs of female beauty.

Another friend noted that the fat positive movement was supposed to make people feel good about their bodies no matter what size they were, not create another set of restrictions and ways for women to feel guilty. Liberation movements (which is what any -positive movement should be) should help free us from guilt and shame, not just shift the direction of the guilt or shame to a different part of a new binary.

Paul Campos stretched the fat and sexuality shame metaphors even further, daring to play what so easily could be called oppression Olympics. He noted that while liberals would never recommend that gay people can be cured of being gay (though there are some radical feminists who imply that women can choose not to be straight as a political statement), they certainly feel welcome to imply that fat people can be cured of being fat.

He wrote:

In short, in an ideal world we would pursue public health initiatives to improve lifestyle without any reference to weight or weight loss. Yet given a choice between public health programs that demonize fatness as a strategy for improving nutrition and physical activity, and doing nothing, I believe the latter is preferable.

I don’t agree that the logical response to shame is to simply give up all concern—to switch metaphors a moment, Christina is right when she points out that we have to be thoughtful about other “natural” impulses as well. We have to be careful about our sexuality; just because abortion is still legal and I don’t believe people should shame women who have them doesn’t mean I don’t use birth control. But I understand that even well-intentioned lefties like Pollan can fall into the trap of citing “obesity” as the great villain of food writing, and that slides easily into fat-shaming.

Pollan’s article contains another shame-pitfall for me, even though he is careful to stress that a return to cooking should be shared equally between men and women. I simply don’t like cooking, though I dearly love shopping at the farmer’s market among aisles of fresh, bright-colored veggies, and even can get into the argument Douglas Rushkoff makes that we need to reconnect to our food in a different way, not just in the kitchen, but on the farm. Hell, I like the idea of growing my own food better than I like the idea of cooking it. Perhaps Pollan is right and I’ve been sold processed food as liberation, or perhaps I’m just terrified of becoming my mother—who herself ate Lean Cuisine while the rest of us ate the meals she lovingly prepared for us.

Let’s face it: food is a fraught issue. It’s just not as simple as accepting fat as a perfectly normal, attractive physical option. Like sexuality, there is no easy political solution. There is a significant materialist critique to be made of the way we eat. We eat corporate-produced food in part because we are working so hard at our corporate jobs that we barely have time for cooking. We are alienated from our food the same way we are alienated from our work and our consumption of other products. To some degree, dieting is a privilege: both because diet products are expensive in this country, and also because for some people, just having enough to eat is a struggle.

Still, body image, like sexuality, is not something simply to be written off as a bourgeois concern, and I don’t agree with Campos that we should simply do nothing because the only other option appears to be demonizing fat. Health, not a certain weight, should be the desired outcome, but more importantly, a societal change that allows us time for sensual pleasures and for connection to our work, our food, and to each other. I know that sounds like a tall order, but it’s a better dream than obsessing over my old jeans.