You only need to scan the front page of any major newspaper to see how conflicted our society currently is about food. Even as restaurants emerge as sites of political resistance and food writing expands in exciting new directions, food insecurity is still all too common, both in the United States and around the world.
With her new book Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live (Simon Schuster), writer Amber Husain wades into all of this with care, working to determine what it really means to be nourished. Partly inspired by Husain’s own journey toward healing from anorexia, Tell Me How You Eat mixes thoughtful research with insightful cultural criticism that references everything from mid-century lesbian dinner parties to Black Panther breakfast programs.
This week, Vogue spoke to Husain about pushing beyond the limits of traditional disordered-eating recovery, feminized preoccupations around hunger, and finding inspiration in modern-day mutual aid.
Vogue: How did the spark for this book come to you?
Amber Husain: The first spark came to me at a time where I was feeling a great sense of liberation, not just from the years of anorexia and inertia and depression that I describe in the book, but also from the tired and honestly quite boring narratives that attach themselves to those things, which had kind of dominated my early experience of conventional treatment. When I first started thinking about the book, I had just been through this quite unusual path to feeling better that had given me a totally new perspective not just on my own condition, but on food and eating more generally. I felt really inspired to share that perspective on what our relationship with food might mean. Obviously, it means different things to different people, and they’re all valid, but I think it was more the principles from which we start to think about those things that had shifted for me.
You talk so eloquently about instances of political or moral starvation, from Samuel Legg to Gandhi to Simone Weil; was there an example that resonated with you most as you wrote?
It wasn’t so much the stories of people who were hungry that resonated with me the most, although there is a story in there about Eleanor Marx that I found really inspiring. [It’s about] her recovery from what you could describe as anorexia, not so much through a process of medical intervention but through a process of becoming politically inspired and not just doing work for her dad and doing things that were kind of intellectually her own with interesting people.
The stories of people who ate joyfully and in a very inspired way kind of spoke to me the most. In the chapter on gorging, I describe a scene from Audre Lorde’s Zami where she talks about going to a party where there’s more than enough food, and how it just changes the whole atmosphere in the room. It’s not even necessarily that political a moment, but it then becomes really tied up with her political work. It’s not that hard to create a beautiful life through food, and yet on a political, systemic level, we find it so difficult.
What do you think is most commonly misunderstood about the refusal to eat?
I think there are a few ways that you could talk about this, because there are common misunderstandings in medicine and then there are common misunderstandings in popular discourse. There is this tendency to frame eating disorders as a purely biological phenomenon in a way that kind of evacuates them of all meaning, or actually repels the attempt to create meaning. I think it serves a pragmatic purpose, because it makes eating disorders feel more treatable by the tools that medicine has, but the problem is that there are conventional treatments that are not particularly effective.
And then there’s another, maybe more significant thread that I talk about in the book, which has to do with [framing] eating disorders in terms of people’s relationships with themselves, and in the case of women, in terms of their relationships with their bodies and with feminine beauty standards. I think that is a valid explanation of what’s happening, and we have to try and find a way of accounting for the fact that all kinds of eating disorders across the spectrum disproportionately affect women. But I think when we talk as if that’s the only way of understanding them, we also kind of do women a disservice, because there’s this implicit idea that self-image is the limit point of what women are interested in. It fails to go beneath a surface-level preoccupation with one’s body that might be a proxy for a deeper concern about something else. Our body, in some sense, manifests our relationship with food, but our relationship with food can be about many, many different things, because food is obviously really loaded with social and cultural baggage. So even if a woman is really preoccupied with her body, we do women a disservice by not asking why.
What’s something you wish you saw more of in the broader conversation around hunger and food?
When you’re cooking a meal for yourself or for somebody else, it can be really easy to get preoccupied with, you know, what’s the nutritional value of this? What’s the health value of this? Is this a chic meal to be making for my friends? What does it say about how cool I am, or my status, or my ethical responsibility? Instead, what if we asked ourselves, What am I saying with this action of cooking for myself or someone else? Is it going to make that person feel cared for? Is it going to make them feel nourished? Or is it going to make them feel anxious or coerced? I think it’s shifting the emphasis from the relationship between what we eat and who we are to what the act of eating and feeding others does, and what it enables us to do.
Is there any organizing around hunger and the right to eat that feels particularly meaningful to you right now?
In this moment it has been heartening, in some sense, to see that amidst all of the violence that’s been going on in the US with ICE, mutual aid is happening in relation to feeding people who are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being separated from their families. It’s really galvanizing to look out for people at a time when it feels like the state is really not looking out for people. In the book, I talk about some of the food organizing that was happening at the time when I was writing in London, where I live. But since then, I’ve been really inspired by the right-to-food movement, as well as global mutual-aid movements and international food organizations like World Central Kitchen and The Sameer Project that have been responding to the use of hunger as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people. There are plenty of other examples that I could go into, but those are a few threads I’m following.
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