Feeding yourself as an act of self-love
+food as activism, and the role of farming in the pandemic
Nice Pear: a weekly(ish) feminist foodletter | Issue #001 | 19 July 2020
Hello!
If you’re new to this newsletter, you can read my mission & ethos here. Now, let’s jump straight into this week’s essay:
Feeding yourself as an act of self-love
I have a difficult relationship with diet culture and self-love.
I went on a diet when I was eleven, and joined a slimming club at 14.
I’ve always hovered around the ‘overweight’ category of the BMI, but it wouldn't matter if I was fat or if I was skinny. A child should not be on a diet.
Luckily, I’ve never had an eating disorder. My relationship with food and my body has been somewhat unhealthy, but no more so than most of my peers.
My experience isn’t outside the norm for most women and girls - certainly in western cultures. Which isn’t to say that it's okay for so many of us to tie our self worth to our body mass - just that this attitude has been completely normalised.
White, patriarchal, capitalist standards of beauty teach us from a young age that we should always try to be smaller, to take up less space - and that the food we eat is intrinsically tied up in that.
The friday-night takeout, salty crisps by the handful, squares of chocolate that I let sit on my tongue until it melts. The fritters that spat at my grandmother as she lowered them into a pot of hot oil for me. The fizzy sweets that left grainy sugar in the sheets at sleepovers. The chips and curry sauce my mother and I shared in the car, after starving ourselves all day in preparation for the weekly weigh-in meeting.
I was taught that these were both the nicest foods and the enemy - that I should always want them but never eat them. Sugar and fat were co-conspirators, luring me away from the prize of thinness, and sabotaging all the ‘hard work’ I had done
Because, of course, there is a flipside to this. If certain foods taste good but are bad and wrong (and all the more desirable for that) then there must be other foods that are ‘good’ and ‘correct’.
Even worse, these ‘right’ foods must, inexplicably, be undesirable. They were framed as a chore, a punishment for the size of my thighs, the softness of my belly, the wobble of a body that isn’t as compact as it could be.
I know that this fixed dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods is nonsensical - just as the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bodies is nonsensical.
So how can we begin to shed those beliefs? To try to unlearn years of training about our relationship with food and with our bodies? To untangle our sense of self-worth from the way we look, and the way we eat?
There is no good food and bad food: we were told a lie. There is just the food available to us, and our bodies telling us what it wants.
Food holds no moral value (at least, not in this context).
Still, it is more than just the calories and nutrients required to sustain the biology of human life.
Food - preparing it, providing it, eating it - is also built into the way we express love and compassion for one another.
Knowing your loved ones favourite flavours, studying cookbooks for the perfect recipe and choosing the best produce you can access. Whether it's a bowl of comfort food, or experimenting with a new dish, “I made it especially for you” is just another way to say “I love you”.
Now take all of that love and care and consideration for what will make someone feel good and channel it inwards.
Ask yourself, ‘what do you want to eat?’ and then engage in an act of radical self-love and listen to the answer.
PS. If you enjoy Nice Pear & want to support it (or any of the other content I create online) you can always become a paying subscriber or buy me a virtual coffee.
Things to read this week
This first newsletter has a bumper crop of reads because I’ve been saving them for the past few weeks in anticipation of restarting my newsletter.
The Walrus explores the link between mass-farming and global pandemics (hint: excessive breeding (we went from just under 4 billion chickens in the world in 1961 to an estimated 20-50 billion in 2020), coupled with overcrowded conditions, and a fast global supply chain makes for “the perfect conditions for pandemics”)
In other mass-farming news, The Guardian reported on an investigation into the development banks financing global factory farming operations. This despite warnings from UN scientists that “[animal farming] produces nearly 15% of human-made greenhouse gas emissions”
In Medium’s Zora, we’re reminded of the possibilities of composting and recycling as an act of resistance - a way to vote with our actions and to centre environmental justice as a non-negotiable part of our activism
Taste looks at the bake sale as a form of grassroots activism, with Bakers Against Racism organising a “decentralised bake sale that anyone, anywhere can take part in” to raise much-needed funds in support of the BLM movement
“Brown chefs are expected to cook their own food, but white chefs can cook whatever they want” In Eater, Nayantara Dutta just about sums up food media’s attitude to race, culture and appropriation.
Add some of the books on this list from Epicurious to your tbr to learn about anti-black racism and food and read Melissa Thompson’s essay on Black erasure in the British food industry, in the fantastic newsletter Vittles
Not directly about food, but the last line in this Bureau of Investigative Journalism report on the aftereffects of the Everyone In policy made me cry in despair: “I’m very happy that I’ve got that treatment, as a human being, like a British person”. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: being treated as a human being should never be dependant on your nationality
Food - and the places that serve food - can act as a safe space, particularly for those from marginalised communities. Atlas Obscura tells the history of NYC’s Florent which, from its opening in 1985 until it closed in 2008, was a space of safety, community and activism the LGBTQIA+ community
While many restaurants have been reopening, this is your reminder that we are still in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. Bars and restaurants are making far less money than they did Before, with pretty much no change to outgoings and rapidly dwindling funding support so, by all means, support local, independent businesses (download the Neverspoons app) and PLEASE be considerate towards the staff who are - quite literally - putting their lives on the line so that your social life can resume
WaPo’s timeline watching a single $20 burger go from farm to plate during the pandemic is fascinating. The supply chain for meat products looks broken to me, and our reliance on meat as food seems to have led to a terrible time for all concerned. Obviously the cattle aren’t having much fun, but I also feel for the farmers who are now making losses, the restaurant workers who have taken pay cuts and the abattoir butchers, and processing plant workers, and delivery drivers who are putting their lives on the line to continue foodservice in a pandemic. Sidebar to American readers: r u ok hun? This line is chilling to me “a plant that had been transformed with… paid leave for sick employees” what did sick employees do before now? Just come in and infect their coworkers?
And, in vegan news: Beyond Meat’s founder is predicting that the vegan alternative will soon beat animal proteins on price 🌱
Remember when ‘wonky veg’ was a novel way to reduce food waste? The kind of unusual produce that was once seen as “grotesque” is now in high demand, thanks in large part to Instagram
Things to eat this week
I know that this is issue one and all, but I just haven’t been cooking that much lately 🤷 So here are some of my all-time favourites:
Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery falls open to The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine cooked in the pickling style on page 100 as soon as I pull it from the shelf. The edition I have is out of print (my mother scoured eBay for a copy the same as hers when I left home), but I’m assured that her more recent World Vegetarian also contains the recipe
My husband bought me a copy of Anna Jones’ A Modern Way to Eat for our first Christmas together, and I still use many of her recipes regularly, but one of my go-to meals to feed a crowd is the garlic black beans on page 170
The other book I come back to again and again when I need inspiration is Niki Segnit’s The Flavour Thesaurus. Keep it on the kitchen counter and flick through it the next time you don’t know what to make for tea.
Where to find me this week
Not technically this week, but I got my very first byline in a national publication recently 🎉 I reported on how hospitality workers really felt about the sector reopening on 4th July for The Metro.
On my own blog, EatsLeeds, I’ve been slowly migrating all the content from an old baking blog that I started (and abandoned) a few years ago - things like this beginner’s guide to gluten-free flour.
As always, you can also find me @ZoePickburn on Twiter, Insta and other social media (I’m currently ~experimenting~ with TikTok but I kinda sorta feel like ya pal’s granny who got on Facebook in 2008 and has NO IDEA how the platform works 👵)
Thanks!
Zoe
Freelance writer & journo | Food blogger & newsletterer (she/her)
Say hello@zoepickburn.com with stories, commissions & foodie chit chat