Lettuce pic courtesy of Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash
The Anti Chop Salad
Interview Analysis
Preface
“Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project – a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.
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But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize. I think about this every time I do something that feels particularly efficient and self-interested, like going to a barre class or eating lunch at a fast-casual chopped-salad chain, like Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a refueling station. I’m a repulsively fast eater in most situations – my boyfriend once told me that I chew like someone’s about to take my food away – and at Sweetgreen, I eat even faster because (as can be true of many things in life) slowing down for even a second can make the machinery give you the creeps. Sweetgreen is a marvel of optimization: a line of 40 people – a texting, shuffling, eyes-down snake – can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale caesar with chicken without even looking at the other, darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding chicken to kale caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for 16 hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.
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The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular $12 salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this $12 salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job. As Matt Buchanan wrote at the Awl in 2015, the chopped salad is engineered to “free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?”
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On today’s terms, what Buchanan is describing is the good life. It means progress, individuation. It’s what you do when you’ve gotten ahead a little bit, when you want to get ahead some more. The hamster-wheel aspect has been self-evident for a long time now. But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more of what was merely stupid and adaptive has turned stupid and compulsory. Vulnerability, which is ever present, must be warded off at all costs. And so I go to Sweetgreen on days when I need to eat vegetables very quickly because I’ve been working till 1am all week and don’t have time to make dinner because I have to work till 1am again, and like a chump, I try to make eye contact across the sneeze guard, as if this alleviated anything about the skyrocketing productivity requirements that have forced these two lines of people to scarf and create kale caesars all day, and then I “grab” my salad and eat it in under 10 minutes while looking at email.
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It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.”
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-Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Organizing one’s life around practices that are ridiculous and indefensible is familiar and strange. When time is short, it seems that one of the first leisures to get chopped from the cutting board is mealtime. From this conundrum rose my quest to discover what factors even make a meal healthy and joyful, and what factors might prevent it. This is the anti chop salad.
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What follows is a synthesis of interviews and research I’ve conducted on the topic of anti chop salad eating and being. I listened to farmers, chefs, nutritionists, writers, activists, experimental gastronomists, artists, and emergency food workers. Their expertise ranges a spectrum of professions within the food industry, giving me immeasurable insight into how we eat, what we eat, and why we eat.
To Take Time
“We live in a country where people are pressed for time, we all work way too hard, and we don’t have enough social infrastructure to give us the time we need to take care of ourselves. And in that way, fast food kind of steps up”
Adam Chandler is a journalist and author, incredibly versed in the most ubiquitous American tradition: fast food. Fast food is a particularly salient case study of our attitude towards food because it is a meal that is both remarkable and unremarkable, a meal that helps build the infrastructure of communities while implicating health, wages, environmental factors, social justice, and a consciousness about the way people eat. There’s a curious virtue to the crinkled and crisp paper bags that hold individually wrapped portions, covered in translucent splotches of grease.
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In many ways, fast food was the blueprint for the sweetgreen salad; both optimized, hyper-efficient ways to get basic nutrients into our bodies, complete with a bow on top. The whopper was originally promoted as a meal in a sandwich, and today we have protein bars, Huel shakes, and $15 salad bowls that function as the exact same thing. While a chopped salad epitomizes wellness and optimization, happy meals come with toys and social stigma.
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One key distinction to note is the difference between fast food and fast meals. Fast food is something that is prepared or cooked in a flash, while a fast meal is something eaten in a flash. Adam remarked that the only way to shift the culture around fast meals in general is to change the conditions that force us to eat in a hurry. Some of these factors include lack of a social safety net, limited access to child care, absence of paid sick leave, exorbitant amounts of pressure at work, the convenience of vending machines and fast food joints, self-consciousness around eating and body image, or the general scarcity of time and money.
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Being conscious of these factors is helpful when thinking about how we can change them for ourselves. Over the past year I spent some of my time working at Union League Cafe, an elegant French brasserie. Entering through the side door of the restaurant, I’d usually pass other workers taking a smoke break in their white chef coats to clock in for my shift under the head pastry chef, Teila.
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As a queer, black woman, Teila is the ultimate expression of talent in a white-dominated and male-dominated kitchen and industry. She is exceptionally funny, adaptable, and creative. She takes on special projects of concocting vegan and gluten free desserts so that everyone can experience the full depth of french patisserie, without limitations. Her coworkers, including myself, lauded her for her imaginative eye in the kitchen. I learned the skill of abstract plating using colors, textures, and shapes to create contrast, and the value of using unconventional materials in the kitchen to produce marvelous feats of confection. On her rise to becoming the head pastry chef at an acclaimed, elite eatery, Teila muses that “...it helped that I knew how to be a renegade chef. Now I’m more refined, but I still have that in my back pocket.”
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Amidst the bustle of live lobsters swimming in fish tubs, stock pots bubbling with bone broth, and coastal mushrooms sauteing in a pan of butter, servers rocket through swinging doors and chefs sweat under their cap over hunks of fresh fish, pillowy pasta dough, and flaming oil. Amidst the bustle of the kitchen, there’s hardly a spare moment to eat, let alone linger over a plate of food and enjoy it. With the added responsibility of being head pastry chef, where all of the tarts, petit fours, ice creams, toppings, and cakes are done exclusively in-house, Teila felt that she was losing her creativity and was of course too exhausted after work to experiment in her own kitchen.
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Teila gets to Union League in the morning and preps her station until service, where she plates desserts until well after closing. On her working days, she rarely has time to eat a real meal, which she defines as “...something that took time, something I thought about, my own flavors and thoughts that came down into something that I created—not something from a vending machine or a food line. That's what a home meal is to me—time for you to think about yourself and really go to town.”
Teila wants to use her food to inspire others, especially black and queer folks. She acknowledged that she inherited a mindset of struggling and fear from the black community, and wants to transform that into a mindset of progress and evolution for others like herself.
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“Random acts of kindness can change anybody’s day or anybody’s mindset. That could influence someone to go home and say “You know what—let’s cook tonight. Let’s make cookies.””
-Teila
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Despite her passion for her craft, chefs like Teila risk losing their place and prowess in the kitchen by taking time off, calling in sick, or sitting out to leisurely eat a meal. She has to exercise extreme time management and strength in order to keep desserts streaming out the doors. Many other service job environments are the same, pushing workers to their limits in order to provide the utmost convenience to their customers, like the ominous Sweetgreen food line or dystopian Amazon warehouses.
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I wanted to work in a restaurant because I loved cooking, but the reality of the job commodified my conception of food. The sheer volume of tarts I made in that little corner of the kitchen transformed a tart shell from a delicate feat of dough to a precise combination of flour, butter, and salt.
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James Cramer, the executive director of the food pantry, Loaves and Fishes, shared a similar experience after years of stocking shelves, “...when you’re around so much food, some of its specialness wears off.” Despite the sensory overload of working in the emergency food sector, James divulged one of the many strengths of the food pantry is its ability to grow community through sharing food.
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“We all have to eat. You can share some food with somebody or eat next to somebody and that's something that we all have to do, wherever you are on the socio economic status, no matter your race. I know that sounds very kumbaya, but there’s some kind of magic happening when we eat together.”
-James Cramer
Loaves and Fishes provides two food opportunities to its clients: the groceries and the coffee hour. “I don’t think we understood how important the coffee hour was with people being able to eat together and hang out together, but now during the pandemic we realized that time was staving off loneliness for a lot of people, and it was it was actually some people's primary form of interaction during the week.”
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Beyond that, Loaves and Fishes strives to offer a lot of client choice in the variety of food they provide. The pantry essentially operates like a grocery store. James explained that “...you're already in a vulnerable position being at a food pantry, and so then having someone tell you this is the best way to eat—that adds to the judgment.” On the subject of ‘healthy food,’ James also stressed that all people know how to eat healthfully and know what it looks like, they just might not have the means to reach that ideal.
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Surveys of the food pantry’s clientele showed that everyone wanted to receive more produce, eggs, and cheese. For people on a budget, convenience and access force them to buy the foods that will give them the best combination of “calories, fullness, and fresh stuff,” and often the more expensive items like vegetables, fruits, or dairy don’t make it into the shopping cart.
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Instead of relying on government programs to feed folks (which often give food pantries comical boxes of far too many onions, butter, and sour cream than anyone would know what to do with), James just buys produce straight from distributors or uses donations from local farms. James says the reason he does all this extra lifting is that “...the USDA is buying all of these commodity crops, and what they’re really interested in is keeping the food supremacy of the United States in existence. That’s the undercurrent of all of this. What they don’t do is they don’t prompt farmers to plant for health. They prompt them to plant for profits. And that's where the subsidies lie.”
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In the hierarchy of food needs, the most important and fundamental is getting enough food. After this baseline, the hierarchy goes: acceptable food, reliable & ongoing access to food, good-tasting food, novel food, and lastly, instrumental food. People are demonized by the industrial wellness complex for eating fast food, cake, or chips. But nutritionist Michelle Allison reminds us that “it’s not because you’re stupid, ignorant, lazy, or just a bad, bad person who loves bad, bad food. It’s because other needs come first” (The Fat Nutritionist).
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Barbara Stuart, an English professor at Yale, teaches courses about food and how to write about it. She reads countless students’ essays about their childhood foodways and how it informs their perspective now, in dining halls or apartment kitchens. Over the years, Stuart has noticed that “People eat due to convenience and affordability, not lack of knowledge... and people always value family meals, but there’s a lot that gets in the way of them.”
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James Cramer and Professor Stuart echo each other: people need more resources in order to achieve completely healthful, nutritious diets. Michelle Allison sums up this point nicely: “You want people to eat better? Give them enough money, a place for cooking and storage, and access to a decent variety of food. Then you can worry about the finer points of nutrition” (The Fat Nutritionist).
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At his home in New Haven, James has been growing food with his family in order to exercise more self-reliance. His daughters are much more apt to eat peas from their garden, he reports. Land, with its ability to grow both food and community, is the future of hunger activism.
To Grow
Our food system is specifically designed to be socially, flavourly, and environmentally destructive. “[T]hese are the problems you'll hear about the most: the loss of biodiversity. The rise in factory farms, chemicals in our soil. And the release of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. When it comes to climate change, our food system is directly responsible for 25 percent of our annual greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the top contributors to a warming planet,” says Sandeep Pahuja, host of IDEO podcast Food by Design. By pointing out flawed designs in various food systems, Pahuja acknowledges that it is possible to redesign them—exactly the work of Soul Fire Farm and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
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“Well, the food system is not broken. The food system was designed to exploit the stolen land and stolen labor of black and brown people, and that continues today across all measures. If you look at who has access to food and who is disproportionally impacted by diet-related illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and some cancers, those are black and brown communities”
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Penniman is the cofounder of Soul Fire Farm, and the author of Farming While Black, both projects born of a passion to grow fresh food for people under food aparteid and to uproot racism in her communities and in the food system. Penniman expertly details the history of black and brown farming practices and their lasting impact on sustainable agriculture practices. They emphasize how underrepresented BIPOC people are with a statistic, “If you look at who owns the land, depending on what census, well over 95% (some measures say 98%) of rural land is owned by white folks. And that’s because of the history of USDA discrimination and racist vigilante violence against black and brown landowners, not to mention the dispossession of the entire continent by settlers from Indigenous people” (Farming While Black Interview).
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Farming While Black is a manual centered on the experience of African-heritage farmers who aspire to reclaim their agricultural traditions in an exploitative, white-dominated system. Their book and farm alike aim to share knowledge and empower folks of color to see farming not as continued subjugation, but as an extension of the “noble agricultural history” that precedes them. Soul Fire Farm also actively organizes around reparations and repatriation, to restore stolen land and autonomy to farmers of color.
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Two and a half hours away from Soul Fire Farm, chef Dan Barber notes that the folks in his line of work “have joined the ranks of activists advancing the agenda of changing our food system” by cooking food in radical, sustainable ways (The Third Plate). Elite chefs help determine the landscape of the plate. What adorns the tables of exclusive dining establishments eventually trickles down to the ranks of mainstream fast food joints.
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Barber co-owns and cooks at Blue Hill at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture and strives to be mindful of how his restaurant uses its land. Combining agriculture and fine dining has infamously manifested the farm-to-table movement, “but really the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around” (The Third Plate). To farm land in creative ways actually might mean a pivot from industrialized agriculture to something much more disorganized, faulty, and fateful.
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“The “transcendental act” of good cooking is more than just culinary magic. It’s an ecological act, too”
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In his book The Third Plate, Barber tells the tale of a man named Eduardo Sousa, and his fois gras. Fois gras is a fatty liver, a buttery French delicacy. The contention around this expensive luxury involves the inhumane practices by which it is produced. Ducks and geese are force-fed grain and corn, causing their livers to swell as the fowl grow distended and listless from immense weight gain. Then, they are slaughtered.
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Eduardo somehow claims to produce an ethical, humane fois gras—one he declares tastes sweeter than all other fois gras in the world. To Eduardo, his geese are his ladies and his “bonitas;” they have complete and utter free will, they are coddled, and they are fed a bounty of olives, figs, and acorns. There are no cages, no fences, no force-feeding. Sousa simply provides the conditions for the geese to feel happy and full, and they fatten naturally.
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In fact, “...many studies have shown the connection between suffering and degraded meat. If an animal is stressed—during its life, and especially in those last moments before death—it manifests, just as Eduardo claimed, in the flavor and texture of the final product” [ the third plate 160]. Eduardo’s advice is to “act quietly” on the land, and to coexist with the harmonies that nature is already conducting.
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“When we allow nature to work, which means when we farm in a way that promotes all of its frustrating inefficiencies—when we grow nature—we end up producing more than we could with whatever system we might replace it with.”
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The industrialization of meat has detached the living animal from the cut, an intentional choice by mass livestock companies to disconnect us from both the experience of death and the flavor of meat. Timothy Pachirat, an intersectional researcher interested in power, worked undercover in a slaughterhouse. At first nervous of his secret agenda to understand the relationship between people and mass death, Pachirat reflects that “No one in the employment trailer of the slaughterhouse was on the lookout for Ph.D. candidates, and my brown skin, upbringing in Thailand, and prior experience with manual labor mapped nicely onto the slaughterhouse managers' conceptions of who should be working in their plant” (A Spy in the Slaughterhouse).
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Pachirat describes the hive of people working methodically to remove hides, butcher cows, and separate cuts of meat; “Of over 800 workers on the kill floor, only four are directly involved in the killing of the cattle and less than 20 have a line of sight to the killing.” The person pulling the trigger is distinctly othered—a moral scapegoat for the deaths of cows shot once every 12 seconds. And factories are hoping for “not just increased ‘efficiency’ or increased ‘food-safety’ but also the distancing and concealment of violent processes even from those participating directly in them” (Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse Interview).
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Eating with intention requires the closure of distance between us and the animals and plants we consume. The work of the food system is to separate us, to keep hard-to-swallow truths off of the plate.
To Eat
“To be well fed is to be healthy”
-William Albrecht, The Third Plate
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Farming in a way that is kind to the land poses logistical challenges. Likewise, eating in a way that is kind to our bodies can feel frustrating and inefficient. But eating kindly requires an opposition to much of the advice we are bombarded with by social media, food advertisements, and the medical industry: eat X amount of calories, eat X amount of times per day, fast for at least 18 hours, consume insane amounts of protein (trust me!) because then you’ll burn fat, avoid fruits for they contain so much sugar, and cut out candies, butter, breads, dairy, alcohol...is there anything else you like to eat? Cut that too.
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A search for how many times one should eat per day returns numbers ranging from 2 to 8 depending on the article, alongside ads for nutrition guides, binge eating treatments, and weight loss diets. Some foodies reject the meal entirely, opting for a bovine-esque routine of grazing.
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The ritual of a meal, as opposed to humans’ steady eating traditions of around 150 years ago, is a social construction. But it is a social construction that “speaks to the deep, often tacit relationships we have with our families, our sustenance, our society, and ourselves” (Three Squares).
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One of the troubles with grazing is that it prevents us from being hungry and encourages us to eat incidentally, or according to immediate desires. Carol Danaher, M.P.H., registered dietitian nutritionist, and board member of the Ellyn Satter Institute (ESI), outlined some of the ESI’s work on encouraging eating competence, and how it relates to mealtimes.
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The Satter Eating Competence Model is a food-neutral and weight-neutral model; it supports what you eat and what you weigh. It also outlines several ways to increase joyful eating, regardless of whether the meal is home-cooked from scratch or fast food from a carry-out bag. Most importantly, this model works to neutralize shame around eating.
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Carol Danaher explained that the purpose of the eating competence model is to fill three intrinsic drives: the drive for hunger and satiety, the drive for pleasure, and the drive for a varied and nutritious diet. Foodways that do not support these internal drives—like dieting—do not work. Full stop. Dieting goes against our bodies’ desires and harms our relationship to food, traumatizing us and shrouding our favorite meals and snacks in clouds of shame. When we harbor guilt around food, it can also prevent us from gathering with people we love.
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When people stay in touch with their bodies, research shows that they are more active, sleep deeper, have more desirable lab tests, and do better nutritionally, socially, and emotionally. The first step towards this goal is giving yourself permission to eat, and trusting yourself to eat the amount you need. Carol remarked that it takes courage to let go of all of those external controls that may dictate what we eat. But when we are allowed to eat the foods that we love, it becomes a joyful experience instead of an anxiety-inducing one.
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“You don’t have to hide the brownies out of sight because you can eat them and enjoy them”
-Carol Danaher
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Eliza Khinsoe, a small-fat, mixed race, queer woman and Registered Dietician, approaches her work with food through a body-affirming approach. Khinsoe says that “we eat for many reasons, but the most important purpose of food is for it to help us feel good, whether that be through gentle nutrition, the connection it creates between us and our bodies, our families, communities and environment, or through the pleasure of cooking, eating and sharing food” (Eliza Khinsoe).
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Khinsoe elaborates on why her work is so important, saying that intuitive eating is branded from a trendy, white, straight-sized, wealthy, business lens. The chopped salad isn’t inherently bad, but the exclusionary fads, diets, and culture it represents is harmful. Khinsoe and others at the London Centre for Intuitive Eating follow the Ellyn Satter models with their clients, and Eliza mentioned that they “feel really privileged to be able to provide that safe space and that shared experience for other people and for them to know that I’m instantly not gonna be judging them, I’m not gonna be telling them to go on a diet or lose weight or whatever” (She’s All Fat: Eating In With Eliza Khinsoe).
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But improving your health while also combatting diet culture, fatphobia, and shameful eating is often tricky, as many nutritionists promote restrictive diets and weight targets. Eliza says to start with the Health at Every Size (HAES) directory, which can help you locate resources like chefs, physicians, therapists, personal trainers, and dieticians that support body diversity and the development of healthy food habits.
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Irrespective of health goals, Khinsoe recognizes that cooking good food for yourself is not easy, especially if you’re not an adventurous eater or an extreme foodie; “When we’re dieting, it’s like ‘What can I eat, what's within this framework of this diet’ and you end up cooking all of these really boring chicken-rice-broccoli-no-seasoning kind of meals and you get stuck there” (She’s All Fat: Eating In With Eliza Khinsoe). They love telling their clients to find something that gets them excited about the simple pleasures and culinary aspects of food, and they often send people to watch Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix because Samin Nosrat, the show’s host, explores food through chemistry, flavor, and enjoyment. And Eliza warns that cooking doesn’t just come naturally— “Be prepared to screw up sometimes! It’s never gonna be perfect. You’re gonna have some really crap dinners, and that’s okay.”
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Ruby Tandoh, food writer, chef, and Great British Bake Off finalist, agrees that crap dinners are not only okay, they are essential to our character and personality. Tandoh writes “...it’s in the terrible roast dinner that you burned or the custard that curdled that your identity is forged. It’s there in the meals you hated and the ones you rowed over and the ones you never even ate. If we could all tell our life story in vignettes about lobsters in Maine, and peaches from sun-drenched Italian orchards, and Michelin-starred bites of glory, we’d be very lucky – but also very boring indeed” (Ruby Tandoh on the food that made her).
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Tandoh embodies the spirit of anti-chop salad through her celebration of foods’ simple pleasures and its ability to feed us in comfort, cravings, familiarity, and satisfaction. Her battle with an eating disorder pushed her to the precipice of a modern version of wellness—thin, hyper aware of good foods and bad foods, and restrictive of meats, dairy, processed foods, sugar, and the like. Ruby uses her own experience to warn that “...when we advocate, and even insist upon, a diet so restrictive, moralizing, and inflexible, and market that diet to young women, and then dress it up as self-care: Just how responsible is that? When I subscribed to wellness, it gave me the means to rationalize my food insecurities, while glossing over my fear of food with the respectable veneer of health-consciousness. My illness was hidden in plain sight, and what's more—it became some thing to be proud of” (The Unhealthy Truth Behind 'Wellness' and 'Clean Eating').
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As the Ellyn Satter Institute, body affirming nutritionists like Michelle and Eliza, drive-through aficionado Adam Chandler, and star baker Ruby can attest to, fast food can be just as good for our bodies as a chopped salad, which can be just as good for us as a home-cooked meal.
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Health is not about counting calories, it is about listening to our bodies and honoring the food we give ourselves. Tandoh gives us all a beautiful piece of advice, to
“Remember above all that you will be nourished not only by the food you eat, but by the pleasure you take in it”
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-The Unhealthy Truth Behind 'Wellness' and 'Clean Eating'
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In her latest project, Breaking Eggs, Ruby uses an audiobook as a medium for a cookbook. She guides listeners through the preparation of butter cakes and miso chocolate brownies by describing the visual, tactile, and olfactory cues that are obscured in a written recipe. Tandoh absolutely shatters the idea of what a cookbook is meant to be by way of an immersive, interactive experience that will leave the listener with piping hot vanilla custard galaxy buns by the end of it.
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Although Ruby makes her audience keenly aware of their senses through her masterful recipes, scientists do actually quantify and qualify the impact of our senses when cooking or eating food. Charles Spence, the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford, explained ‘sensehacking,’ or modifying the sensory input of food to improve our behavior, mood, performance, the quantity we eat, or the rate at which we eat. To sensehack at home, he suggested eating with heavier cutlery or none at all, using sonic seasoning to sweeten food with music, setting the table with colored plates or napkins to brighten presentation, adding herbs for a pop of verdant freshness, and giving home-cooked meals sensory labels: name a dish something you would salivate at if it were on a restaurant menu...even if it feels a bit silly.
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In our conversation, Spence also noted that more of us are eating alone than ever before. During COVID’s #wfh moment, kitchen space melded with living space, overwhelming us with food cues (like smells and sights) that prompt us to eat more often instead of waiting for mealtimes or snack times, as the ESI recommends we do. Spence and his colleague, Quian Janice Wang, are currently researching how technology can play a positive role in the experience of eating, through methods like VR sensory integration or simple skype calls.
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From these acclaimed gastronomists’ research, it’s evident that food is not just calories and chemistry. It is satisfaction, connection, and comfort. Jia Tolentino remarks that the systems we live in make such satisfaction inherently out of reach (Jia Tolentino On The Internet, Optimization And Other Late Capitalist Woes). Thus, adopting an anti-chop mentality and taking time to savor food (with yourself or with others) is an act of resilience, defiance, and care.
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“When you’ve spent all day wading through the swamp of your own inadequacies, there’s no absolution like spaghetti dripping in pepper and cheese....even if you don’t end up with anything you ever want to share with other people, you’ll still have made something—and this is all you can hope for—for yourself.”
-Marijuana Edibles and Pounds (and Pounds) of Pasta: Jia Tolentino on Writing and Cooking
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Defiance in the face of authoritative systems, like the industrial medical complex, is an ongoing project that activists like Da’Shaun Harrison are fighting to change. Harrison, a Black trans writer, abolitionist, and organizer, speaks from experience at the intersection of Blackness, querness, gender, fatness, and disabilities in hopes of “...a future where their history is depicted accurately and their stories are told correctly” (Da'Shaun Harrison). Da’Shaun offers a nuanced reflection of HAES, stating “I’m not invested in being read as ‘healthy at any size’ because I know that as a black fat person, that I am removed from this ability to be recognized as healthy irrespective of what framework is being used. My interest is in destroying the concept of health itself, because the medical industry which gives birth to health is produced through antiblackness” (She’s All Fat: Revisiting HAES w/ Da’Shaun Harrison).
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It’s true that Health at Every Size seeks to equip fat people with tools and resources to combat an existing system that routinely misdiagnoses and mistreats them due to their weight. Da’Shaun supports that goal, but dreams of a world in which care and health is readily attainable for people across a multitude of identities, abilities, and expressions like themself. In order to understand the history of discrimination against fat people, we have to go back about 15 years.
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Harrison eloquently writes, “In March 2004, during a highly publicized news conference, the CDC published a report claiming that “obesity” was “killing 400,000 Americans a year” and that it was becoming America’s “number one preventable death”, outnumbering tobacco. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)—which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. One of the authors of the report was the head of the CDC. Because of this, the report had the credibility it needed and would lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, our bodies, and the alarming rate at which we were allegedly dying from “obesity”” (We Are Witnessing The CDC's Violent Eugenicist History in Real-Time - Da'Shaun L. Harrison).
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That report sparked the formation and funding of research to back the declaration of an obesity epidemic, giving rise to “a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex” (We Are Witnessing The CDC's Violent Eugenicist History in Real-Time - Da'Shaun L. Harrison​). It may come as no surprise to find that the numbers in that report were inflated. They were extrapolated from old data and were far from accurate. The CDC proclaimed fatness as a proxy for ill health, and thus a culture of fatphobia and diet culture was born. Obesity hysteria informed the social attitudes of research, which seeped into “scientific fact,” codifying venomous social opinion into truth.
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Michelle Allison argues that diet culture is a ritualistic phenomenon that helps humans trick themselves into believing that they are clean, that they have achieved the purest form of being, and that they are part of a movement of others who have achieved whatever high status is achieved by consuming cold-pressed carrot juice and arugula.
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“They could afford to eat cake, should the bread run out, but they quit sugar. They’re only eating twigs and moss now.”
-Michelle Allison, Eating Toward Immortality
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To combat the snarling teeth of dieting is to eat without restriction. To chew and enjoy is a form of rebellion. “It is admitting your mortality, your limitations and messiness as a biological creature, while accepting the freedoms and pleasures of eating, and taking responsibility for choosing them” (Michelle Allison, Eating Toward Immortality).
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Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a Brooklyn-based journalist and author who uses cooking as a reclamation of independence, womanhood, and community. Growing up in Singapore, Cheryl was surrounded by hawker culture (aka street food), where each hawker has been making over 200 bowls of noodles per day for decades. She understands the necessity of the chopped salad, of hurried food, but she expects these meals to be of the same caliber as something from a hawker center: cheap, fantastic, and unforgettable.
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Originally a fashion writer, Tan recounts going out with her colleagues to amazing restaurants with mouth-watering menus. As the waiter went around the table, everyone would curiously order a cobb salad (light dressing, no bacon, no cheese, no egg, no croutons). What arrived were bowls of sad, meager leaves. She was in a profession where people avoided both cooking and eating, and she became homesick for the food of Singapore.
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Cheryl is from a family of exceptional cooks and long dinners, where meals are half-planned and hodge-podge; “it's always a feast and it takes a long time, with a whole ton of desserts.” Growing up, however, she never wanted to be in the kitchen. The role to her was womanly, and growing up as the eldest daughter in a traditional Chinese family, she actively feared being pigeonholed into the stereotype of the girl who subserviently cooks and cleans. Her dad recognized this, and encouraged her to stay out the kitchen and keep her nose in her books.
When Cheryl rejected the fashion industry to reconnect with her family’s foodways, her family muttered “Oh, now you want to learn how to be a woman.” She had tried to escape cooking her whole life, but now she found the practice to be anything but weak, pedestrian, or servile. Cooking is empowering and it is the way the women in Cheryl’s family exerted their influence; “...it showed how fearless and how powerful they were in their own domain.”. She heard stories and recipes that had never left the kitchen walls, and in doing so, she learned about her family’s history and herself.
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To take time to grow food, cook food, and eat food, we have to be courageous. We have to be indulgent and fearless and resilient and creative and conscious. Being anti chop salad is about lingering, chewing the fat, and relishing the moments we have with one another and with only ourselves. Loving food is radical, so go eat with gusto.