Eating Light
Emily Stimpson on the Last & Other Suppers
A Saturday morning in December. I am in Pittsburgh, writing in a coffee shop. Two women in their early fifties sit at the table in front of me, each sipping something hot. One makes a confession. She sinned last night . . . with a piece of cheesecake.
The other expresses sympathy. But there is condescension in her voice. No cheesecake touched her lips last night. The first one congratulates the second, and declares herself—not her behavior and not the food, but herself—“bad.”
She is obsessed. They both are. If they’re not eating, they’re thinking about it or talking about it. They move from diet to diet, but the more they diet, the more obsessed they become, and the more they define their worth, their virtue, by what they put in their bodies, not by what they do with those bodies.
They are gluttons of a peculiarly feminine and peculiarly Western stripe.
Fast Food Products
A Sunday evening in March. I am in line at the grocery store. The checker moves slowly as she passes the items of the middle-aged man in front of me over the scanner. Soda and sweet cereal travel along the motorized belt. Frozen pizzas, a box of Twinkies, and tomatoes redder than they should be, considering the time of year, soon join them.
Save the artificially grown tomatoes and a bag of frighteningly large frozen chicken breasts, there is not a single item of food on the belt. Only food products.
This man has forgotten how to eat. He no longer knows what he instinctively knew as a child: how to listen to his body and to know what nutrients it needs. He has also forgotten what a balanced meal looks like, just as he has forgotten the taste of fresh vegetables in season and of cakes made by a woman, not machines.
Which is why tonight, like every night, his dinner doesn’t nourish his body, but slowly poisons it.
A Wednesday afternoon in April. I am driving to the bank to pay my mortgage. I slow down as the SUV in front of me turns left into McDonalds. A young mother is at the wheel. She has two children in the back seat, both dressed in soccer uniforms.
Emily Stimpson lives in Steubenville, Ohio, where she divides her time between working on her old house and writing for Franciscan University?s magazine Franciscan Way. A refugee from the world of D.C. politics, Emily previously worked for Senator Jim Talent (R-Mo.) and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III.
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