If You Feed Me Do You Love Me?

From the moment we enter the world and move from womb to breast we have someone who loves us encouraging us to eat, and that’s good. Women will do anything necessary to feed their babies. Nurturing and love begins with food. The attachment an infant makes with his mother is about the amazing phenomenon of taking food from her body. It’s instinctual and even sacred.

From the first time we have a full belly and lie in the arms of the person who, hopefully, if all goes well, loves us more than anyone on earth, we equate that comfortable, full and content feeling with staring into the face of the most blessed creature on earth. No wonder it gets confusing.

Our ability to feed those who need sustenance is a sign of our humanity. The breakdown of a society can be determined as much from our inability and unwillingness to feed each other as it can from the crime rate. Feeding the hungry will always be something about us that comes from a spiritually aloft place.

Food is complicated. The relationship between food and love is forged early and littered with confusion and collusion and lots of stuff. From the first moment a child gets a cookie for being good to the last meal of a prisoner considered the final comfort and courtesy, human beings learn early on that people who care for us feed us.

When I was four years old my parents divorced. I remember standing near the front door watching my mother hand my father a cast iron frying pan over my head. I looked straight up from my tender height and thought, "This is bad."

Actually I didn't think anything. I was baffled and confused, but I sensed the loss. I felt rather than understood.

In the months that followed, my mother, a recent divorcée with three children under eight, changed her life. She went back to college and got her teaching certificate. She held on to her children, her house, and her dignity. She began a life of working too hard the moment she handed my father that frying pan and, in the end, her body and her health suffered.

She was far more stressed than any human being should be, but she survived and she provided a stable, happy home life for her children. She used food from that day forward as a tool to comfort and sustain herself.

Prior to that day she had used food in other ways. It was an enemy—something to be fought against and triumphed over, something to portion out and ration carefully in an attempt to remain thin and beautiful to an unappreciative husband. She was someone who was a product of the times she lived in. A time when reducing diets included hard-boiled eggs and Rye Crisp and small servings of cottage cheese all consumed with one hand clutching a cigarette advertised by the media to help her control her weight.

In addition to this plan of almost-fasting and smoking were the inevitable diet pills and idea that exercise was harmful to those trying to reduce. The theory was that exercise caused people to get too hungry and thus consume more. It was a war. Every woman for herself.

At about that time fat reducing machines were the rage. Women flocked to health spas and attached themselves to turning and vibrating devices that “jiggled away the fat.” It did absolutely no good but they felt proactive. They might swim a lap or two, their heads tucked into bathing caps poised gingerly above the water so as not to spoil their "sets." The overly athletic girls or those with a country-club sense of the social might take a turn on the tennis court, but the rough stuff—lifting weights or hard exercise—was something for men. Women didn't want to get "big."

My mother, like anyone else, was driven by not only by the prevailing dieting culture but her own circumstances. She operated with not enough sleep and too many cigarettes, no exercise—and either not enough food, or the wrong kind for the wrong reasons. Her relationship with food made her its constant casualty—first gorging from stress and then punishing herself with abstinence. The whole thing was simply set up from the get-go to be a disaster.

And despite this constant battle with food as both good and evil, she somehow managed to conduct a career, excel professionally, feed her kids, keep her house clean, take care of first her ailing father and then mother, get a masters, make a slew of friends, and change the lives of hundreds of kids for the better.

No wonder she died before she was 70 years old.

Food became an evil lover—sustaining and beautiful and desirable and lovely and damaging and dangerous and mean.

The last thing my mother gave my father as their relationship was torn apart forever was a tool to cook with—the do-it-yourself version of the last meal. What I didn’t know was their attitudes—however healthy or unhealthy—would be the basis for all of mine.

End Part One