by Vicki Robin
I was also a lot lighter—not from the chemo but from a six-week marathon diet that had stripped twenty pounds off my body and promised to have changed my metabolism so that I could now eat gloriously, wantonly, voluptuously, without ever gaining back a pound. Having paid my dues, the payoff was this very meal, these glistening dishes full of fat and sugar and salt, crunch and slither and squish, noodles and rice and everything nice that I’d been denied trying to regain my menopause-obliterated waist.
I was trying not to look too eager as I clutched my plate and eyed the spread ahead with all the casualness of a hungry dog when he’s about to get fed. I flicked my tongue to both corners of my mouth, in case I was drooling.
Until this day, the only “food issues” that got my attention were personal. They were all about feeding my mouth, not feeding the world. In two decades of writing and teaching about the perils of overconsumption, I had challenged only our obsession with money and things and their impact on the planet, not our obsession with food, eating and dieting. How could I challenge our food insanity when I had my own hand in the cookie jar?
How Have I Dieted? Let Me Count the Ways
I’d always been an eater, of course. I was born that way. The simple act of bending my elbow with food-laden forks and spoons would amount, over my lifetime, to more than six tons of food disappearing down my gullet. What I have to show for all that shoveling is that I’m alive . . . with a few extra pounds.
The first time the bliss of feeding turned to the shame of fat was when I was six. On a hot day at a summer camp far more progressive than my parents knew, we were invited to take off our shirts and run in the sun. I watched kids with rail-thin bodies and ribs like keyboards tear their shirts off. I was pudgy—and mortified. In those days I loved cinch belts, so I valiantly hiked mine up from waist to underarms like a tube top and wiggled my hips like a movie actress, smiled, and came to know that I was different. I was fat.
The cinch belt was, in fact, the first of many elastic strategies for shaving off the odd bump and lump. “We’ve got to get you into a girdle,” my mother hissed one day as she walked behind me and saw that puberty was rearranging my fat attractively into two round dancing butt cheeks. We went directly to B. Altman’s foundations department to sausage me into a body shaper that could second as a chastity belt. Sometime later our family physician put me on my first diet. He had a big, sloppy, tobacco-stained gray mustache and his own balloon of a belly and delivered a sheet of paper with “the diet” with the same authority as God handing those two tablets to Moses. Dry toast. Skim milk. Naked vegetables. Sliced fruit. Skinless chicken.
So began a lifetime of diets and cheating on diets. I replaced pleasure and appetite with lists of dos and don’ts—and more diets than beads on a rosary. From Atkins to Fat Flush to Zone to South Beach to raw food to no food (fasting) so I could remember what my ribs and hip bones felt like—but, like the tide, the fat rolled in again and I rolled my self into a girdle as a last resort.
Then there were the health and virtue diets. Eat no fish (fisheries are collapsing). Eat no red meat (bad for your arteries and definitely bad for the feedlot cows). Eat no chicken (mass-produced in cages). Eat no dairy—you’re probably allergic. Eat no eggs—cholesterol. No, wait, eat eggs, you need the lecithin. Eat nothing with eyes (our brothers and sisters)—only fruits, nuts, and vegetables. When I lived in the woods in northern Wisconsin, tending a half-acre garden with a group of friends, we took a photo of us brandishing guns and knives at a wheelbarrow full of fresh-killed vegetables—yanked from the ground and piled high like carcasses. I dabbled in food virtue, one “right way” after another—and went back to eating what I wanted, working only on the virtue of self-acceptance.
The derivation of diet from the Greek means simply “how you live.” Traditionally it simply meant what people eat; cultures identify with the foods of their land—the salmon people, the seal people, the reindeer people, the taro people. Are we, then, the fast-food people? The aspartame people? Have we lost our “diet”—our way of life—entirely in service to dieting? If you review the many diets,1 few agree what to limit. Ayurvedic practitioners even question the supremacy of chugging down eight glasses of water a day. We should sip, not gulp. It should be warm, not cold.
I even lost any honest hunger, that inbred signal to get up and seek food. Hunger was always an option, welcome because it meant my diet was working; my body was finally eating its stores of fat. In my whole life I might have missed meals, but I’ve never gone hungry involuntarily for more than a day. My hungers were for things food could not really solve—because I was sad or scared or frustrated or bored. I bit down on food so I wouldn’t snap at the next person to cross my path.
Am I the only one this nuts? I don’t think so. We treat our bodies like servants or mannequins or machines or sex objects or conveyances for our overactive brains—rarely as a simple blessing, an aliveness. Food thus becomes a temptation, the enemy, a pleasure money can buy, an ostentation, a trifle, a given. Many of us have a love-hate relationship with food. We binge. We purge. We won’t eat. We won’t stop eating. If news of hunger and starvation wafts in on the morning news as we drink our fruit smoothie or eat sausage and eggs, at best we write a check—and perhaps later in the day assuage our uneasy conscience by another visit to the fridge.
How perfect that I was about to begin the 10-mile diet just as I’d finished feeding my fat-hating demon one more time. No longer a little girl at summer camp who could hike up a cinch belt to fit in, I was inching, literally, toward a matronly body—and I didn’t like it. That’s why I joined a growing number of friends in using a new super diet—the standard starvation plus a hormone that aids weight loss the way steroids aid muscle bulk. They’d all lost upward twenty pounds. Now I had too and was about to celebrate my win . . . by eating.
I did not know what I was in for with the 10-mile diet. I never expected to develop a new relationship with food that had nothing—but nothing—to do with my size. I would fall in love with the hands and lands that fed me. I would learn to seek nourishment, connection, and empowerment through how I grew, bought, cooked, and ate my food. I, the lone eater, would become I, the blessed, with food, farmers, farms, fields, and forests that fed me. I would receive the love right from the food, rather than turning to food as a substitute for love. This kind of diet sticks because it transforms the eater.
Local food could be yet one more fad or one more issue or one more virtue. Something to try—and say you did. The experiment I would soon undertake required an honest look at my current relationship with food. How I used food as an emotional crutch, as a ritual, as an entitlement, as an identity, as a set of habits I had no desire to break. On that summer day in 2010, though, local food was simply the happy distance between plate and mouth.
Growing Up in the Fifties
Most of us at the potluck had grown up in the fertile soil of the post–World War II middle class. We grew up hearing:
“Eat your vegetables. Think of the poor starving children in . . . [China, Korea, Africa].”
“Don’t ruin your appetite.” (Which meant no snacking after four P.M. Ruining our appetites was a sin against Mother, who spent an hour cooking our dinner.)
“If you don’t eat your dinner you can’t have any dessert.”
“Clean Plate Club!”
Our parents were reflecting their experience during the Depression, when so many did not have enough to eat. Meager fare continued into the war effort. Until the year I was born, sugar, coffee, processed foods, meats, canned fish, cheese, canned milk, and fats were all rationed, and victory gardens fed the nation.
After all that privation, the United States liked its women rounder. Marilyn Monroe was a size 14, compared to the size 6 stars of today. We weren’t afraid of a little weight. Milkmen delivered creamy fresh milk in glass bottles—plus butter and eggs—to the rising middle class’s doors daily. Fear of the link
between high cholesterol and heart disease was still in the future. Elsie wasn’t yet a cartoon character standing on hind legs, a frilly apron around her waist. No, Elsie was a real cow and she lived, like I did, on Long Island. And we put big dollops of real butter on our hot vegetables before serving them.
Food miles back then weren’t an issue because most food was at least regional. Sure, we had Wonder bread from the breadbasket of the nation and the new frozen, canned, and boxed foods made elsewhere. But the hundreds of additives we now ingest were still gleams in chemists’ eyes.
My first foray from the confines of home was to that progressive camp in Tenants Harbor, Maine, where we had Lobster Feast Day each year. We each got a whole one-dollar fresh-caught lobster to drown in butter and eat with bibs that never kept us clean. We’d cook the lobsters in giant black-bottomed stockpots over a fire on the beach, plunging them in boiling water and then piling seaweed on top to steam our now bright-red lobsters to perfect rubbery doneness. The cook also harvested a lacy white seaweed and made seaweed pudding that I bragged about to playmates stuck on Long Island.
“I ate seaweed.”
“Yuk.”
“A lot you know. It was really good.”
Later I went farther, tasted more. Every winter the family migrated to Hollywood Beach, Florida. Our three-day drives from Hempstead, Long Island, were punctuated by stops at Stuckey’s, the old pecan and tchotchkes shops along the great American highways of the fifties. You always knew how far the next Stuckey’s was. As soon as you drove out of one there was the billboard: ONLY 247 MILES TO THE NEXT STUCKEY’S. My brother and I kept track of Stuckey’s distances like gamblers keep track of the odds.
Coming of Age in the Sixties
My food circles widened as the years went on. Opportunities to indulge my insatiable curiosity kept coming as I went farther afield.
In Austria I sampled fresh yogurt. In Spain I ate calamares en su tinta (squid in its own ink) and morcillo (blood sausage) and tortillas, which there meant frittatas of potatoes and onions cooked in olive oil. In Norway I ate goat cheese and lutefisk, drank aquavit, and sang “Tak für Matten” before the meal. In Russia I gorged on black caviar. Intourist, the Soviet tourism bureaucracy, required visitors to purchase meal tickets in advance—enough for caviar and chicken Kiev for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In Mexico I learned to hunt turtle eggs in the early morning on the beach and to grind potent chiles, salt, and garlic in a stone molcajete for killer hot sauce. My neighbors—literally barefoot and pregnant—taught me to slap masa between my hands into thick Mexican tortillas and cook them over a wood fire. In Cuba I ate greasy arroz con pollo, fried plantains, and moros y cristianos (black beans and rice). In Thailand I ate sticky rice. In Hungary I actually had goulash. I fasted in the desert and gorged at the King’s Table in Las Vegas. I ate around. And unto roundness.
In a way, coming to Whidbey Island in 2005 after fifteen years of globetrotting was coming down to earth again. It could well be that the chicken in the bubbling Crock-Pot on the potluck table had roamed free in one of my neighbors’ yards and been beheaded, bled, gutted, and plucked by the very hands now giving a final stir to the fragrant stew.
Within an hour, I’d agree to start my road back to eating where I am planted, but for another few minutes the world of anywhere eating was my oyster—and whatever else on that table I could get onto my plate. It didn’t seem unreasonable that in addition to some homegrown salads there were three kinds of corn chips and five kinds of salsa. Nor did it seem strange to me that flavors from India and Africa were combined in one rice dish or fruits from three continents were in a fruit salad. The exotic has almost become humdrum to us.
By now I had snagged a piece of pie just to be sure and was beginning to scoop small mounds of each appealing dish onto my plate, tightly arranged from the center out like packed sunflower seeds in mature, laden heads. I was maximizing the plate. I would give a new meaning to “super-size me.”
Overeating
Overeating is as American as apple pie. We are free to consume as much as we want whenever we want—and no one can stop us. Corporate food companies advertise on TV and on the Internet and in the pages of magazines and on roadside billboards knowing that as we gain, they gain. They pack us as full as possible—like geese bred for foie gras—and tell us this is freedom and choice and happiness. It all tastes so good that we comply, not realizing how scientific the manipulation of taste is. Our palates evolved in nature, where sugar and fat are rare and rich sources of energy, and salts contain precious minerals. In the presence of any of these, our brains flash GO, assuming such rich fare is limited. A stop signal wasn’t needed.
But now we aren’t hunters in the wild, we are consumers in the endless food courts of the early third millennium—global eaters with reptilian brains. Products laden with fat, sugar, and salt—or all three (salted caramel ice cream, anyone?) are readily available in fast-food drive-throughs and full refrigerators everywhere. In a stroke of evolutionary brilliance, Frito-Lay nailed it when they advertised “Bet you can’t eat just one.”
I filled my plate as if I, like my ancestors, didn’t know when a feast like this would come my way again. We do know, though. Probably in three hours. But hardwired habits are hard to shake. Finally liberated from the constraint of the strict diet I’d been on, I was doing what comes naturally—getting ready to gorge. Could it be that I wouldn’t just expand back into my old two-size-larger clothes after the extreme diet? The diet’s originator promised otherwise. I chose to believe him. To imagine I was not only two sizes smaller but had the metabolism of a teenage jock.
I wandered out to engage in the happy ritual of drifting from one group to another, renewing acquaintances, meeting new people, hearing about births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and the migrations of children off the island and back on. We talked politics but without too much passion, and about personal trials without too much detail. Content didn’t matter much. We were just happy little bees rubbing antennae.
The 10-Mile Diet Begins
As I was enjoying the infinite pleasures of eating in good company, Tricia Beckner wandered by with her husband, Kent Ratekin. Tricia has short, highlighted hair that she ruffles as if to punctuate her sentences. We officially met as sopranos in the Open Circle Singers, a no-audition choir that let me actually sing instead of—as I had been instructed in school—just move my lips in sync with the tuneful. I’d joined the choir the first month I was here, discovered I hit more notes dead-on as a soprano, and found myself next to Tricia weekly, mumbling jokes between songs.
I’d seen her, actually, in another setting that I hoped she did not remember. My new apartment came with a garden plot and I needed some manure to enrich the soil before planting. A normal person would have bought a bag of precomposted steer manure, but not frugal me, not with sheep next door. Indeed, that paddock had dung galore—on the other side of a fence. I waited till dusk, climbed the fence, and started to fill my bucket. A car had passed by, and even though I crouched at the sound, Tricia (the driver) told me later that she’d noted a strange sight of someone apparently—could it be?—stealing poop.
But Tricia wasn’t thinking about manure bandits when she saw me. She had something else on her mind. “Hey,” she said, “Kent and I were watching this thing on YouTube last night. You know Morgan Spurlock? Super Size Me?”
I only nodded because my tongue was now squishing creamy Yellow Finn potato salad onto the roof of my mouth.
“Yeah, well, I saw this Netflix movie where this guy did a ‘super-high me’ thing. Smoked pot every day for a month. So I said to Kent, ‘You should do a “super-yeggie me.” Eat only what grows in my garden for thirty days. Sort of a reverse Super Size Me.’” Tricia has a half-acre garden where she grows both for home use and for sale from a stand by the Langley post office. “He said no.”
“Are you going to try it?”
“Heck no.
No way I could do that. I can’t live without my treats. But I decided to see if someone else would. I’ve asked a dozen people so far and no one is game. It’s probably impossible.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, shifting from the German potato salad to a cherry pie so sweet I am sure the main ingredients were white sugar followed by cornstarch, with some cherries mixed in to merit being called cherry pie.
Sustainability as Extreme Sport
Lifestyle experiments are like extreme sports for me. As soon as I had language I’d try new things and run to Mother saying, “You know something?” and give a report on my latest discovery. In the years since, I’ve lived in an operatic range of temperatures—from the coldest (Rhinelander, Wisconsin) to the hottest (Florence, Arizona) parts of the country. I lived for years in a motor home with just forty cubic feet to call my own: thirty-five cubic feet for sleeping, five cubic feet for possessions. For six years I lived on one hundred dollars a month. I hiked solo in the Anza Borrego Desert, fasting for three days in a cave by a huge rock clearly used by the aboriginals for grinding seeds and corn into a powder with a stone. None of this felt like suffering or deprivation or even risk. It felt like going to the edge of the known to see what I—and the world—was made of. Live for a month on what Tricia grows in her garden for farmers’ market sales? Sure. Not just sure, but “Hell yes! Bring it on!”
And so it was that I undertook hyperlocal eating with no other expertise than being an eater who by now had packed away much of my lifetime tonnage of food to relieve stress, to taste the world, to celebrate and mourn, to tap out the rhythms of my days.
