Every Sunday morning in my home, for as long as I can remember, my mother has made brunch. The ritual was so integrated into my childhood that I thought it was something everyone did. After mentioning it in passing to my friends, and having to explain the intricacies of the meal, I realized that this was something special—this was my family’s. Bacon, always crispy; eggs, scrambled; bagels; hash browns that my sister and I would fight over. This was the ritual.
Our relationships with food are not our own. They are a series of choices made by the people around us, a series of individual experiences and meals, a mess of cultural, religious, and familial ties that we can’t undo. Herein lies the issue with modern views of health and wellness: they strip us of these nuanced experiences with food. Rote explanations of health with terms like gluten free or low fat consider eating an emotionless act, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. From the beginning of humanity, eating has been an act dripping with connotation—connotation of celebration, when hunters brought back food for weeks, of importance as part of rituals and sacrifice, of mourning, at burials. Evidence exists that even 13,000 years ago, people were offered a last meal before their death. Food is not just about nutrients or necessity. Food is a collective experience unlike any other we have, and this is not by chance, or by modern invention.
The problem arises when people recommend dogmatic forms of eating without taking into consideration the individual pasts that people have with food. In an age that prides itself on considering strong the new skinny, more and more people feel comfortable recommending diets under the guise that they intend to make the population healthier. Of course, it’s never that simple. Health is not something that can be prescribed across the board by cutting out bread, or fat, or sugar, or whatever food group is currently taking the heat for making us bad. Further, this isn’t necessarily an effective view of nutrition: if it was as simple as cutting out all foods deemed horrible and never thinking about them again, more people would do it. We have to consider who we are blaming. Is it the food, for appearing innocent but revealing a sinister nature? Is it our bodies, for taking up too much space? Or, worst, us, for daring to crave things that have been determined as unworthy?
Food is integral to culture. When we make blanket statements about the value of healthy food that condemn other cultures’ food as overly rich and indulgent, not only ignores the presence of this food in people’s everyday lives but also ascribes them the same way of eating as us. There needs to be space in discussions about food to account for our differences. There is no hierarchy of health, and positing our diet laden culture as better than others is unfair and untrue. Ordering curry from an Indian restaurant as your “cheat day” shows a lack of understanding of other cultures’ food. To tell someone that the naan their mother makes them at home is actually unhealthy ignores their history, and also posits the West as the forerunners in health. In actuality, many cultures have been doing things for centuries that the West as a community is just coming around to.
The fitness community also seems to derive a certain kind of joy in the persistent elimination of unhealthy foods. There is a pleasure in difficulty, a pleasure in being the kind of person who is strong minded enough to achieve a certain body, a pleasure in depriving oneself of more and more things. While there also exists a pleasure in being the kind of person gifted with a body that appears healthy, the fitness community depends upon the concept of work: working for one’s health, which almost always means working for the right kind of body, whether this is admitted or not. Moderation is a hard thing to build an identity out of, whereas eliminating foods from your diet can earn you a spot among a community of people who are strong in the same way as you.
This system seems to centre on food first, and thus, bodies first. There is very little concern for the history of food, or the latent insecurities of the person choosing to become healthier. The advice first focuses on acai bowls and what foods to never, ever eat (Number 3 Will Shock You!). The idea here is that our bodies, once beautiful or thin or otherwise “healthy,” will no longer burden us. We will no longer feel ashamed because we will have eradicated the need to. Inherent in this is the idea that we did have reason to feel shameful before. This is hurtful and, more importantly, untrue. Many people are addicted to the pleasures that food can bring them, and shame is the center point of addiction. In teaching ourselves shame in eating, we only stand to limit discussion and growth.
Imagine a world where any journey with food begins with the prioritization of kindness. Imagine beginning with the knowledge that we are protecting ourselves, not attempting to change ourselves. Imagine advocating for moderation: a world in which we partake in all of the foods that bring us joy—avocado spread on a bagel, a smoothie with only your favourite fruits, a plate of fries—because that is what we deserve. We deserve vitamins and proteins and colours because we have bodies that keep us alive, and we must protect them. We deserve good food because it is memory-inducing and community-building and it makes us happy. Refrains from fitness gurus of “I work hard for this body” imply that you get the body that you deserve when you work enough for it. I urge you that your body is already the one that you deserve. Your body is already good, already worthy of your love and respect and nourishment.
This weekend, or any weekend that I return home, my mother will wake up on Sunday morning and start to make brunch. Bacon, always crispy; eggs, scrambled; bagels; hash browns that my sister and I have found a system to divide. This is the ritual. To deny myself this food would not be an act of my own volition and it would ruin the simplicity I felt eating it as a child. To feel guilty about it would be to betray mys
elf and negate the joy I feel from it. To remind me prescriptively of the gluten in my bagel would be callous and unfeeling. So, I will sit down, and I will eat.
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