Eating My Feelings

On Monday I was angry.  No, let me rephrase that: I was VERY angry -- furious -- livid -- fire-spewing mad.  Why I was angry is not nearly as interesting as what I did with that anger.  I ate it.  I literally stuffed my face because I did not know what to do with the incredible anger I felt.  I had no outlet, no means through which I could expel this demon, anger.  And I found this so troubling I tried to drown it, suffocate it, with food.  Now I am sure you can imagine the result of such an effort:  A stomach ache so tremendous I could not sleep, but rather was up all night seething with anger and a stomach ache.  Perfect.

Food is a very powerful tool.  When I am full I feel everything.  Hunger distracts.  So when I do not want to think about a hurt or to address it, I do not eat.  So why then do I eat to excess?  Anger...but at what?  Feeling invisible, unimportant, dismissed, lied to.  I eat to substantiate my existence.  Put another way, when I feel liking nothing, I want to eat nothing.  When I feel like something big and powerful, I also eat accordingly.

I was watching my pup today.  When it is grey and cold out and he does not get as much exercise as he would like, he limits his intake of food.  When he isn't burning it, he doesn't need it, so he doesn't eat it.  What separates my pup and me is that food is not for me ever just food.  It is a long and complicated narrative beginning and ending with a sometimes clear, sometimes opaque, sometimes troubled vision of myself, perhaps not as I am but certainly as I feel myself to be.  There are so many books out now about how to 'eat like a skinny person': 'eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full'; 'eat anything you like, but in small doses'; 'the trouble with Americans is that we eat too many chemicals'; etc...Now, I am not dismissing these platitudes, as in each one there is truth.  But food is so much more complicated than that, and the solutions, both personal and communal, for our food woes must be more complex.

So where do we go from here?  Hell if I know!  But I do hope we can develop a platitude-free, nuanced, honest articulation of the complex problem of food production and consumption in this country.  We will have to address some skeletons in our collective closet, skeletons named race, greed, profit, poverty, sex, sexism and their troubling cousins.  Where should we begin?