Really? You Want Melba Toast with a Side of Industrial Strength Manure?

Food Issues - nah, let's call them by their real name, shall we? Food pathologies. I don't think I've ever met a woman who didn't have some sort of food pathology.
I can fall into conversation with a woman who's a perfect stranger while standing at an hors d'oeuvres table at a cocktail party who will within 30 seconds confess to me that she can't believe she's just made a pig out of herself for putting a spoonful of guacamole on her plate - oh, she ooh's and aah's about the wonderful taste, then in the next breath tells me she'll have to work out an extra thirty minutes the next day to undo the "damage" done by the seemingly innocent guacamole.

If you think that can't possibly happen, think again. It has and it does, all the time. I actually made a wee science experiment out of it at one time - listening to the disparaging and self-deprecating remarks women made about food and their relation to it. For what it's worth, there were always distinct shades of hostility in their words. Harsh words about their bodies, and equal disdain for the food they loved but felt they simply couldn't afford to eat. Frankly, it's not really the food that women feel badly about, but themselves - that's a larger and more insidious issue.

I still wonder, why? Wait - that's a disingenous statement for me to write. I know exactly why this happens. The diet industry doesn't rake in a gazillion wheelbarrows full of cash every day for nothing. There are times I just want to take a nice concrete pole and shove it firmly up the ass of advertising, and in this case, it's completely justified.

The current unrealistic standards of female beauty and their effects on women's lives have been written about extensively by those who studied them far more closely than I, yet even as a total amateur I know their capacity to ruin. Shall we run down the rules again? Women must be rail thin at all times - nothing must get in the way of this - most especially not age or childbearing; they must not be seen eating heartily in public; they must pick on salads only (most especially while on a date with the opposite sex); they must not indulge in public but if they do they must be damn sure to inform everyone within hearing distance that this is aberrant behavior they don't condone and reassure their listeners that they will pay the strictest penance for doing so (need I go on? Isn't this list depressing enough?).

Imagine the power of a sausage (or a chocolate eclair, oreos, or a bag of Fritos). This sausage has some serious mojo - enough so that it's mere presence on a woman's plate, in her mouth, or coursing through her digestive system causes her to experience some or all of the following emotions, all completely out of proportion to the sausage's actual standing in the universe:

Disgust - how could I have eaten all this! I'm such a fat pig!
Fear - this will go right to my thighs.
Self-loathing - but my thighs are already fat!
Resolution - I will never eat a sausage again, even though I love them.

Food, especially of the indulgence category, becomes the Enemy and is given all this irrational power that it simply doesn't have.

My mother has some severe food pathologies, and growing up with them wasn't easy. She cloaked quite a number of them under the banner of what she claimed were her health problems (very handy and also trendy). To say her health problems thirty years ago were all completely in her head would be kind. The fact that she still carries them with her when she is in her mid-sixties is an example of the tenacity of the clusterfuck. This is a woman who will, in a four star restaurant, order plain lettuce leaves with oil & vinegar on the side while the rest of the family orders normal appetizers and entrees, all the while claiming "I can't eat any of this food." So what that a lettuce leaf costs $12? So what that the people at the entire table are suddenly mute and uncomfortable, unable to enjoy their pleasant dinner because all eyes are turned to the rabbit food in front of her? Pathology rules!

It's a miracle that she raised three daughters who haven't inherited her problems with food. It's not to say that my sisters and I are all perfectly comfortable with our bodies all the time, but the deeper aspects of her pathology has thankfully passed us by.

When I was younger I was the woman feeling guilty for a dab of guacamole at the cocktail party, and I was the one eager to confess it to another woman, especially a perfect stranger. Fitting in at the time was so important to me, and espousing what I considered to be the party line in public felt natural.

I should have been wearing a neon sign on my forehead proclaiming myself as bound by what my society had defined as a acceptable standard of female beauty and behavior as were the feet of aristocratic Chinese women a couple of hundred years ago.

Yet there came a time when I wanted to free myself of the sausage's pernicious ability to cause fear and loathing. To accept my appetites for what they were, place them in a normal context in relation with the rest of my life, and to stop perpetuating, in word or deed, standards I ultimately deemed demeaning, pointless, and devoid of joy.

In other words, I ate.

And contrary to popular opinion, I didn't immediately gain 100 pounds. I actually listened to my body and appreciated my cravings, and they weren't always only for sausage and chocolate eclairs. I learned about my craving for grapefruit, for broccoli, for roast lamb with new potatoes, for steamed asparagus, for tomatoes, for hot buttered toast and cafe au lait. Sure, I'm a complete sucker for a perfectly ripened wedge of Brie; I eat enough to satisfy and put the rest away with not one single expression of guilt. I learned to eat only when I'm hungry and not as an automatic response to other emotions, and not to use food as a reward or a security blanket. I'm not grossly overweight, although I could stand to lose 10 pounds, but neither am I unhealthy (although I can't help but boast about a cholesterol level fitting a woman half my age).

This didn't happen overnight; there were fits and starts lasting years, setbacks I'm not entirely proud of, times when it seemed infinitely easier to fall back into the approved, accepted, (yet ultimately soul destroying) artificial mindfuck rather than pave my own way.

But I'm glad I persisted. In my own way, it was an achievement over my mother's tyranny, a cheeky thumbing of the nose to the patriarchy, and wonderfully liberating all on its own.

But I must close - I've got some fabulous corned beef with Dijon mustard calling my name.