1Rules and Rebellion
I cannot keep ice cream … or bread or … anything too rewarding in the house.
—GLORIA STEINEM1
When I was young, my father traveled for work. He was a fledgling professor and researcher, and there were always lectures and conferences he was flying off to during those early years. Of course, I missed him, but there was an upside. When my father went out of town, my mom made macaroni and cheese.
He was always watching his cholesterol, which meant the whole family was watching his cholesterol, as well as our own. Even as a toddler, I could list which foods were “bad for you,” among them: cheese, butter, fast food, processed meats, and all sweets. It was the 1970s, when people still smoked cigarettes to relax, but new research was emerging that egg yolks were killers (a position that has since been reversed, incidentally). Food and food restriction dominated our lives. The messaging was inside and outside my home, everywhere and impossible to ignore. Certain foods, bad ones, which also happened to be delicious—could literally kill you. My mom wasn’t fully buying it.
I could hear my dad’s car pulling out of the driveway for a two-day work trip, and already she was gathering ingredients from the cupboards to start a roux. Real butter (we had butter in the house?) and flour. Whole milk. When I was very small, she’d grate the cheese, and when I got older and could be trusted not to shred my fingers, I was permitted to press the block of Cracker Barrel up and down along the grater, until all that remained was a tiny end piece, warm from my little hands, that all went into the bubbling pot.
Stirring was very important, my mom instructed. I’d stand on a chair next to the stove, wooden spoon in one hand. “Keep stirring!” she called over her shoulder, as she prepared a rum and Coke for herself. I don’t know where the soda came from; I never saw it in the house.
Sometimes she added peas and onions. The pasta was always elbows. Never baked in the oven, no crumb topping. Just the rich, fatty, velvety sauce. Hearty, salty, and comforting. Sitting at the small table in the kitchen across from my mother, I didn’t realize that we were also participating in a quiet rebellion. Unbound from any food rules. Free.
My parents were both relatively health conscious, which was unique for the time (at least compared to my friends, who, I discovered at my first sleepover, were allowed Cocoa Puffs for breakfast). In our home, bread was whole wheat; my mom sometimes shopped the crammed, narrow aisles of the town’s health food store, its pungent vitamin smell sticking to my clothes. My father was young, sharp, followed nutrition science closely, and had a family history of high cholesterol that concerned him. I remember him carefully telling me more than once, You can eat cheese, but I can’t because of cholesterol. He didn’t want to burden me, I’m sure. But I must have understood even then that we were related, so it might be an issue for me, too. His concerns were echoed by messages in the world around us, the nightly news, the cover of Time magazine in the grocery store, as we waited to check out. Cart filled with frozen vegetables and Spoon Size Shredded Wheat.
When I was around four, home alone during the day with my mother, I once watched in horror as she prepared an egg salad sandwich for herself. It went like this: hard-boiled eggs WITH YOLKS (THAT WAS THE WORST PART!), celery, onion, and mayonnaise. Toasted (WHITE!) Pepperidge Farm bread.
“Would you like half?” she offered.
I don’t know, I thought, would I like to DIE TODAY?
I shook my head no, jaw dropped.
I watched as she cut the small sandwich diagonally and ate it with a cup of coffee. She chewed slowly, savoring each bite. I recall feeling genuinely worried, as if something terrible would happen to her in that very moment. But nothing did. In fact, she was smiling.
Good Foods and Bad Foods
The notion that foods can be good or bad has been hammered into all of us for decades by parents, friends, relentless cultural messaging in the form of food advertising, weight loss programs, nutritionists, the medical community, even the US government (more on that in a moment). Seventy-seven percent of Americans believed back in the 1990s that there were “good” and “bad” foods, according to the American Dietetic Association, and it holds true today.2 The concept makes sense. It’s difficult to argue that nutrient-rich kale isn’t a “good” food, and that a pepperoni pizza, dense with saturated fats, isn’t a “bad” one.
Right?
Not entirely.
“Pizza is often demonized as ‘bad’ because it is high in fat, high in refined carbohydrates and easy to overindulge” with, wrote Chris Mohr, cofounder of the nutrition consultation company Mohr Results.3 “But if that pizza isn’t an everyday occurrence and it brought friends together, encouraged conversation, laughing and connection, the otherwise ‘bad’ food becomes nurturing for your soul. Food inherently is not good or bad.”
Marry me, Mr. Mohr.
Starting with informally polling friends, then expanding my outreach, I found it nearly impossible to find a woman who hasn’t made at least one or two rigid food rules for herself, or actively restricts or eliminates a particular food group for either perceived health reasons or weight management.
“Do you know anyone I can talk to who has a healthy relationship with food?” I asked my friend Lauren, adding, “You look fantastic, by the way.” She did. What was she doing?
“Thanks! I gave up sugar,” she said. I file it away. Note to self: stop eating sugar, I guess? She continued, “No bread, no wine, no bananas…”
Wait, bananas are bad now?
“And no,” she added, “I can’t think of anyone for you to talk to.… Sorry.”
The most common food restriction I’ve witnessed among friends and in American culture at large is bread. At any one time I have a minimum of three friends who are “off gluten for health reasons,” even though no doctor was involved in the decision.4
Poor bread! Who did this to her? (Answer: the publicity machine behind the Atkins Diet.) And despite evidence to the contrary, that bread is fine to eat, the “gluten-free” nonsense sticks. I’ve subscribed to it myself. I cannot count the number of times in my adult life I’ve stopped eating bread, genuinely believing I feel “lighter and better” (direct quote from me to myself) when I’m not eating bread. If I really do feel lighter and better without bread, then what about Paris? Why did I feel consistently fantastic during the ten days my husband and I were in France on vacation eight years ago, eating a minimum of two baguettes plus one croissant per day? Incidentally, I didn’t gain a pound on that trip.
“I met with a nutritionist the other day,” my friend Joanie tells me. “She asked what I ate for breakfast, and when I told her ‘toast,’ she said that was the absolute worst thing I could be eating.” Joanie blew air through her lips and I could feel the anger coming. “Fuck her,” she said. “Why can’t I eat toast?”
Many women who suffer or have suffered from an eating disorder trace the origins of their illnesses to a particular food restriction. For Daphne, growing up in Wiltshire, England, cheese on toast was one of her favorite childhood snacks. Then she stopped, concerned about carbs, fat, and so-called healthy eating. “When I suffered from anorexia for ten years, I could not eat cheese, nor could I eat bread, so cheese on toast was a complete no-go area for me,” she told me. She continued to avoid cheese and bread for years after her recovery, and then very gradually began working them back into her diet.
Today there is an enormous body of scientific research disputing the notion that foods can be classified as good or bad at all. The ADA’s position is that “all foods can fit into a healthful eating style,” and that “classifying foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ may foster unhealthy eating behaviors.”5 Black-and-white thinking about particular foods can cause unnecessary stress, preoccupation with food, and lay groundwork for developing an eating disorder, like chronic food restriction, bingeing, or purging.6 I reread that list and tick each off in my mind. I still feel stress around eating, and even without retreading old eating disorder ground like starving or purging, which I no longer do, I’m still frequently preoccupied with food and what I should and shouldn’t be eating. It’s such familiar territory, I’m not fully aware of how much stress it’s causing me.
In recent years, a new disorder has emerged, orthorexia, essentially an obsession with so-called healthy eating. There is not yet a clear set of criteria to diagnose orthorexia, and it’s not formally recognized as an eating disorder by the American Psychiatric Association (catch up, APA!), but the National Eating Disorders Association includes it in its list of disordered eating behaviors, and many psychotherapists treat orthorexia as a form of anorexia and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Healthy Labels
The other complication in thinking of foods as good or bad is that it’s a moving target. The criteria change constantly. Like when your friend breaks up with someone and, to be supportive, you say, “I always hated that asshole,” and then two weeks later they’re back together.
That’s exactly what happened to fat.
Fats have been demonized in the United States since the 1950s, after coronary heart disease was revealed as the leading cause of death a decade earlier. In what became known as the diet-heart hypothesis, researchers proposed that diets high in saturated fats and cholesterol were a major cause of coronary heart disease. In her stellar paper “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America,”7 published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Ann La Berge, a professor at Virginia Tech, tracks how this one hypothesis spurred a complete overhaul of the country’s dietary guidelines and eventually led to all of us bingeing on SnackWell’s cookies thirty years later. Initially, a low-fat diet was recommended for people at risk for heart disease. The American Heart Association published a report on diet and lowering heart disease risk, cautioning, “It must be emphasized that there is as yet no final proof that heart attacks or strokes will be prevented by such measures.”8
Despite that, the US government put the diet-heart hypothesis front and center on the national agenda, creating new dietary guidelines and promoting a low-fat diet not only for people with a high heart disease risk, but for everyone except babies.
“The diet-heart hypothesis remained a hypothesis,” La Berge writes, “but, as if already proven, it became enshrined in federal public health policy and was promoted by health care practitioners and popular health media.… From 1984 through the 1990s, dietary fat was increasingly blamed not only for coronary heart disease but also for overweight and obesity.”9
And just like that, health and weight became intertwined and a window opened up for some money to be made.
“Here was a chance for the food industry to profit from scientific research,” writes La Berge. Suddenly grocery store aisles became glutted with foods bearing the “low-fat” label, most processed foods having swapped out the fat for an increased amount of sugar. The AHA launched a low-fat campaign, including the introduction of a “heart-healthy” label indicating the association’s seal of approval. Food companies could pay the AHA to label their foods as “heart-healthy,” thereby officially declaring them Good Foods.
Among the so-called heart-healthy foods La Berge found in her research: Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and Low Fat Pop-Tarts. (You know which foods never snagged the healthy label? Fruits and vegetables. They were excluded from the program altogether, as if they were irrelevant.)
The AHA clarified its position on fat in a 2015 white paper, writing, “Contrary to what has been reported in the media and likely perceived by many health care professionals and consumers, the AHA does not advise a low-fat diet for optimal heart health [italics mine] … and recognizes that the overall dietary pattern is more important than individual foods. The recommended dietary pattern emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.”10
Fats? Not so bad.
Over the years, other well-funded campaigns followed the low-fat one, each with its own agenda and set of food rules: high protein, low-carb, Whole30, paleo, and on and on. Cloaked in the pretext of health guidance, all of these crusades share two important characteristics: (1) someone (not you) is getting rich and (2) the rules will drive you mad. They can send you spiraling in the opposite direction: the more you try to control your food, the more out of control you may feel.
You can’t help but want to rebel.
When I was thirteen, all of the deeply engrained healthy-eating structure from my parents went to hell: I got a job at Wendy’s.
This was in response to my father informing me that I had to work. He grew up in a struggling immigrant family and started working young. To him, me getting a job at thirteen was part of life. Unfortunately, the state of Pennsylvania didn’t agree—it was a violation of child labor laws. Still, he was firm. If I wanted to spend money, he said, I needed to make it myself. So I took the bus downtown to the Department of Labor and filled out special paperwork for families to override the policy, and my father happily signed off.
I wasn’t qualified for much; my main skill at the time was performing the choreography from the movie Flashdance, which wasn’t super marketable.
My father was so pleased that I landed an after-school job, that he didn’t blink at my working at a fast-food restaurant, whose menu was only comprised of “Foods That May Kill You,” by our family’s standards. Bacon double cheeseburgers, french fries, and the Frosty—remember the Frosty? Did it not occur to him that I’d be eating the food?
Too young for the grill or frier, I was assigned to make sandwiches. I stood next to Dwayne, who manned the grill and was probably around twenty. He passed me patties to assemble.
My first week, there was a power outage on the entire block and we stood in the dark in the hot kitchen compulsively eating french fries that we knew would have to be thrown out once the power came back on. It was a decadent hour.
Working at Wendy’s, I ate a lot of fast food but I kept it healthy by sticking to Taco Salads. That is, until Dwayne saw me eating one and schooled me on the chili that topped the dish. The chili—which for legal reasons I’ll presume was a quirk of this particular franchise, now closed—simmered in a giant industrial-sized stockpot on a back burner of the grill ALL DAY. Perhaps long ago it once was chili, like a sourdough starter made generations ago to get things going. But while I was there, the chili pot seemed one tier above the trash. Everything went in: overdone fries, burnt ends of burgers, onion skins, pickles, discarded buns. I once watched someone throw in half of a Frosty, followed by a few shakes of chili powder. I stopped eating the Taco Salads, switching my preshift meal to fries and a Coke. It was all delicious, of course, but in addition to all that salt, there was another taste: Freedom.
Like macaroni-and-cheese weekends with my mother. Times a million.
During the Wendy’s months, I picked up smoking, experienced sexual harassment at work for the first time, and probably gained at least fifteen french fry–Frosty pounds. I felt like a grown-up. I was making my own money, savoring short smoke breaks in the parking lot, winter air hitting my face. I had my own time, my own space, my own workplace world. For a few hours after school I didn’t have to answer to parents, and I could eat whatever I wanted. No rules. Long after that job was over, I equated (and still often do) freedom and independence with eating whatever I want, and the radical idea of eating for pleasure. It is pleasurable. Salty, tangy, crispy, creamy, and chewy. But some days I’m afraid I’ll lose control.
It never occurred to me that rules about good foods and bad foods would be the very thing that set me up for those feelings of failure later in life.
Copyright © 2023 by Cole Kazdin
