Food, Body and What's Trauma Got To Do With It
Whatever culture you may have grown up in, you have likely encountered the mind-boggling double standard that dictates our hunger and appetite, as well as how we relate to our food and bodies.
On one hand we encounter family narratives around food that demand we finish whatever is on our plate or that we can’t get up from the table unless our plate is clean. On the other hand we may be chided for eating “too much”, told we need to regulate our eating, or be told weight gain is inevitable (and labeled as very unwanted/unacceptable) if we don’t “control ourselves".
What is actually happening in these opposing narratives and why do so many families continue to enact them?
In this blog post we will look at our relationship with food and examine what trauma has to do with it.
Food as survival
Before we can conceptualize our relationship with food on a meta level, we need to acknowledge that first and foremost eating is a basic human need and drive, and is tied directly to our survival as a species.
This pure fact of biology and evolution acknowledges that our drive toward food will be instinctual and that food availability, food scarcity and the general environment around food will code how we relate to food and how we eat.
For those who survived food scarcity this may look like eating really quickly, because our body has physical memories of not having enough, not knowing where the next meal will come from, or having competition with other people over who gets to eat which food and when. Finishing a meal becomes not just a preference but a clear path to survival.
Now when we bring in a large scale traumatic event - famine, war, a natural disaster - the environment around how to get food, where to get food, and whether there will be enough is so profoundly destabilizing to our bodies and nervous systems that a trauma response forms around food.
For me as a Ukrainian-born person whose DNA is chock full of genetic material about surviving man-made famines orchestrated by Stalin, the idea of never wasting a crumb of bread or stockpiling food is tied to the intergenerational trauma of my ancestors.
For those in the States this idea may come from the Great Depression, when resources were stretched thin from war and abundance was a memory of the past.
Our experiences alter our DNA that we pass onto the next generation, and generation after that, and so on. Even if you personally have not lived through the Great Depression, someone in your family line may have and through epigenetics your body still carries the trauma of remembering what it feels like to not have enough food.
The demands that we eat everything before us, don’t waste any food, and treat food with a form of reverence is frequently a trauma response to profound and debilitating lack of resources.
Food as “excess”
Now you may get to this point and wonder, “But if food is survival, why do people diet?”
In order to answer that - and to explore the other end of the spectrum where food is considered “excess” and “gluttony” - we need to examine another kind of trauma, and that is one of white colonialism.
Historically, fatness was exalted as a sign of health, fertility and abundance of resources. From as far back as 30,000 years ago - a date to which the famous statue of Venus of Willendorf is attributed - fatness equaled vitality.
This continued throughout millennia. Think of famous Renaissance paintings that depicted voluptuous figures lounging amidst bowls of food. Remember how in feudal Europe many lords and merchants were fatter and this signified their status of affluence and power.
So what changed? Anti-fat sentiments began to enter the discourse in Western Europe toward late eighteenth - early nineteenth century. Romanticism era commences, followed by the Gothic novels that depicted characters who were very thin. A curiosity began to emerge in the society at the time and with it a shift was happening toward a preference for thinness, precisely because of it’s “depravity” and being the antithesis to what was “natural” at the time.
In her book Fearing the Black Body, author Sabrina Strings explains that it was not until the massive influx of enslaved Africans and the resurgence of religious zeal in the United States that thinness became a way to distinguish “proper” Anglo-Saxon Protestant women from the enslaved Africans, particularly enslaved Black women whose body form and size became a point of contention and a way of separating “us” from “them”.
Any such separation inevitably creates oppression, and oppression is traumatic. The white, Protestant, colonial version of propriety, health and “goodness” - whether in the eyes of god or society - became directly related to thinness and established anyone who deviated from this norm as ugly, disgusting, gluttonous, unrestrained, and out of control.
Colonialism, imperialism and religious dogma advocated for restriction for the sake of shrinking one’s body size and promised admittance to the “good” society. Saying no to this narrative would mean exclusion and being a source of hate, disgust and disdain.
In other words - racism became the foundation on which the drive for thinness stood on and continues to stand on today.
Coming back to intergenerational trauma and epigenetics, we now understand how our ancestors’ drive for inclusion and belonging in a society that is oppressive and racist began to dictate their - and as a result our - relationship with food. Thus the principle of dieting and food restriction was born, going directly against every survival instinct in our body.
Breaking out of the binary
The demand to finish everything on our plate and the question of why we are eating “so much” creates yet another binary, another spectrum with two clearly defined extremes.
The marker of true mental health though is the ability to let go of rigidity and embrace the gray.
Rigidity is comfortable and safe, which is why we see so many people easily succumb to it. Rigidity promises simple solutions and easy answers, a clear idea of “right and wrong”, and a path set out to follow that allows little to no deviations. You are surely familiar with these promises, as every diet in existence is seductive in its appeal of “simplicity” and the mentality of “just do this and it will all be better.”
However in the strive to maintain the illusion of control - because true control is rarely attainable - a person with rigid thinking is giving up a whole lot. With flexibility come options, preferences, choices, thoughts, actions, behaviors that while laced with uncertainty also offer true freedom. Rigidity leaves us desperately clinging to the ideas we know and understand, while robbing us of the power that resides in “what if”.
When returning to the question of “why are you eating so much?” we can then begin to identify the rigidity of the statement. The question presumes there is a right and wrong amount of food to eat, one that is too little and one that is too much. Yet in this question we rarely see the wondering of what if there is no right amount of food to eat? Or what if the amount should be determined by the individual and their needs rather than cultural narratives and trauma histories? That question is dangerous to a rigid mind.
Same applies to the “finish everything on your plate” statement. It implies that appetite is dictated by external sources, in this case the amount of food on one’s plate or the food preparer’s idea of how much one should eat. Applying the same what if principle, imagine the person asking the question of “What if it doesn’t matter how much food is left on the plate after dinner? What if I trust the appetite and preference of the person I am feeding?”
Introducing “What if?” questions is a powerful way to begin to break out of the binary where no one is ever a winner. What if can create possibilities, and among those is one where our relationship with food and our bodies is defined solely by us trusting our hunger, our appetites, our desires and what we find pleasurable, good and nourishing.
It allows us to live into trusting our bodies and healing the trauma of past generations, one meal at a time.