girl, interrupted (mid meal)

I’m fourteen; half-formed in my identity, uncomfortable in my body, anxious about non-literature exams and living away from home for the first time. I’m sixteen; a year wiser about boarding school, therefore lonelier and unhappier than I remember being before.

I’m seventeen; in perpetual conflict with my mother, angry with my body and my inherited personality that isolates me. I find any excuse to go home as much as possible, but luckily for me, I get sick a lot.

I don’t yet think of films as a non-negotiable and I no longer think of books the same way, so at this point in my textbook angst-filled late teenage life, when I’m sponge-y and primed to be influenced at levels I had not been since 8-12, I’m watching a lot of TV. Specifically, reality TV. More specifically, cooking shows.

I feel disconnected from myself often, but while I may feel out-of-body in the upstairs living room of my mum’s house, the colours combined with sounds of crunches and clinking cutlery courtesy of DStv’s channel 175 —the Food Network — fill the room. At the same time, they fill up all the newly formed cracks I feel I’ve developed, patching me up until a new personality island assembles itself and I feel at home anytime I tune in.

I love Food. ‘Capital F’ Food; the concept of it—the events, stories, cultures, and communities around food, but also my personal visceral experiences of food. Without always understanding why, its effect on me can be pleasurable in an abstract and esoteric way.

It can be innocently healing in the colourful-soup-on-a-cold-day type of way or paint a more hedonistic picture that I’ve tended to avoid projecting out of, oh, I don’t know, most likely shame (the enforced Catholicism of my childhood complicates this second point, but we WILL talk about that some other day).

Now that Film has a podium position in my life, though, I see this vaguely scandalous feeling mirrored at me in some of the most creative, resonant, disarmingly unabashed ways, and baby, it’s pretty transformative. 

Films that are odes to food, but more specifically odes to the community around it and the participants sharing in the eating of food, unwittingly became one of my favourite microgenres along the road somewhere, but I didn't actually realise this until I saw Jūzō Itami’s Tampopo (1985).

I say so in my Letterboxd thoughts on it, but to repeat myself a bit, this is mostly because the way I process and connect with the world around me is heavily contextualized by sensory stimulation, specifically through food.

For example, the way a meal is cooked and served makes me curious about the concept of bonding in whatever culture owns the recipe, or I’ll ask myself if their national meal is sweet potato-based because sweet potatoes were all that survived a long drought in XYZ-land circa 17th century.

How does food tell us about ourselves? What can I learn?  The world gets bigger to me around a dinner table. A lot of this started with my time being jealous of Guy Fieri’s food adventures, but most of it was solidified across two foundational trips with my mother (who I fight with significantly less these days).

We were privileged enough to have work-related travel for children under eighteen covered by her workplace, so here and there, she would give me and my older brother permission to skip school, out of a (correct) belief that cultural exposure would teach us valuable things a West African primary school syllabus could not.

So, playing hooky in the most wholesome way, I followed her across parts of Asia—drinking warm bubble tea before half-falling asleep in the back room of Hong Kong meeting rooms and hoarding bags of the sweetest seedless nectarines on train rides to colourful cities so beautiful and full, I thought I made them up.

I should’ve been doing homework, but we were eating Häagen-Dazs for the first time in a Shanghai apartment complex and buying durian from two sweet Singaporean street vendors well after midnight. I think they were also mother and daughter. 

If you want to experience culture and community through Food, Asia is as good a place to start as it gets. In a piece for the Criterion Collection, essayist and journalist Willy Blackmore references a cultural ideal long established in Japan which asserts that—to paraphrase—tasteful and informed appetites should belong to the many, not just the wealthy few.

Being a lucky, lucky part of the many for those precious weeks, my tastes were informed and my mind re-moulded. It was impossible to resist the realisation at that point; I simply loved eating.

I loved tasting complementary flavours to figure out why they work together and the discordant ones, because why do those hit so far left for me? What is that noodle soup they serve at the breakfast buffet, and who else eats noodle soup that early? What is a chimichanga—is it always this good, or is it just a crunchy burrito and the Boat Quay vibe is simply selling it super hard this afternoon?

It’s not exactly unreasonable to consider each morsel divine when you're looking at the Merlion in the face. I say “loved,” though, because what honeymoon phase lasts forever?  

I’m nineteen, barely chiselled out by university, and out of town visiting someone I no longer know. They’ve brought their friends; a boy I’ve just met and a girl I also know but remain undecided about. We go to a campus cafeteria, secure our plates and then our seats.

The conversation doesn’t stick with me, but once we’re done eating and my plate is clear, she does something I don’t forget. She laughs at me. She jokes about the empty plate, and I remember the other two finding it funny.

I try to deflect with a made-up lesson from a primary caregiver about never taking your meal for granted, but in that moment, I’m twelve again and at the foot of my family home's staircase while another primary caregiver tells me I could stand to lose some weight.

The personality island greys out and falls apart. I decide I hate her, but while she continues to laugh, I decide I hate me too.

For the next several years, my food-focused shame has a very different shape than it will in my adult years and it’s impressively flexible. It mimics whatever's thrown at me —today, it looks like hiding my thighs and arms in clothes borrowed from my brother, tomorrow, it’s shaped closer to embarrassment about my lower belly.

I’ve been told it’s unflattering in tops. For emphasis, it might even get pinched so I see just how much body pokes out. My friends and classmates are blossoming around me, but I’m not yet the right version of myself; “svelte” is the ideal, obviously. Everyone knows the rules.

Food confuses me now, and I’m not comfortable eating around anyone, so I often opt not to. When I do, I have all these hard boundaries without being sure who’s set them, or why it feels like my life depends on enforcing them. 

The unforeseen challenge here is the literal wound in my stomach growing larger and more unignorable as my heels dig deeper into quicksand. I wake up screaming one day when it feels like a beast is clawing out of the middle of me, and my mother takes me to the hospital. Our family doctor thinks it’s silly that I’m there at all because, like, girl, just eat?

It’s a trend, this response to my emotional these-and-thats. It’s common consensus in my nuclear bubble that I cause my own misery and let things “over me” if I’m quoting correctly (I am), so it hits me that this disordered behaviour must also be an overreaction.

I decide I hate myself a little more because I feel silly. I feel guilty and ashamed; for ever clearing my plate, but mostly for hurting my body that had done nothing but keep me alive and well. I think I deserve this confusion, because, after all, this is in my head, isn't it? My furious body agrees,  so it starts to protest.

I forcefully learn about the Ghrelin hormone, because I don’t feel hungry when I should, and my capacity for more than two bites shrinks. My mother thinks it’s silly because, girl, just eat. But I don’t fully make sense to her yet and will later come to understand we’re fighting similar battles, so hindsight holds no bitter opinion of this.

Plus, at this point, it’s been a long enough song and dance that I don’t fully make sense to myself anymore.

A simple mathematical statement directs me; me + food = guilt, ∴ me - food = peace of mind.

It takes years until, at twenty-two with a rotation of food tonics in my bedroom, a revelation falls from the sky and makes it undeniable that my relationship with food for almost all of my life at this point has been disturbing, destructive and some definition of abusive, but I’m still unsure who is hurting who. 

Like countless girls before me, a sleepover starts to crack something.  I’m in a home with someone who doesn’t make me uncomfortable, and we’ve even shared a meal or two at some point. We rewatch Chocolat, and the aforementioned Catholicism of my youth recognises the strict villagers and the logic they see in their rejection of Vianne.

I joke about how they’d reject me too if I was there because Vianne’s shop would never stop seeing me. She and her shop made me curious; where did she learn that chocolate and spice pair well, and is that true? Where could I try it? I’m African; spice is easy to find, and so is chocolate —can I make it?

The thought excites me. I want to make everything Vianne makes because I want to feel everything her chocolates make the townspeople feel, even if they resist it. I resisted food at this stage, but if I ate something

wholeheartedly, maybe there would be a different feeling waiting for me at the bottom of my plate. Math was never my strong suit anyway, so who says the formula fuelling me is correct? I rewatch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Violet Beauregard’s eyes are bright when she rattles off the chewing gum menu.

I want to feel that energised by the thought of tomato soup and I wonder if any breakfast buffets serve it. I see the trailer for Marie Antoinette; there are jellies and cakes and piles of I-don’t-know-what-else. It occurs to me I have never had asparagus, and I’m curious about the sound it makes when it snaps. I want to travel again, maybe even to France, and I want to learn. 

I’m twenty-four, and I’ve moved back to Canada. I live in Toronto now, and I’m enrolled in Film School. I eventually actually watch all of Marie Antoinette, but I also see Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Howl’s Moving Castle, and I rewatch Ratatouille.

I start to deeply miss Food, and I want more of it in my life, but I remain loosely shackled to embarrassment, which feeds me promises of skinniness, beauty, and value—false fruit with bitter skin. I’m still not convinced I’ve progressed past the need to be “svelte”, and my lower belly looks mostly the same. I’ve maxed out a few gym free trials because I don’t eat enough to sustain a serious routine.

I watch Girl, Interrupted, and I meet Daisy. Daisy and I don’t have much in common, but we share a similar discomfort around being seen eating. My chicken bones are metaphorical, but there are still skeletons I keep somewhere.

I feel an irrational sense of failure to protect her by the end of the film, and I decide I don’t want anyone to feel like she does, maybe not even me. I don’t hate Daisy, so I begin renegotiating my feelings about myself.

I watch Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain and In the Mood for Love and notice how central food is to these stories, but how it is not the point. It’s not a big deal for these women to eat; it’s just a part of their lives.

A thing they enjoy, I’m sure, and sometimes even a thing they can celebrate and connect over — Amélie goes from cooking pasta for one to sharing ginger biscuits with a neighbour, and noodles are at the centre of Wong Kar Wai’s love story — but it’s a part of their lives, with no pomp, circumstance or dramatic emphasis. This thought is too powerful for me to push against the overwhelming comfort it makes me feel. It validates me.  

Seeing women in film eat to heal themselves, celebrate a situation, bask in a moment or eat just to eat without it being a thing, feels like being given permission to be a human being.

When they eat because they love to eat or because they enjoy bonding in that way, without all the suffocating navel-gazing of it all, I feel as if they’re sharing a secret with me —a hidden truth about living that I can only decode by doing what they do. By not thinking about it too much.

Call a friend and go eat something. Food is life, so live. I want to live, so I call a friend. We get Korean BBQ, or sushi, or ramen—whatever we want.

I call my mother on the phone for something that should take five minutes, but we talk for hours. Food comes up, and we talk about restaurants. We miss the sounds of clinking cutlery harmonising with the hum of conversations and smooth jazz  (we have this conversation a lot). I promise to take her to this new one, and that, and we fantasize about the decor.

When we hang up, I laugh about how eating at these places wasn’t the point for either of us, but we still plan future memories around sharing a meal. 

I think about how my lower belly looks mostly the same, but I eat anyway. It’s okay; a gentle reminder that my body is more than fine as she is, because she keeps me alive and well, and that is all I can ask.

I’m twenty-nine now, and I put time aside to thank my body. I buy cookbooks, bookmark fusion recipes to experiment with in the kitchen and luxuriate in grocery aisles.

I hug my body and pass steadier hands over my lower belly, whispering my apologies and making stubborn promises. I give myself permission to be a human being and aggressively overstep the hard boundaries around Food that I did not set for myself.

It’s rebellion and resistance against a standard to me, and sharing the baby steps into newfound freedom with friends and community feels like an honourable duty.

Granted, the weight of duty is heavier on some days than others and old habits make no secret of dying hard when the things that pollute your thinking still exist loudly, but we still have seconds and thirds with shared efforts to not get consumed by deceitful ideas.

We share gratitude and growth that should be the standard for all. 

I clear my plate and move on with my life.