Food Glorious Food!

WeightWatchers in the USA are filing for bankruptcy. The BBC news item last week explained that the loss in WeightWatchers’ income ‘follows the meteoric rise in the popularity of weight loss injections’ in ‘a rapidly changing weight management landscape.’ Not surprisingly, people struggling to lose weight have concluded that it is much easier to have an injection to help them lose weight than go through the rigours of calorie counting and healthy eating and regular exercise and the panoply of weight loss techniques in the WeightWatchers’ armoury. It’s a no-brainer!

To adjust your diet for any reason whatsoever – whether it be health or fitness or body shape or religion or spirituality can turn out to be a serious business. People who choose to do so find that they are struggling not only with the strength of their own physical hunger pangs but also deep emotional needs: their need for comfort and nurture, their need to belong, to be an acceptable member of the crowd, to be seen as ‘normal’. They may find themselves threatening others who see rejection of their food as a rejection of their own ‘soft power’. (I made this specially for you and now you won’t eat it!) They may find themselves on the receiving end of the projections of other people who struggle with their own appetites.

These days, ‘special dietary needs’ is an everyday term. Thirty-seven years ago when I discovered that I had food intolerances, I realised that I had to stop eating some of the foods I loved the most. I needed to start thinking very seriously about food and nutrition. In those days I found it really hard to tell a would-be host or hostess, ‘Sorry but I can’t eat wheat or dairy’! I had been brought up to ‘eat what was put in front of me’ and ‘not to make a fuss’ and I found the whole business of stating my needs really difficult.

One person told me, ‘I’d like to invite you and Mike to eat with us but your diet is quite a problem!’ I didn’t blame her! Another friend who openly struggled with his own weight issues mocked me for my ‘fad diet’, doing his best to persuade me to eat some of the foods that he knew that he and I both loved. If he ate them, he put on weight. If I ate them I felt so many of the symptoms now recognised as ‘common' for sufferers who have allergies or intolerances to milk or wheat.

But thanks to the flexibility of our friends, the social isolation I feared did not follow.  Indeed, not long after I started my diet, we went to America for three months and then on to Australia and Hong Kong – a mini round-the-world trip! I was dreading it. But what I discovered then and many times since is that people would say, ‘Hmm, I’ve wondered if this or that foodstuff upsets me or my child or some other member of the family’. And now, as medical and nutritional knowledge have progressed, the demand for alternative food has grown and the shelves of supermarkets containing ‘free from’ have grown longer and longer! It’s almost ‘fashionable’ sometimes to have a ‘food intolerance’! Sometimes people even prefer what I am offered rather than the ‘mainstream’ menu!

Over the years, the whole experience of swimming against some of the food ‘mainstream’ has taught me to understand viscerally that what people choose to eat is about so much more than the biological need to sate your hunger. Food can be a powerful symbol of all sorts of things – in all societies, probably in all families and in many relationships. From the time of the New Testament when some Christians refused food offered to idols they were making statements about their identity, about their attitudes to powerful people in their society and about who they held in high esteem or worshiped. In a real sense, ‘you are what you eat’

It’s all food for thought!