This week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. It is also Chicago’s Restaurant Week. It seems bizarrely contradictory and morbid the two “weeks” coincide so perfectly with each other, and is indicative of how obsessed our culture is with food.
I am someone who loves food almost too much. Instead of playing Sporcle or Facebooking when I procrastinate, I download the menus from five-star restaurants, pore over their offerings and mentally create the meal I would order if I could go there. When I’m stressed out, I bake cookies and muffins and cakes, which explains why there are currently three full muffin pans in my kitchen. I religiously follow at least a dozen food blogs, and I love the Food Network so much I gave it up for Lent (no easy task, mind you). So on one hand, it is difficult for me to fully understand eating disorders, though I can of course empathize. On the other hand, is an anorexic or bulimic fixation on food just a different way of manifesting my own degree of food obsession?
It is heartbreaking our society puts such high expectations on impressionable girls and women of all ages. The average American woman is roughly 5-foot-4 and 140 pounds. The models that we so often see on runways, in magazines and on billboards? About 5-foot-10 and 115 pounds, even before the professional makeup and hair stylists, flattering lighting and Photoshop get to them. The expectations on men are no better: Be thin but not gaunt; muscular but not body-builder; tall but not towering. There’s no way to fulfill these purported guidelines, and you could drive yourself crazy trying.
At the same time, the foodie culture is hardly a perfect one. Food is too often given such huge importance that entire publications, careers, businesses and weeks are devoted to two or three tiny bites on a plate that is mostly composed of white space and the occasional smear of sauce. One plate can make or break a chef’s career. Thousands of foodies have devoted their lives not to providing basic nutrition and food education to people, but to elevating the concept of food so high it no longer truly resembles what food is intended for at its most basic level: sustenance.
Like any girl I’ve done my fair share of personal body-bashing. There is always something that can be bigger, smaller, flatter, tauter or generally better. I try not to allow myself to overeat or eat unhealthfully. I am also hugely guilty of salivating over the beautiful food photography in magazines and going out to eat at nice places more often than I should, even though the portions could barely satisfy my 10-year-old sister, who eats like a bird. It still strikes me as odd, though, that our society is often so diametrically opposed along the food spectrum. Total obsession with eating on one end, and on the other, an overwhelming obsession with not eating. Neither outlook is a totally healthy one, and because food is a basic human necessity, we as a culture are not going to stop being preoccupied with it. I just hope the level of obsession, on both ends, does not infringe on the basic health and sanity of individuals. Obsession in any form is no way to go about living.
