Speaker 1: It's December nineteen ninety two, Christmas time. I'm ten years
Speaker 1: old and writing furiously into the pages of my little
Speaker 1: pink diary, venting about dinner, dear Diary. Today, Grandma gave
Speaker 1: us to Molly's for dinner. They smelled so good. Why
Speaker 1: does she always do this to me? Doesn't she understand
Speaker 1: that I'm the fattest girl in my entire school And
Speaker 1: it's because she's always tempting me with food? Love always,
Speaker 1: xoxo me. In the Mexican household I grew up in
Speaker 1: December was high to Molly season. We'd make them for
Speaker 1: family and give them away as gifts too, and they
Speaker 1: were legendary. My grandmother and grandfather used to sit down
Speaker 1: in a mini production line and make does of tamales.
Speaker 1: Each one is like a tiny present of spicy meat
Speaker 1: and earthy massa, wrapped in papery corn husks. My love
Speaker 1: is watering just thinking about them now. But back then,
Speaker 1: bamales were the bane of my existence. I was a
Speaker 1: little fat girl who was being bullied relentlessly for her weight,
Speaker 1: and food was enemy number one. The better it tasted,
Speaker 1: the more dangerous it was a threat to becoming different, better,
Speaker 1: thin if I could just be thin, I thought I'd
Speaker 1: be happy. I'd get the love and attention I always
Speaker 1: craved from the boys at school. I thought being fat
Speaker 1: meant ugliness, a loveless future. Those delicious thamales meant staying fat, failing,
Speaker 1: failing at being thin, and failing at all the other
Speaker 1: things that seemed to be wrong with me, like the
Speaker 1: Mexican home that made me feel like I was an
Speaker 1: alien at school, the words I would mispronounce because my
Speaker 1: grandmother said them differently, the rituals that kept us from
Speaker 1: being real Americans. My feelings about those tamadas were all
Speaker 1: about my relationship to culture, family, tradition, immigration, and race.
Speaker 1: Food is powerful that way. I'm Virgi Tovar, and this
Speaker 1: is Rebel Eaters Club. It's a show where I talked
Speaker 1: to incredible people about our relationships to food and all
Speaker 1: the things wrapped up and eating, like self esteem, sex, community, love.
Speaker 1: I am a fat woman of color, and I hated
Speaker 1: my body for a long time. I was terrified of
Speaker 1: food for nearly twenty years. But finally, one day I
Speaker 1: gave the finger to diet culture. But what is diet culture?
Speaker 1: In the US? The weight loss industry has grown to
Speaker 1: seventy two billion dollars a year. That's seventy two billion.
Speaker 1: This culture is constantly telling us that all our problems
Speaker 1: would be solved if only we ate less. Diet culture
Speaker 1: shows up in workout clothing companies. It tell you to
Speaker 1: find your shine in keto cookbooks on the bestseller list,
Speaker 1: in the way coworkers can't seem to share a meal
Speaker 1: without talking about the gym, the way fat people are
Speaker 1: treated like second class citizens. Every year, forty eight million
Speaker 1: Americans go on a diet, but not everyone is calling
Speaker 1: it a diet. People might call it wellness or a
Speaker 1: healthy lifestyle. But diet culture is everywhere and it's destructive.
Speaker 1: So we're going to break up with diet culture one
Speaker 1: corn dog at a time, and you will salivate and
Speaker 1: I have feelings and new thoughts. At the end of
Speaker 1: every episode, there will be a question I want you
Speaker 1: to journal about. The more you know about your history
Speaker 1: with food and eating, the better equipped you are to
Speaker 1: finally break up with diet culture. Are you ready? Today?
Speaker 1: We're going to talk to my friend Mia Foyer about
Speaker 1: her food front of me bagels. I brought some bagels
Speaker 1: and some schmir Is it schmirs. How do you use it? Well,
Speaker 1: I have never heard anyone call it schmir until I
Speaker 1: moved to the US. But in Winnipeg, where I grew up,
Speaker 1: where I ate my earliest bagel, it was just cream cheese.
Speaker 1: For Mia, bagels are all tied up with some of
Speaker 1: her most important relationships with her mother, her heritage, and herself. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: so are you ready? Should we do? Oh? My god,
Speaker 1: I just dropped a bunch of cream cheese on my lap.
Speaker 1: If I'm I'm going to eat it off? Yeah? Are
Speaker 1: you ready? Huh? Okay, do it? Let's do it. M mmmmm,
Speaker 1: although I gotta say I longed for a toaster. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I met Mia when she came to Babe Camp, one
Speaker 1: of my weekend long workshops on fat feminism. Since then,
Speaker 1: she's become a friend. She's a Canadian and a total
Speaker 1: badass sculptor. When we sat down in the studio to
Speaker 1: eat some bagels, she started telling me about her childhood
Speaker 1: in Winnipeg, Manitoba. So I grew up in a Jewish house,
Speaker 1: Jewish grandparents. I went to do a school, and so
Speaker 1: I was really kind of steeped in a Jewish community.
Speaker 1: And with that came a lot of Jewish cooking, like
Speaker 1: a lot of things like knishes and balinzas and corn
Speaker 1: beef sandwiches and pickles and bagels, you know, and brisket
Speaker 1: and chicken soup and mats of balls. And bagels were glorious.
Speaker 1: And the ones that my mom bought at Safe Way
Speaker 1: in Winnipeg were not fancy. They were not these like
Speaker 1: beautiful bagels that i've i've you know, had in Montreal
Speaker 1: or in New York. They were like out of a
Speaker 1: plastic bag that you know, were made in a factory
Speaker 1: that came and frozen on a truck. You know. They
Speaker 1: were the industrialized bagel for the middle class family who
Speaker 1: lived in like the middle of Canada. And I remember
Speaker 1: lying in bed and I would think like, oh, I am,
Speaker 1: I cannot wait to wake up and eat a toasted
Speaker 1: bagel cheese whiz. That was like the ultimate, that was
Speaker 1: like my fantasy. I would go to bed, I was
Speaker 1: so excited to wake up and have breakfast. And then,
Speaker 1: because of the fact that my family is full of
Speaker 1: larger bodied people, men and women, I learned how to
Speaker 1: hate my body from my mother, who hated her body,
Speaker 1: and then I hated her body, and I hated my body,
Speaker 1: and I hated my cousin's bodies and my aunt's bodies.
Speaker 1: But my dad became almost like this cop around the house,
Speaker 1: and he put a picture on our fridge. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you remember, Virgie, but like there was these
Speaker 1: birthday cards that came out in the eighties of fat
Speaker 1: women or like super fat women in bikinis holding a cupcake,
Speaker 1: and then it was meant to be funny, you know,
Speaker 1: but it was hurtful. It was so he put one
Speaker 1: of those on our fridge as like a reminder to
Speaker 1: everybody in the house, me, my brother, and my mother
Speaker 1: that you know, if you open up this door, just
Speaker 1: remember this body right here could be you. He would
Speaker 1: tell me that I had to do like X number
Speaker 1: of minutes on the stair climb or every night. There
Speaker 1: was so much fear being hurled at me as I
Speaker 1: was just sort of approaching puberty. I wasn't even like
Speaker 1: thirteen yet. Not soon after that, I actually remember sort
Speaker 1: of telling myself that I should not be so excited
Speaker 1: about eating bagels because of the fact that, like I
Speaker 1: was receiving very strong messages around food, around eating. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the thing right, because there's so much weird, there's
Speaker 1: morality tied into all of it. Yeah. And I think
Speaker 1: when you're talking about when food stops being something that
Speaker 1: you enjoy or something that you use for nutrition, right, Like,
Speaker 1: and you number there's a range of reasons why humans
Speaker 1: and animals eat, right, Yeah, And I would say all
Speaker 1: of them are natural. But then you add this cultural
Speaker 1: level where food becomes tied to morality in our culture. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also our relationship to food culturally is very seated
Speaker 1: in anxiety. And I think most people think that most
Speaker 1: food is either dangerous or bad for you. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so when you have that moral overlay, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you start to see really strange behavior. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1: just feel like that, like I witness so much of
Speaker 1: that on a day to day basis, right, Like there's
Speaker 1: this kind of understanding of what you're supposed to do
Speaker 1: when someone else is watching, and what you want to do. Oh.
Speaker 1: I feel like I have been in so many situations
Speaker 1: where I am performing. If I'm at an art opening
Speaker 1: and there's like a big table full of delicious food,
Speaker 1: but I'm surrounded by colleagues and other people from in
Speaker 1: the art world, you know, forget it. I'm just going
Speaker 1: to nibble at the smallest thing possible. Why even if
Speaker 1: I'm hungry, Because I all of a sudden fall into
Speaker 1: this weird trap of feeling scrutinized by everyone around me,
Speaker 1: and that scrutiny is somehow linked to what I'm eating. Yes,
Speaker 1: And also, I mean, how many dates have I been
Speaker 1: on in my lifetime where I'm ordering food across the
Speaker 1: table from somebody who I think is judging me based
Speaker 1: on how much I eat or what I order. I'm
Speaker 1: happy to say that I've sort of shaken a lot
Speaker 1: of that bullshit off, but in my life it's been
Speaker 1: a constant. And then another thing I was thinking of
Speaker 1: back to the bagels, is so my mother and the
Speaker 1: women of my family go to weight watchers. This is
Speaker 1: something that has been a constant, you know, since I
Speaker 1: could remember. My mother has been going to weight watchers
Speaker 1: until she started bringing me with her weight watchers, and
Speaker 1: then I went on my own to weight Watchers as
Speaker 1: soon as I was old enough. But they would make bagels.
Speaker 1: There would be like I remember, every once in a
Speaker 1: while in my household growing up, the bagel brand would
Speaker 1: shift to be like two point bagels, from weight watchers,
Speaker 1: and they were sort of disgusting and they were small, alert,
Speaker 1: but you still kind of got to saw them in
Speaker 1: half and put them in the toaster and they became toasty.
Speaker 1: And then my mother at one point found a recipe
Speaker 1: to make one point bagels that were like made out
Speaker 1: of oh god, there was like fat free yogurt, and
Speaker 1: who knows. That was like the ultimate, Like they're only
Speaker 1: one point weight watchers, you know. And as I got older,
Speaker 1: I you know, and I moved out and I moved
Speaker 1: out of Canada and I went to grad school. I
Speaker 1: felt like I was deep, deep, deeply struggling in terms
Speaker 1: of what I was allowing myself to eat. What I
Speaker 1: ended up falling into at that point was no bagels ever.
Speaker 1: I had loved them once so much and I knew it,
Speaker 1: and I just felt like if I if I eat
Speaker 1: a bagel, it's over. Don't ever or a bagel, don't
Speaker 1: ever eat a bagel. Just don't do it. Don't do it,
Speaker 1: don't do it, don't do it. For years. WHOA, I'm
Speaker 1: having like a recollection of something my mother taught me
Speaker 1: when I was a fat little girl who was getting,
Speaker 1: you know, emotionally abused and bludgeon day after day for
Speaker 1: being fat. You know. I remember we were sitting in
Speaker 1: her car and I was crying and I just felt
Speaker 1: like I was so disgusted by my body. I remember
Speaker 1: taking her hand and putting it on the inside of
Speaker 1: my thigh and making her feel the stretch marks and
Speaker 1: telling her that there was something wrong with me. There
Speaker 1: was something that normal people don't have, this that you know,
Speaker 1: my life would be better if I was the kind
Speaker 1: of person who didn't have, you know, Like it was
Speaker 1: such a physical memory of like, look at my defect,
Speaker 1: feel it, like, feel what it looks like to see,
Speaker 1: to feel the like the little tear under the skin
Speaker 1: or the stretch mark happens, you know. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think that she felt really overwhelmed and unable to
Speaker 1: guide me in that moment um, and so she leaned
Speaker 1: on her own dieting and disordered eating cash of of
Speaker 1: information and tips or whatever, and she said that the
Speaker 1: key to becoming thin was learning to hate the foods
Speaker 1: you loved the most. WHOA and and like that kind
Speaker 1: of I mean that reminds me so much of what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, where it's like that inversion where it's
Speaker 1: like where the thing you love the most is the
Speaker 1: biggest danger to who you can and should become. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's what I mean, That's what it's like. That's
Speaker 1: also part like her teaching me how to have a
Speaker 1: eating disorder was part of feminine intimacy in our culture, right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like somehow like oh, this beautiful moment of
Speaker 1: like feminine intimacy where a mother is passing something onto it.
Speaker 1: It was like all that awful diet culture shit is
Speaker 1: as much a part of gender as like my mother
Speaker 1: touching my body. You know what I'm saying. It's like
Speaker 1: it's all connected, right, I completely agree. Well, it's like
Speaker 1: it's interesting, right because like there's this cultural mechanism the
Speaker 1: family is attempting to use food the way that humans
Speaker 1: use food, which is to celebrate, to create intimacy, to
Speaker 1: feed and nurture, and then there's this weird moralistic diet
Speaker 1: culture thing that's kind of stepping in and and it's
Speaker 1: just it's like interesting, right because I see the trajectory
Speaker 1: of family and how food is, oh, is central to that,
Speaker 1: and then there's this weird thing that kind of interrupts
Speaker 1: another story that feels really resonant with what you're talking
Speaker 1: about with your family and your mother is like I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, distinctly writing in my diary these like hate
Speaker 1: letters to my grandmother, um, because I was so angry
Speaker 1: at her for making delicious food that I felt tempted me,
Speaker 1: that I felt, you know, like if she could just
Speaker 1: stop making this food, that I could be the right size.
Speaker 1: And I think what's so interlace with that, and what's
Speaker 1: so intense about that is that you know, my grandmother
Speaker 1: my family is Mexican, right like my family, so like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm learning that this particular kind of like
Speaker 1: Anglo streamlined Norwegian body is the ideal body. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm seeing my Mexican grandmother who is making the food
Speaker 1: that I'm connecting with home, but also connecting with my
Speaker 1: racialization as evil. Me too, Virgie, me too. I the
Speaker 1: bagel there was something so Jewish about it, and I
Speaker 1: not only hated my body, but I hated my Jewish body.
Speaker 1: This is not something that I have fully resolved. You know.
Speaker 1: The bagel for me, like it was, it was like
Speaker 1: the perfect food to hate. You know. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: like chocolate, or it wasn't just like ice cream the
Speaker 1: food that like everyone loves and then you know everyone
Speaker 1: people are on a diet are like no, you know,
Speaker 1: the bagel was like it symbolized my cultural background as
Speaker 1: a Jew, and how it odds I was with that totally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that makes sense. Yes, of course
Speaker 1: it does, of course. I mean yes, I mean I'm wondering, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you kind of mentioned we're first talking about it,
Speaker 1: you're kind of returned to the bagel. Yeah, pregnancy, and
Speaker 1: I kind of wanted to hear this story. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: got pregnant in twenty fifteen, and there were just some
Speaker 1: foods I did not want, right, you know, I and
Speaker 1: there were some foods where you know, the cravings just
Speaker 1: really took over and it was I mean, all I
Speaker 1: wanted was a fucking bagel. All I wanted was a
Speaker 1: fucking bagel, Like and it was a plain bagel, no seeds,
Speaker 1: no flavor, with plain cream cheese. It's all I wanted, motherfucker, Like,
Speaker 1: just give me, bring it to me. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: something kind of animal happens when you're pregnant. You start
Speaker 1: to smell more and eat sense more, and you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're like, hey, you know like you can't really see
Speaker 1: what I'm doing, but I'm pretending to be a little
Speaker 1: animal sniffing around through garbage looking for that perfect treat.
Speaker 1: And like that's kind of how what I was becoming.
Speaker 1: And um, when I wanted a bagel, which was kind
Speaker 1: of all I wanted, um, you know, I made sure
Speaker 1: I got one and did it create like static for
Speaker 1: you that that intends craving every time, every time every
Speaker 1: time because I I al was like I can't believe
Speaker 1: I'm meeting a bagel. Yeah, do you understand your body
Speaker 1: is gonna do all this crazy shit and you're probably
Speaker 1: gonna gain all this weight and you're the world's gonna end,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna have a child and you're gonna you know,
Speaker 1: but I you know, the bagel, the bagel was eaten, yes,
Speaker 1: because it was all like I couldn't. I didn't want
Speaker 1: anything else totally. And even during my birth, I just
Speaker 1: remember this moment while I was giving birth. I had
Speaker 1: my son Galio in my in my house, in my
Speaker 1: own bed, and I was pushing and I was it
Speaker 1: was like screaming and it was like I was I
Speaker 1: was an animal and I was trying to bite my
Speaker 1: do lie in her face, and you know, and then
Speaker 1: and it was storming outside, and it was, you know,
Speaker 1: like four in the morning, and I remember my partner said,
Speaker 1: He's like me, you look so beautiful right now, and
Speaker 1: I just was like, shut the fuck up. I'm so fat.
Speaker 1: Why are you even telling me this right now? Like
Speaker 1: I was, because I was so deeply invested in the
Speaker 1: fact that I was like my body was wrong that
Speaker 1: even in that moment when my body was doing like
Speaker 1: the most magical thing it's ever done. And I even
Speaker 1: had somebody right there rooting me on, and I just
Speaker 1: couldn't even shake that culture in that moment. And then
Speaker 1: when I think back to that, how depressing, What a
Speaker 1: shame that, like I have to have that memory poisoning
Speaker 1: my experience. I mean, I'll forever look back on that.
Speaker 1: You know, I chose to have a homebirth so I
Speaker 1: could be really present, and yet I was not present.
Speaker 1: I was still having thoughts that I needed to be
Speaker 1: skinny in that moment. I mean, how ridiculous it was
Speaker 1: that we are back A couple of years after Mia
Speaker 1: gave birth, she came to Babe Camp. That's the workshop
Speaker 1: I do with women where we get free from the
Speaker 1: lives we're told about our bodies. Remember me. As an artist,
Speaker 1: she takes found industrial materials and makes huge human size sculptures.
Speaker 1: Not long after Babe Camp, she was asked to do
Speaker 1: an installation in a decommissioned greenhouse and the La Arboretum.
Speaker 1: This greenhouse is kind of like this derelict little shit box.
Speaker 1: It's been vacant for decades. It is like this ruinous
Speaker 1: structure that's made of wood and glass, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of fucked up. It's gnarly, like the glass is kind
Speaker 1: of smashed out in parts. And spent some time in
Speaker 1: this greenhouse and also thought about kind of the journey
Speaker 1: that I've been on in my own body, getting pregnant,
Speaker 1: letting go of diet culture, you know, really um sort
Speaker 1: of reprioritizing the things that I was going to put
Speaker 1: my energy into, which was not shrinking myself like it
Speaker 1: just it was it was like glaring. It was a
Speaker 1: glaring problem for me to wake up in the morning
Speaker 1: and and say, well, what was I going to do today?
Speaker 1: Am I going to go to the gym? And then
Speaker 1: spend the rest of the day worrying about what I
Speaker 1: was going to not eat or you know or was
Speaker 1: I just gonna go to my fucking studio. There was
Speaker 1: nothing about shrinking my body that felt remotely important, felt
Speaker 1: like anything I needed to bother with. It felt like
Speaker 1: something that was, if anything working against me, it was working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like actually actively working against me. And as
Speaker 1: soon as that should started to melt away, I was thinking,
Speaker 1: I want to make some kind of I want to
Speaker 1: make this like celebratory body of work pun intended, yea,
Speaker 1: And I wanted to use my own body. I wanted
Speaker 1: to use the bodies of brilliant women who around me.
Speaker 1: I was moved to create an installation in that greenhouse
Speaker 1: of these fictional goddess figures. One of them was the
Speaker 1: Egyptian goddess to Wear It, who has the head of
Speaker 1: a hippo and the body of a woman, and her
Speaker 1: and her sisters were referred to as the Solar Mothers,
Speaker 1: and what their role was was to protect birthing mothers
Speaker 1: and newborns of all species during the birthing process and
Speaker 1: also to usher the sun being born over the horizon
Speaker 1: every morning. Okay, so I had an opportunity to take
Speaker 1: all my clothes off and be cast by you. It
Speaker 1: was such a specific experience. It was like, you know,
Speaker 1: like I'd never been cast before, and um, and there's
Speaker 1: some logistics to it, like, for instance, you had to
Speaker 1: put vassiline all over my vagina and then put a
Speaker 1: tiny piece of saran wrap over it. And it was
Speaker 1: like you were so consent driven. You were like, is
Speaker 1: this okay, I'm gonna put this? You can. I think
Speaker 1: you even had like a joint dangling out of your
Speaker 1: mouth at this point or something, and you're like, is
Speaker 1: this okay, just okay? Oh my god, so evocative. I
Speaker 1: always envision you with a joint hanging out of your mouth.
Speaker 1: It's it's I mean, that's not a judgment. It's actually
Speaker 1: very charming. Oh I'm so I'm so thankful. I'm so
Speaker 1: thankful to weed. So it's like I got cast and
Speaker 1: then I like started to panic and you had to
Speaker 1: cut me at you and like your assistant had to
Speaker 1: cut me out of it, and you gave me some
Speaker 1: weed and I started to freak out and I was
Speaker 1: like I've never been higher in my life, and you're
Speaker 1: like you are not that hot, Like you held it
Speaker 1: down in that moment, Like it was like the moment
Speaker 1: when the airplane was like crashing and You're like, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be out, okay, Yeah, And I felt okay after that,
Speaker 1: I felt like I felt like that you were just
Speaker 1: so emphatic, and I felt like I could trust you
Speaker 1: in that moment. I just want to tell you about
Speaker 1: the first time I saw me a show. Once it
Speaker 1: all came together, Mia had invited the group of Fat
Speaker 1: Babe she had cast for the sculptures to be VIP guests.
Speaker 1: After the wine and cheese reception, we walked the windy
Speaker 1: path of the La Arboretum to the greenhouse, and what
Speaker 1: we saw there was like something out of a science
Speaker 1: fiction fairy tale. Through the windows, I saw these incredible
Speaker 1: sculptures that had the heads of hippos, the tales of dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: and human bodies. Our bodies, I saw our bellies, our
Speaker 1: double chins, and thy rolls illuminated under the gallery lighting
Speaker 1: as if we were demigods. It was like a museum
Speaker 1: of witchy hippos crossed or the forgotten corner of Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: And it was amazing. I mean, I do believe that
Speaker 1: this is the most exciting work I've ever made, and
Speaker 1: it's only just sort of like the beginning of the
Speaker 1: most exciting work that I've ever made, because I all
Speaker 1: it did was just make me want to make better
Speaker 1: and more and crazier, and you know, like I just
Speaker 1: want to kind of keep riding it. I Mean, one
Speaker 1: of the things I love about this work is that,
Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, there's there's like the documentation
Speaker 1: of bodies that have largely been either completely deleted from
Speaker 1: the archive of Western art or are only portrayed to
Speaker 1: display sin or gluttony or you know, something kind of
Speaker 1: a deviation or a sign of immorality. I mean, in general,
Speaker 1: I don't see fat women's bodies being revered and loved.
Speaker 1: And I think there's also what I love is because
Speaker 1: of the nudity. There's like a documentation of the physicality
Speaker 1: of fatness that is so unique anyway that Actually, that's
Speaker 1: the last question I wanted to ask you, was, you know,
Speaker 1: I know you're still in the journey, but you're kind
Speaker 1: of on the other side of the line, right, Like
Speaker 1: I just found out recently that forty eight million Americans
Speaker 1: diet every year. Yeah, and so what is your dispatch?
Speaker 1: What do you know now that you didn't know when
Speaker 1: you were part of that statistic? Yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: that to walk through that, you know, that that threshold
Speaker 1: or whatever of like being on a diet and committing
Speaker 1: to this like bullshit, sort of like living in the
Speaker 1: future aspirational gobbliegook. Yes, to consider leaving it, you'd only
Speaker 1: be like, well, then what happens to me? That is scary?
Speaker 1: But then I feel like, once the door was even
Speaker 1: cracked a little bit open, you can't close it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's searing bullshit that you realize you were in.
Speaker 1: As soon as there's like a little inch of light
Speaker 1: going through, It's like, well, you see all the poop
Speaker 1: garbage the light coming in illuminates. Yes, Yes, they're like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: wait a second here. And the other the other thing
Speaker 1: is the parenting question. Yes, because I feel really fortunate
Speaker 1: too to have sort of discovered this radical way of
Speaker 1: living in our culture, which is like without having a
Speaker 1: priority to shrink myself. I'm so grateful that it kind
Speaker 1: of happened when it did, as I had been, you know,
Speaker 1: just becoming a parent, because there are so many things
Speaker 1: that I am seeing other parents around me do that
Speaker 1: are setting their children up for the exact same sad,
Speaker 1: painful relationships. I see. It just with the way parents
Speaker 1: talk about their own bodies. I never ever, ever want
Speaker 1: there to be any shame around eating around, eating bagels,
Speaker 1: around bodies, around bodies and bathing suits around, jiggling around,
Speaker 1: tickling around, you know, like like like anything that's kind
Speaker 1: of associated with like bodies and how bodies are funny,
Speaker 1: and how bodies are hairy and smelly. And I just
Speaker 1: I'm trying to protect Gallet as much as I can
Speaker 1: from how the culture sterilizes and creates so much shame. Mia.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being here, for eating bagels that we're
Speaker 1: not toasted, and for sharing your beautiful story. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Eating is a basic need we have to eat. We
Speaker 1: rely on food for survival every day, all the time.
Speaker 1: Our bodies are built to enjoy eat. It's a basic
Speaker 1: biological source of pleasure. Beyond that, food connects us to
Speaker 1: other people and to ourselves. It's part of our greatest
Speaker 1: moments of celebration, joy and mourning, and for better or worse,
Speaker 1: it's tied to all the things that anchor us to
Speaker 1: the place we're from, to the people many of us
Speaker 1: will never be closer to our family. My relationship with
Speaker 1: my family is complex, but now thamalists reminds me of
Speaker 1: the warm parts of our relationship, not the hurtful ones.
Speaker 1: I know my grandma was caring for me with hermalis.
Speaker 1: She was never trying to attempt or torture me. She
Speaker 1: was only interested in nourishing me. Nowadays, thamalists are a
Speaker 1: big chunk of my food pyramid. I don't hate my
Speaker 1: body or food anymore, so they don't represent danger. Instead,
Speaker 1: they represent a small, delicious part of a very fraught inheritance.
Speaker 1: Every week, at the end of the episode, I'm going
Speaker 1: to share a journal prop that will help you think
Speaker 1: about your relationship to food. This week, I want you
Speaker 1: to think about one of your food inheritances. Write about
Speaker 1: food that reminds you of family, chosen or biological. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. What does this dish represent to you? What's
Speaker 1: its story, the joy, the tension, where it came from,
Speaker 1: the good memories and the weird ones, and how it
Speaker 1: shaped who you have become. If you want to write
Speaker 1: it down, you can send it to us at Rebel
Speaker 1: Eaters Club at gmail dot com or leave us a
Speaker 1: voicemail at eight six two two three one five three
Speaker 1: eight six, and your story could make it onto the
Speaker 1: show eight six, two two three, one five three eight six.
Speaker 1: When you're done, don't forget to give yourself the merit
Speaker 1: badge you earned, the all Food is Good Food badge.
Speaker 1: You can find the merit badges at rebel Eatersclub dot com.
Speaker 1: Just download the club starter pack. Once you have your
Speaker 1: merit badge, show me where you're putting it. Post on
Speaker 1: Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag Rebel Eaters Club All
Speaker 1: one word or tag us at Transmitter Pods. You can
Speaker 1: also find the merit badges on giffe so you can
Speaker 1: share the Rebel Eaters Club love all around the Internet
Speaker 1: and join me. Next week, we're talking to my friend
Speaker 1: Bailey about recovering from an eating disorder and learning about
Speaker 1: self love. Like Buck accepting yourself, I Love Myself. Rebel
Speaker 1: Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media, the
Speaker 1: podcast company that's like the last cream puff on the
Speaker 1: dessert tray. I'm Virgie Tovart. The show is produced by
Speaker 1: Lacy Roberts and Jordan Bailey, with help from James T.
Speaker 1: Green and Alex jong Laughlin. Our editor is Sarah Knicks.
Speaker 1: Greta Cohen is our executive produce Sir our show art
Speaker 1: is by Lucy la Perini. Like what you hear on
Speaker 1: the show and want to sponsor us, Visit us via
Speaker 1: Lipstick and Vinyl dot com and let us know. And
Speaker 1: please head to your favorite podcast app and give us
Speaker 1: a review. It will help us grow the club. See
Speaker 1: you next week.