Emotional Eating

You know how sometimes, you think you are in for one kind of experience, and you end up completely diverted through no fault of your own? Like when you went to someone else’s house as a child and you thought you were getting Vegemite, but it was actually Promite and it was so, so wrong? You’d happily existed on this earth without ever having run into Promite, but your friend insisted that it was just as popular in other countries and was essentially the same thing and you just didn’t know what to believe in any more?

This happened to me a few years ago when I picked up the book Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin – ‘A no-nonsense, tough love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous.’ I’d had a pretty indulgent Christmas and was vulnerable at the airport, killing time in their overpriced bookshop. I was attracted to the deceptive Chick Lit drawing on the front and thought: ‘That’s me! I’m savvy! I want to look fabulous! This sounds like fun!’ What I got was a dossier on the horrors of the food industry that read like Mein Kampf for Veganism and 'pure' eating. I was railroaded into being at the very least a vegetarian as they yelled things at me like: ‘Coffee is for pussies’ (ok, I see where you’re going with this) and ‘Suck your mother’s tits. Go on. Suck your mother’s tits’ (now dairy is out) and ‘You are a total moron if you think the Atkins diet will make you thin.’ (This came from a chapter entitled the ‘Dead, Rotting, Decomposing Flesh Diet'.) Rory and Kim achieved their aim – they conned me into reading their book and made one more person a vegetarian. This lasted about 3 years. I was doing well and then started to waver. I blame bacon. It smells fabulous and that’s nothing compared with the salty, salty goodness that enchants your taste buds when you eat it. My friends devoured in front of me while I was trying to make do with avocado and tomato on toast. I hadn’t yet faltered, but I was teetering on the brink. So I prayed for a sign, and I got one while watching Ellen one day. It was all innocuous stuff. Ellen was jokin’, Ellen was dancin’ with the ladies and then Ellen was interviewin’ Jonathan Safran Foer about his book Eating Animals. The usually fictional writer had just had a baby boy and wanted to be more informed about what he was feeding his kid. He went a huntin’ for information about meat and how it gets to our plate. He was so sweet! So knowledgeable! But importantly, since he too had shilly-shallied in his vegetarianism, he wouldn't yell at me.

So I read the book. And I cried like a child who’s just found out that Santa isn’t real. The way he describes how a factory farmed animal lives and dies would break the heart of the most hardened carnivore, and then comes the information about the correlation between diseases and meat, environmental destruction and meat, species extinction and meat…you get the idea. What’s great about this book, however is that Safran Foer thoroughly examines each perspective, searching for answers. He interviews activists, hobby farmers, factory farmers, vegetarian ranchers, slaughterhouse employees and many others. He’s not trying to blame anyone, he’s just working out what to feed his family. And so I’m back on the path. And like James Brown, I feel good. It was just the diversion I needed.