One Cannot Think Well, Love Well Or Sleep Well, If One Has Not Dined Well. Virginia Woolf

July 8, 2017

“One cannot think well, love well or sleep well, if one has not dined well.” ~ Virginia Woolf

“The best form of revenge is a good body. I am not seeking revenge on one particular person. It’s revenge on life and being the best me.” ~ Khloe Kardashian

“It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is – I am a feminist after all, and I believe in diverse body types – but then I have to leave my apartment and face the world.” ~ Roxane Gay

And here, the hundred year old battle of food as survival and food as curse. Nourishment versus torture and excess.

We live in a culture of food. Well watch anything (nothing is commercial free, even youtube has ads, and Hollywood has to hawk at you at least 40 products within the 2 hours that they have you), you will be bombarded by food, and where to eat, and what to eat and how to eat it. Everything is “tasty” and “yummy” and “delicious” and “uuuy you just HAVE to eat this.” We are constantly being sold food to eat.

We socialise to eat. We snack. We eat ‘clean’ or we eat ‘dirty,’ but we eat. Unless of course we don’t, either because of circumstance or compulsion. In each case something is wrong. Why aren’t you eating? Why are some people forced to starve? Forced to live in food deserts? Don’t have access to food?

Who has access to good food? Who can afford to eat well? Why can’t we all?

Sometimes, our mind tells us not to eat, because our appearance is ‘unappealing.’ Some minds are actually wired to tell their hosts not to eat. For some the reality of food is an ugly thing. Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia are two very dangerous eating disorders which, have many women living in the “hell” of calories versus pounds or kilos. Counting calories, monitoring intake versus expulsion. The first I heard of it, in my limited 8 year old comprehension, I thought that I understood. I have after all, been told, scolded, reminded of, picked on and warned about my weight for all my 30 years.

From my visits to the pediatrician, what I remembered most clearly was the union of two words: over and weight. And most of my childhood consisted of family members monitoring how much bigger I was than my little brother and cousins. Then there was Barbados.

In 1994, my mother took us with her as she studied at UWI for her law degree. This was my first encounter with emotional eating. I was so homesick that I feared death. I felt so isolated from the other children, because my accent was ‘funny,’ as were my terminologies, and my lack of understanding of their vernacular. I ate my self ‘happy’, so much so that I returned to Belize in 1995, to “gyalyuh get fat, fat, fat, instead of “we missed you. Welcome home!”

I was always bigger but never “fat, fat, fat”

Fast forward to the awkward high school years, when you want boys to notice you, and I was still “fat, fat, fat.” Here I delved into the strange world of starvation. I will not call it anorexia, because I have never been diagnosed, but for my first year at St. Catherine Academy, I threw away all my lunches and tried not to eat at home, or eat before leaving the house the next day. I was unhealthy, but lost the weight and the monitors of my caloric intake. Any fat person can relate to people giving you dirty looks when you eat, especially when you eat ‘unhealthy’ foods. I guess that that is why they call it dessert, you have to deserve food, and the society tells us that fat people deserve so much less.

#GRUB is in direct response to the monitoring of my waistline, not only by people who know me, but random strangers in the street, hurling admonitions at me on how ‘unsightly’ my appearance has become. Questioning why I allowed myself to get so fat. Offering unsolicited diet advice and suggestions as I go about my day, and completely minding my own business.

They don’t know that I take antidepressants which take away my desire to do anything but sleep and isolate and retreat. They don’t know that I still practise emotional eating. That I am filling voids in my life like success whether in love, career or family with food. They do not care about any of that.

#GRUB is a social experiment which uses poetry, installation and performance to bring the food conversation to the table.

Truth is we all eat, some too much and some too little, and our bodies respond in kind. My quest with the GRUB series #GRUBPIX, #GRUB and #GRUBpt.2 is to explore the social interaction around that dynamic. How much say should others have over my appearance? Where and when is the line drawn? Why discuss food problems with food? Why invite hostile and cruel fat shamers to lunch to discuss how what they say make me feel?

Why don’t I just ignore them? What makes this art? Where is this going?

Katie Numi Usher