The Story of Harli's Eating
Hi! My name is Harli, I am a sophomore at Michigan State University. It's the fall of 2016, and I'm writing this autobiography of sorts as an attempt to understand why I, and possibly more Americans like myself don't eat healthier.
To begin let's look into my current habits and tastes. To be frank, I usually maintain the diet of a young child given open access to the pantry. I sometimes try to change my habits and choose healthier options, but the effort is usually limited to short a lived phase and ends with me succumbing to my inner child and binging on copious amounts of junk food. My favorite food is chicken, all kinds of chicken (fried, grilled, roasted, etc). My least favorite foods are Brussel-sprouts, and chicken fried steak; with chicken in the name it lets on that it might be a perfectly delectable meal, but it's not. I live in a dorm at Michigan State University and get my meals at the cafeteria across the street.
As a child, I was always pretty picky, and never had much of an appetite. I had a few favorite meals, but even of those, I would rarely clear my plate. My parents told me that I ate like a bird because I would never finish all my food, but I was always hungry shortly after. It's probably safe to assume that some of my early childhood eating habits were the result of a short attention span. I was a spastic child, full of energy, and I never really devoted myself fully to a task for more than ten to twenty minutes. Sitting down to eat wouldn't keep my attention long enough for me to finish a meal. Whatever the cause, my habits leading up to early adolescence were marked with a certain disinterest in food. A privilege that is easily taken for granite. As the grossly uninformed cliche goes, "there are starving children in Africa." True enough, sure, but there are also starving children here in America, and an incredible amount who are paradoxically obese and malnourished at the same time. But I have always had the luxury of being picky. I could pass on foods that didn't please my palate without worry because I had never felt the sting of hunger pains.
My disinterest with food didn't last, though, and my eating habits changed drastically around age eleven. This transformation was marked by an experience I had with a dish my father often served. It was a precooked, frozen, ham-in-cheese-in-chicken treat labeled chicken cordon-bleu. He would often make the chicken cordon-bleu's, but I had never finished my layered meet mound, until the day I happily ate two whole ones. My Dad remembers that my stark increase in appetite that day marked the beginning of a long "growth spurt." I soon earned myself the nickname "garbage disposal," because if you had any trouble clearing your plate you could be sure that I would take it off your hands for you. A nickname I should have worn with honor, considering it meant literally that I was an eliminator of food waste, wich according to the USDA, the U.S produces upwards of 113 billion pounds of in a year. But alas! this perspective would not come to me until much later, and I would live a good portion of my life known as the family glutton.
When failing to make healthier eating choices throughout my life I would usually revert to blaming it on this caricature of myself. If overeating and a love for indulgent foods had become a part of my identity, I would be changing who I was just too loose a few pounds. Much like the competitive eating icon Sonya Thomas (The Black Widow), I had pushed passed the disgust commonly provoked by gluttony (as described in Rachel Herz's, That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion) and turned it into a fun part of my personality. To a lesser extent than Sonya, I was known for putting away food. Certainly, I didn't want to be known forever as the girl who eats a lot, but it just wasn't worth giving up my favorite foods and dealing with the strange looks my friends would give me when I ordered a salad.
There is a certain kind of peer pressure between people who try to better their health and their friends. At least in my case, it usually works to discourage the healthy hopeful. My friends, who were likely triggered by something within them that made them feel bad for their own eating habits, would always push against my health kicks. The perceived holier than though attitude certainly affects the way people treat a person who orders a salad at a burger place. I can only imagine how this pressure is worse for a vegetarian or vegan. The backlash that is prompted by the snooty stigma tied to vegetarianism is easily one of the biggest things keeping me from pursuing it, even after reading the horrors outlined in Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. What is so bad about vegetarianism that there would be any reason for it to reflect poorly on the practitioners? Maybe this is our American food culture at play.
Barbara Kingsolver points to a lack of food culture as the culprit behind the obesity epidemic as well as the U.S's massive carbon footprint, but maybe we do have a food culture of our own. Maybe we are a society that celebrates freedom and individuality so much so that we value the pursuit of happiness —or more accurately, instant gradification— over our health, as well as the environments, and that is what makes up our food culture. Pleasure, convenience and progress are paramount, and valuing health, animal welfare, or the planet over instant gratification is different, scary, and thusly, in true American form, bad.
None-the-less, there are Americans who care much about their health, animal welfare, and the environment; increasingly large populations of them in fact, but I was not raised in one of those granola cruncher families. You know, the ones who have a compost bin in their kitchen and feed their four-year-olds quinoa. My parents fed me chicken fried in lard and endless meals from boxes or drive through windows, and you can forget about ever fixing me up some quinoa. Beyond my personal relationships with friends and family, a significant amount of my eating habits can be traced back to the food I was raised on. Unlike the morally obligated and proud house wife's described in Laura Sapiro's Something From the Oven —the type that would feel guilty about saving themselves effort with convenience foods— my mother didn't have time to care about putting much effort into dinner. I did not grow up in the 1940's and working moms could take pride in serving quick meals. Dominos and Stoffers were staples of my early diet, and home-made meals from scratch were a special treat. Some of my fondest memories were in the kitchen cooking real meals. My mom and I had this wonderful turkey noodle soup tradition. Every year a couple days after Thanksgiving I would get to help her prepare a large pot of homemade turkey noodle soup. We would make the noodles ourselves from an old family recipe, and use the leftover turkey for the meat and broth. It was special to cook a real wholesome meal with my mom, but not something that happened every day. I never experienced home cooked meals as a part of everyday eating, and more importantly never learned the skills necessary to provide them for myself later in life. I am a victim of a movement I would otherwise celebrate. As women moved out of the kitchen and into the workplace, convenience foods slowly became commonplace. It wasn't because working women didn't want to cook for themselves, though, Laura Shapiro writes about early working women who reported cooking homemade meals for themselves every night. The food industry took advantage of these women's work lives, though, and pushed the glamor and efficiency of convenience foods through television ads, magazine articles, and recipe publications; wearing down the working woman's will to cook. As less woman cooked for their kids, fewer kids learned to cook. My mother wasn't the exceptional cooking housewife typical of the 1940's and 50's because she didn't spend much time in the kitchen learning from her mother as a kid, and then neither did I. I remain hopeful though for the fate of cooking, as it has been gaining popularity once again. The revival of the recipe column craze litters my social media feed in the form of cooking tutorial videos.
But my love for bad foods isn't just the consequence of a lack of cooking. I moved into my mom's home full time in middle school, after previously living mostly with my dad and stepmother. I then went from a limited three meals and few snacks a day to having the freedom to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Like many Americans, I soon fell victim to the propaganda and popularity surrounding junk foods. In 1999 "more than half of American adults were now considered overweight." (The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, Michael Moss, 2013) This is in large part because of the efforts made by food companies to eat up bigger chunks of "stomach share," or the amount of room in our stomachs that one company fights other brands for. They fight for this space by getting people hooked on their products, and I was no exception. I soon became addicted to salt, fat, and sugar.
These habits and "addictions" are hard to beat and now even as an adult, I feel bound to unhealthy choices. I continue to eat the way that I have since I was 12 years old, despite increased consciousness of the negative consequences of the food industry on myself as well as the world. My plight of poor habits is a struggle faced by many Americans. The way that I grew up eating is not uncommon, but it is also not natural. The way the processed food industry has marketed, lobbied, advertised, and pushed their way into our daily lives is a big part of why the US has such a problem with obesity. Yes, humans have the ability to execute will power, but unfortunately, we don't get to do so in a vacuum —as pointed out in an episode of the Dian Rehm Show titled "Soda Politics". While I might be a big fan of externalizing blame, I don't think it is a stretch to say that there are many factors that go into the decisions we make regarding food, beyond will power and conscious thought.
It's clear that there is a bigger picture here, a fairly broken system, but just because the problem might be bigger than any one of us, doesn't mean that it's not our responsibility to fix it. It's not going to change overnight, and it's going to take a lot of conscious thought and willpower to make a difference. As much as I would like to say that this class has totally changed me and I'm a born again vegan who will never touch factory farmed meat again, I'm not, and all in all my habits haven't changed much. But this class has changed my perspective on a lot of things, in a lot of ways. There hasn't been a day this semester that something in the real world hasn't connected to something we've talked about in class. While I haven't yet changed my life because of the knowledge I've gained in this class, I feel it has enlightened me in a way that not many classes do. I could explain away my regret of not changing my actions with a million excuses, but I do believe, like an addict, acceptance is the first step. I have accepted that there is a problem in the way I eat, and I am hopeful that I can change it for the better.
To begin let's look into my current habits and tastes. To be frank, I usually maintain the diet of a young child given open access to the pantry. I sometimes try to change my habits and choose healthier options, but the effort is usually limited to short a lived phase and ends with me succumbing to my inner child and binging on copious amounts of junk food. My favorite food is chicken, all kinds of chicken (fried, grilled, roasted, etc). My least favorite foods are Brussel-sprouts, and chicken fried steak; with chicken in the name it lets on that it might be a perfectly delectable meal, but it's not. I live in a dorm at Michigan State University and get my meals at the cafeteria across the street.
As a child, I was always pretty picky, and never had much of an appetite. I had a few favorite meals, but even of those, I would rarely clear my plate. My parents told me that I ate like a bird because I would never finish all my food, but I was always hungry shortly after. It's probably safe to assume that some of my early childhood eating habits were the result of a short attention span. I was a spastic child, full of energy, and I never really devoted myself fully to a task for more than ten to twenty minutes. Sitting down to eat wouldn't keep my attention long enough for me to finish a meal. Whatever the cause, my habits leading up to early adolescence were marked with a certain disinterest in food. A privilege that is easily taken for granite. As the grossly uninformed cliche goes, "there are starving children in Africa." True enough, sure, but there are also starving children here in America, and an incredible amount who are paradoxically obese and malnourished at the same time. But I have always had the luxury of being picky. I could pass on foods that didn't please my palate without worry because I had never felt the sting of hunger pains.
My disinterest with food didn't last, though, and my eating habits changed drastically around age eleven. This transformation was marked by an experience I had with a dish my father often served. It was a precooked, frozen, ham-in-cheese-in-chicken treat labeled chicken cordon-bleu. He would often make the chicken cordon-bleu's, but I had never finished my layered meet mound, until the day I happily ate two whole ones. My Dad remembers that my stark increase in appetite that day marked the beginning of a long "growth spurt." I soon earned myself the nickname "garbage disposal," because if you had any trouble clearing your plate you could be sure that I would take it off your hands for you. A nickname I should have worn with honor, considering it meant literally that I was an eliminator of food waste, wich according to the USDA, the U.S produces upwards of 113 billion pounds of in a year. But alas! this perspective would not come to me until much later, and I would live a good portion of my life known as the family glutton.
When failing to make healthier eating choices throughout my life I would usually revert to blaming it on this caricature of myself. If overeating and a love for indulgent foods had become a part of my identity, I would be changing who I was just too loose a few pounds. Much like the competitive eating icon Sonya Thomas (The Black Widow), I had pushed passed the disgust commonly provoked by gluttony (as described in Rachel Herz's, That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion) and turned it into a fun part of my personality. To a lesser extent than Sonya, I was known for putting away food. Certainly, I didn't want to be known forever as the girl who eats a lot, but it just wasn't worth giving up my favorite foods and dealing with the strange looks my friends would give me when I ordered a salad.
There is a certain kind of peer pressure between people who try to better their health and their friends. At least in my case, it usually works to discourage the healthy hopeful. My friends, who were likely triggered by something within them that made them feel bad for their own eating habits, would always push against my health kicks. The perceived holier than though attitude certainly affects the way people treat a person who orders a salad at a burger place. I can only imagine how this pressure is worse for a vegetarian or vegan. The backlash that is prompted by the snooty stigma tied to vegetarianism is easily one of the biggest things keeping me from pursuing it, even after reading the horrors outlined in Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. What is so bad about vegetarianism that there would be any reason for it to reflect poorly on the practitioners? Maybe this is our American food culture at play.
Barbara Kingsolver points to a lack of food culture as the culprit behind the obesity epidemic as well as the U.S's massive carbon footprint, but maybe we do have a food culture of our own. Maybe we are a society that celebrates freedom and individuality so much so that we value the pursuit of happiness —or more accurately, instant gradification— over our health, as well as the environments, and that is what makes up our food culture. Pleasure, convenience and progress are paramount, and valuing health, animal welfare, or the planet over instant gratification is different, scary, and thusly, in true American form, bad.
None-the-less, there are Americans who care much about their health, animal welfare, and the environment; increasingly large populations of them in fact, but I was not raised in one of those granola cruncher families. You know, the ones who have a compost bin in their kitchen and feed their four-year-olds quinoa. My parents fed me chicken fried in lard and endless meals from boxes or drive through windows, and you can forget about ever fixing me up some quinoa. Beyond my personal relationships with friends and family, a significant amount of my eating habits can be traced back to the food I was raised on. Unlike the morally obligated and proud house wife's described in Laura Sapiro's Something From the Oven —the type that would feel guilty about saving themselves effort with convenience foods— my mother didn't have time to care about putting much effort into dinner. I did not grow up in the 1940's and working moms could take pride in serving quick meals. Dominos and Stoffers were staples of my early diet, and home-made meals from scratch were a special treat. Some of my fondest memories were in the kitchen cooking real meals. My mom and I had this wonderful turkey noodle soup tradition. Every year a couple days after Thanksgiving I would get to help her prepare a large pot of homemade turkey noodle soup. We would make the noodles ourselves from an old family recipe, and use the leftover turkey for the meat and broth. It was special to cook a real wholesome meal with my mom, but not something that happened every day. I never experienced home cooked meals as a part of everyday eating, and more importantly never learned the skills necessary to provide them for myself later in life. I am a victim of a movement I would otherwise celebrate. As women moved out of the kitchen and into the workplace, convenience foods slowly became commonplace. It wasn't because working women didn't want to cook for themselves, though, Laura Shapiro writes about early working women who reported cooking homemade meals for themselves every night. The food industry took advantage of these women's work lives, though, and pushed the glamor and efficiency of convenience foods through television ads, magazine articles, and recipe publications; wearing down the working woman's will to cook. As less woman cooked for their kids, fewer kids learned to cook. My mother wasn't the exceptional cooking housewife typical of the 1940's and 50's because she didn't spend much time in the kitchen learning from her mother as a kid, and then neither did I. I remain hopeful though for the fate of cooking, as it has been gaining popularity once again. The revival of the recipe column craze litters my social media feed in the form of cooking tutorial videos.
But my love for bad foods isn't just the consequence of a lack of cooking. I moved into my mom's home full time in middle school, after previously living mostly with my dad and stepmother. I then went from a limited three meals and few snacks a day to having the freedom to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Like many Americans, I soon fell victim to the propaganda and popularity surrounding junk foods. In 1999 "more than half of American adults were now considered overweight." (The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, Michael Moss, 2013) This is in large part because of the efforts made by food companies to eat up bigger chunks of "stomach share," or the amount of room in our stomachs that one company fights other brands for. They fight for this space by getting people hooked on their products, and I was no exception. I soon became addicted to salt, fat, and sugar.
These habits and "addictions" are hard to beat and now even as an adult, I feel bound to unhealthy choices. I continue to eat the way that I have since I was 12 years old, despite increased consciousness of the negative consequences of the food industry on myself as well as the world. My plight of poor habits is a struggle faced by many Americans. The way that I grew up eating is not uncommon, but it is also not natural. The way the processed food industry has marketed, lobbied, advertised, and pushed their way into our daily lives is a big part of why the US has such a problem with obesity. Yes, humans have the ability to execute will power, but unfortunately, we don't get to do so in a vacuum —as pointed out in an episode of the Dian Rehm Show titled "Soda Politics". While I might be a big fan of externalizing blame, I don't think it is a stretch to say that there are many factors that go into the decisions we make regarding food, beyond will power and conscious thought.
It's clear that there is a bigger picture here, a fairly broken system, but just because the problem might be bigger than any one of us, doesn't mean that it's not our responsibility to fix it. It's not going to change overnight, and it's going to take a lot of conscious thought and willpower to make a difference. As much as I would like to say that this class has totally changed me and I'm a born again vegan who will never touch factory farmed meat again, I'm not, and all in all my habits haven't changed much. But this class has changed my perspective on a lot of things, in a lot of ways. There hasn't been a day this semester that something in the real world hasn't connected to something we've talked about in class. While I haven't yet changed my life because of the knowledge I've gained in this class, I feel it has enlightened me in a way that not many classes do. I could explain away my regret of not changing my actions with a million excuses, but I do believe, like an addict, acceptance is the first step. I have accepted that there is a problem in the way I eat, and I am hopeful that I can change it for the better.