On Settling an Unsettling Relationship

Words By: Lauren Blaser Photos By: Lauren Blaser & Jamie Kim

“People who love to eat,” the prophetic Julia Child once wrote, “are always the best people.” I do love to eat, but I don’t always like it.

For those with the privilege of stable access to food, eating is inescapable. The average day offers a minimum of three opportunities for food-related thoughts to consume a person. Allergies play a role in deciding what, when, and how to eat—someone with lactose intolerance knows to opt for Lactaid or Oatly over dairy milk. Culture and palette have an impact, too, of course. But none of these considerations hold as much power as the way each of us personifies eating. Food might be a friend and a source of joy, or a cunning adversary of whom one needs to be wary.

When I was eight years old, I played recreational basketball, and I was awful. The only baskets I scored were two consecutive free throws, made with shaky elbows and met with pure shock from all involved. I was so flabbergasted by the entire experience that I wrote a short story about it for my language arts class. On the worst nights, all that got me through our trying, mid-evening practices was the late-night snack I anticipated afterwards. I used to smear cold slivers of butter onto a slice of (also cold) wheat bread that my mom kept in our fridge. This was Arnold Whole Wheat, the kind of bread that smushed into a thin line if you pinched it. Not extra crusty, or textured, or flavorful. The post-practice ritual of mine began randomly. Standing in the local high school gym one night, I let my mind wander from the drill being run in front of me, and serendipitously, bread and butter slipped into my head. It sounded good, and I began to crave it. When I returned home, I ate it.

The older I grew, the further I wandered from the intuitive, playful way I approached each meal as a kid. This was a subtle yet powerful shift, and it slowly began to take over my life. “Craving” became a tainted word. Eating what I wanted was an inclination I started to shy away from; what genuinely sounded good wasn’t nearly as valid as what should sound good. Certain moments marked timestamps (tombstones) in this process of psychological rewiring. The last time I ordered a cheesy, soup-filled bread bowl at Panera. The first time I stalled while ordering at a café. My sister’s matcha latte was paid for and halfway finished while I stood tapping my feet in front of the register—not because the drink descriptions were tripping me up, but because the printed calorie content had me too overwhelmed to make a decision.

The simple, overwhelmingly pleasant way I viewed food as a child began to clash with a new perspective which proved more conflicting, more weighty. Thus, my teenage years were spent trying to reconcile two approaches to food, completely at odds and stacked stubbornly atop one another like oil and vinegar. To make matters worse, as I became older, more and more layers accumulated.

Some of the most lovely foods form as the child of two polar liquids which firmly resist one another. The beauty of emulsification is the magically transformative reaction that occurs each time it happens. Lackluster ingredients which are too different to make any sense together are suddenly— literally—whipped into creamy sauces, custards, and condiments. Pesto and chocolate ganache would not exist without the coalescing of ingredients which initially refuse to mingle. Contact with a catalytic emulsifier separates the molecules of each substance and keeps those of the same content from gelling together. A uniform mixture is the delicious result.

If only an egg yolk was able to do for my complex understanding of food what it does for lemon juice and butter. Shake things up, bond them, make them better. I never got a rich sauce out of my experiences—I got a bitter mess and an unshakable sense of confusion. Perhaps the issue was—is—that in an emulsification, each layer vanishes from the final product. The perfect hollandaise, for example, doesn’t taste anything like lemon or butter. In the end, the sauce has a full-bodied flavor that’s undeniably all its own.

Diet culture, in all of its cunning forms, sauntered onto the center-stage of my already rocky relationship with food during senior year of high school, and it stole the show. Six years of Instagram use, an active Pinterest board titled “prom bod,” and the general anxiety of an eighteenyear-old all came to a toxic tipping point. Every day I was either consciously seeking—or subconsciously being fed—messages about food and appearance and how the two were supposedly inseparable. I put a sign inside our pantry with a quote from Mulan that I hoped would remind me to think about food choices often and carefully: Reflect before you snack! The words actually come from a scene in which Mulan misreads a note on her arm, intended to say “Reflect before you act.” As the absolute badass that Mulan is, she would likely be disappointed with my appropriation of her film as fuel for an increasingly problematic relationship with food.

At this point, I was looking at a dull rainbow of different approaches to eating. No longer was I able to instinctively identify what I loved, what I wanted, what would satisfy me. My voice (and my stomach) was the last priority. First, I had to consider each annoying perspective that wormed its way into every choice I made. What would a doctor say about this meal? My parents? My friends? The anonymous creators of healthy Pinterest recipes I’d so quickly become addicted to saving?

I have only just begun to grasp that living in a world with this many perspectives on food requires not a balancing act, or even a separation, but rather a transformation. Selecting an entrée—or ordering a latte, or making a grocery list—requires me to silence the chorus of voices that hurl in from every direction. I might taste notes or hear distant echoes of external opinions. But in order to survive, and to eat with the same relish I did as a kid, all of these voices must fade to the background as I lift a fork, straw, or spoon to my mouth. The only one left is my own.