The Tamesis
You only have to glance at the front page of any major newspaper to see how conflicted our society currently is when it comes to food. Even as restaurants emerge as sites of political resistance and food writing expands in exciting new directions, food insecurity remains all too common in the United States and around the world.
along with her new book Tell me what you eat: food, strength and the will to live (Simon & Schuster), author Amber Husain takes a closer look at it all, trying to determine what nourishment really means. Partly inspired by Hussain’s own journey to heal from anorexia, tell me what you eat It combines thoughtful research with insightful cultural criticism, referencing everything from medieval lesbian dinner parties to Black Panther’s breakfast show.
This week, Fashion Chatted with Hussein about transcending the limitations of traditional eating disorder recovery, feminine focus on hunger, and finding inspiration in modern mutual aid.
Fashion: How did the inspiration for this book come about?
Amber Hussain: The first spark came when I felt a huge sense of liberation, not just from the years of anorexia, inertia, and depression that I describe in the book, but also from the exhausting and honestly rather boring narratives associated with these things that had somewhat dominated my early experiences with traditional therapy. When I first started thinking about this book, I had just been through this very unusual path to feeling better, and it gave me a whole new perspective, not just on my own condition, but on food and eating more broadly. I feel inspired to share my perspective on what our relationship with food might mean. Obviously that means different things to different people, and they’re all valid, but I think it’s more of a principle for us to start thinking about those things that changed for me.
You speak so eloquently about examples of political or moral hunger, from Samuel Legge to Gandhi to Simone Weil; is there one example that resonates most with you in what you write about?
It wasn’t the story of the hungry that resonated most with me, although there was one story about Eleanor Marx that I found very inspiring. [It’s about] She recovered from what you call anorexia not so much through a process of medical intervention but through a process of being politically inspired, working for her father, doing something intellectually her own with interesting people.
Stories of people eating happily in a very inspiring way are most inspiring to me. In the chapter on overeating, I describe a scene from Audre Lorde zami She talked about going to a party where there was plenty of food and how that changed the whole atmosphere in the room. It’s not even necessarily a political moment, but it does tie into her political work. It is not difficult to create a good life through food, but it is difficult at the political and institutional level.
What do you think is the most common misconception about food refusal?
I think there are a few ways you can talk about this because there are common misconceptions in medicine and there are common misconceptions in popular discourse. There is a tendency to view eating disorders as a purely biological phenomenon, thereby removing all meaning from eating disorders, or indeed repelling attempts to create meaning. I think it serves a pragmatic purpose in that it makes eating disorders feel more treatable with medical tools, but the problem is that traditional treatments aren’t particularly effective.
