TELL ME HOW YOU EAT: Food, Power, and the Will To Live

Abstract

An agile treatise on food, hunger, self-starvation, and the politics underlying it all.

Category: None

Publisher: Washington Square Press/Atria

Page Count: 288

An agile treatise on food, hunger, self-starvation, and the politics underlying it all.

“The DSM-5 would like to know if you are a person who wants to eat, or if you are a person who doesn’t.” British scholar and author Husain ponders her own longtime indifference toward food, having “basically forgotten how to eat.” Such indifference sets off therapeutic alarm bells, of course, and Husain observes sagely that it’s the “female condition” that drives the food narrative, the symptoms and behaviors following a trajectory that the psychiatric reference work concludes is an unwillingness to change one’s habits of consumption: the anorexic as dissenter and rebel, and one who can be shepherded if not bullied into learning about proper self-care and then wanting to practice it. But, writes Husain, the DSM-5 “doesn’t acknowledge that you can want, and be suspicious of, the same thing at once,” put off one’s food as a political act. Husain enlists a wide cast of characters in her discussion, among them Simone Weil, who famously starved herself to death “without a plan,” resigned to a world of genocide and totalitarianism at the height of World War II, and Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, who denounced the British government’s use of hunger as a political weapon in places like Ireland. From there she examines connections between food and political activism, citing the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program as a revolutionary act, “a fuel for the act of growing a political consciousness.” Given the hunger of people living in places such as Gaza today, food continues to have a strong political dimension, reason enough, Husain concludes, that while in such circumstances the idea of food as comfort seems wrong, “contributing to a better world requires that you live, and that you thrive.”

A thoughtful meditation on the systems that bring food to the table—and that drive some people to push it away.

Audience: NonFiction

ISBN: 9781668060315

Price: $29.00

Author: Husain, Amber