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Do you feel self-conscious eating in public? Do you deliberate endlessly about what to order at a restaurant?
Does a sloppy plate of spaghetti send you into spasms of self-consciousness?
For many women eating is an excruciating public performance.
March is Women's History Month and I'm ruminating on that most loaded of symbolic acts, eating, and the various roles food plays in our lives.
Women, in particular, are bombarded with advertisements, products and programs that encourage us to shed lbs. The Biggest Loser, the reality weight-loss show, is a worldwide hit currently in its 9th season, airing in over 90 countries.
Vogue perpetuates images of women as thin as phyllo dough. Comments like model and designer Kate Moss' remark that "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" are hard to stomach.
We spend enormous psychic energy hating the way we look and trying to slim down to that size 4 dress or the magic number on the scale.
I think of Eleanor Antin's Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, a performance art work in which Antin photographed her own naked body at successive stages during a month of crash-dieting. The artist was attempting to reach her perfect size, yet always fell short of her "ideal."
On the other extreme is the appeal of eating contests that summon us far afield -- to the county fair where we indulge vicariously and voyeuristically in gluttonous excess.
Sonya Thomas (98 lbs) is a Korean-American competitive eater dubbed "The Black Widow" because she regularly defeats men several times her size.
In obscene frenzies of consumption, Thomas has captured current world records that include:
- 46 Mince Pies in 10 mins (2006, Somerset, England),
- 17 Chinese Lotus Seed Buns in 12 mins (2006, Hong Kong)
- 9.75 lbs of Fried Okra in 10 mins (2006, Oklahoma City)
- Acme Oysters: 46 Dozen (552) in 10 mins (2005 Metairie, LA).
- "Feel the Heat" whole, pickled Jalapenos: 250.5 in 9 mins (2009, Chicago, IL)
These speed-eating performances exaggerate and parody female appetite.
Such gastronomic orgies are both "repulsive and gratifying," claims Deborah R. Geis, in their suspension of cultural sanctions against women's extreme consumption and making a down right sloppy mess.
Excessive food intake, which more often takes the form of private binging, is predominantly a female behavior -- indulged in when other venues of pleasure are closed.
Overeating is, Jennifer Maher says, one way to "satisfy the self when one is exhausted by constantly satisfying others."
Food is how we swallow what we would otherwise scream.
Popular television shows also center on the subject of food aversions. Freaky Eaters, a series broadcast on UK women's reality TV, dramatizes peoples' food phobias. Each episode follows a person who has a severely limited diet, often to the point of subsisting on just one provision such as biscuits, brown sauce, or burnt sausages.
A team of "experts" expose participants to sensational methods of treatment that included strapping one contestant to the wing of an aircraft. According to the show's "psychological coach" Felix Economakis: "How difficult is eating a tomato when you've survived being strapped to the wing of a plane?"
We also have our food fascinations. The preparation of a meal has become its own widely-viewed seductive spectacle. On most evenings, the Food Network commands a larger audience than any other cable channel.
These shows have popularized the practice of "food porn," the alluring presentation of sensuous and exotic dishes that arouse our desires and activate our associations between food and sex.
Nigella Lawson, the Queen of food porn, knows how to handle spaghetti. She also concocts other lush entrees that the lens reveals like a close-up from Playboy.
Chefs from the cooking shows enjoy names with X-rated connotations: "Jeremiah Tower," Jamie Oliver, (aka "The Naked Chef"), "Wolfgang Puck," and "Alice Waters."
Cameramen for these programs use many of the same conventions of porn, tantalizing us with provocative camera angles, soft focus, saturated colors, and careful cropping.
Never mind that the photo-shopped, hyper-idealized images are something that few can replicate at home. These food fantasies are artificially-enhanced beyond human emulation.
For dessert: the camera zooms in to a wine-poached pear tart, artfully arranged and glazed with jam, glistening atop a flawlessly-flakey crust.
Meanwhile, for most women, the mouth is a site of stringent policing and surveillance. Inevitable drama. War.
This is not only a battle to control our body-image but one fought over the expression of our own appetites, both gustatory and erotic.
(My former analyst once told me that the unconscious does not distinguish between the body's various orifices.)
We displace these anxieties about erotic pleasure onto the body more generally and obsess about restraining it, and dropping that last 5 lbs.
Following cues from the fashion and fitness industries, women pursue the unattainable in a tortured reinvention of self -- and end up alienating themselves from their own desires.
Alas, we buy into our culture's obsession with the idealized female form.
Literally.
Well, something's got to keep the economy going.
Main References:
Geis, Deborah R. "Feeding the Audience: Food, Feminism, and Performance Art." Eating Culture (1998). Edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Maher, Jennifer. "Ripping the Bodice: Eating, Reading, and Revolt." College Literature: Oral Fixations, Cannibalizing Theories, 28.1 (2001). Edited by Allyson D. Polsky and Tina Takemoto. West Chester, PA: West Chester University Press.
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