Talking the Food Talk

Hello reader. Hold on. I really want to write this article, but before I do, I’m going to make some cinnamon toast. I kinda want some peanut butter too, right? Do I? I don’t know. 

Hey reader, do I want peanut butter or just regular butter? Should I have margarine? I thought that stuff was bad for you. No, I want peanut butter.

Yeah that settles it, I’m having peanut butter. Sorry to interrupt us like that, but I literally have not eaten all day and I’m starving.

This bizarre need to crowd-source a decision to have midnight toast perfectly exemplifies a phenomenon that I have come to think of as Food Talk, a strange social interplay that I have noticed far more prominently in women than in men, and that I find subtly harmful.

At home, I have two sisters — at Cal, I have two hundred — and this legitimacy lets me stress that Food Talk is not a stereotype or a rare phenomenon, and that I don’t mean to apply any sort of stereotype to women. I want to address Food Talk as a bad habit I notice in my friends and, somewhat alarmingly, in me.

When I say Food Talk, I mean the uncanny regularity with which women preface their food consumption with an explanation for why they chose that particular item. In my experience, people preface their food consumption primarily before diving in to a meal that is somehow different.

By different, I mean eating when no one else is eating, going back for seconds when no one else has finished, building a mountain of mashed potatoes when everyone else is snapping up kale, or picking idly at celery when everyone else has a sundae.

From Thanksgiving feasts to the Monday night dinners at my sorority, meals build community spaces around celebration, comfort, and conversation, and Food Talk apparently acts as a misplaced effort to preserve the homogeneity of this community.

Despite a person’s physical needs, they — most often, she — fears eating “differently” because it transforms her food into an identifier, the proverbial “you are what you eat.” She does not want her food to define her among her peers, so she justifies herself.

If she eats a lot, she might feel compelled to describe any sort of food she ate earlier, demonstrating how little she had and why she deserves extra. Perhaps she’ll throw in a side reference to a particularly brutal workout or a skipped breakfast.

By comparison, if she doesn’t want food, she has to prove to concerned peers that she does not have an eating disorder, probably falling back on illness, stress, a stomachache, or a particularly massive earlier meal.

She never considers that “this is what I want” is a sufficient excuse. In either scenario, the demands of her digestive system take a second seat to the anticipated censure of her peers. I’d like to point out that I don’t judge people for their food preferences. In this valley of vegans, I quickly learned not to judge raw “cheddar” kale chips, flax seeds, kombucha, and soy yogurt. In fact, I’ll admit to liking the kale chips.

But Food Talk is more contagious than salmonella. When one of my friends does it, I start to suspect her of judging my plate, so I start slip into Food Talk to avoid her judgment.

Ironically, all this food talk undermines the communal experience of eating, and turns it into a poker game played out with carrot sticks and chocolate chip cookies. Friends unintentionally reinforce for each other the outdated link between a woman’s dinner and her character.

In order to keep up appearances, a woman must therefore deprioritize her body’s needs. She must ask permission, she must get approval. Food Talk takes away agency, exacerbates unhealthy body image, and most importantly, is more irritating that crumbs in the butter.

Have your cinnamon toast. Nobody gives a shit.

 

Image source: foodlikethat.com