• "Food shouldn't be a bad friend, dragging you down or holding you to ransom. It should nourish your body as much as it fuels your mind; it should pump life through your veins; it should waltz in sync with your mood and your appetite, sometimes blissful, often mundane, always a part of you." (pg. 4)
• "There is so much more to eating than just eating. Eating is picking blackberries, or deciding to pick blackberries next week, or remembering blackberries you picked fifteen years ago. It is choosing a mango in the supermarket - one soft enough to hold a dimple when you press a thumb to its flesh - holding it to your nose, and taking a gulp of its heady scent." (pg. 9)
  • read the poem 'from blossoms' by li-young lee !! reminds me of that first sentence a lot
• "This is a food ritual: ... Choosing the fullest-looking cheese and ham sandwich from Pret A Manger, or eating an Oreo just so - these are the things that make food so much more than fuel." (pg. 11)
  • loving this idea so much - food is more than something mundane if you choose to make it so & choose to pay attention
• "Cooking plays a vital role in the way we eat. It's an extension of eating, really, and every moment we spend in the kitchen chopping, peeling, stirring and slicing deepens our connection with the food we eventually put in our mouths." (pg. 11)
• "Often, mindful eating is a tactic used to encourage people to eat less... but you can't really use it as a tool. Mindful eating is something that will sometimes awaken a fierce hunger inside of you, and other times will have you satisfied after a single square of chocolate. It's a way of putting your mind back into your body and, just for a moment, letting yourself be." (pg. 13)
• "The food narratives we create when we shop, cook, and eat don't need to be exotic, expensive, or rarefied. They shouldn't be estranged from the humdrum, ugly, familiar mess of everyday life. They don't even have to taste good. The important thing is giving yourself time to imagine your food, to touch, taste, and smell the ingredients, and to really sink into the pleasure of eating." (pg. 14)
  • THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE TO TASTE GOOD !!
• "Let your fingers take on the smell of the garlic - it is a joy!" (pg. 15)
  • IT IS A JOY IT IS A JOY IT IS A JOY <3 !!
• "TO eat is to admit that we are part of all the mess and madness of the world." (pg. 30)
  • try thinking of this as something to embrace, not just admit - I am a part of this world !!!
• "The enjoyment we get from our food is intimately connected to the nutritional power of that food. Pleasure isn't just a happy side effect of following your appetite... it can be something that keeps us healthy." (pg. 33)
• "It's not just what you eat, then, it's how you eat it. Eating food that you enjoy, in a context that's relaxed and pleasurable, is a step toward more efficient digestion and better health." (pg. 35)
• "There's a lot of comfort in knowing that your appetite and your health needn't act at odds with one another. Sometimes, you can just sit back and trust your appetite to lead the way." (pg. 35)
• "This is cause and effect at its most fundamental: goodness on your plate will help to foster goodness in your body. It's the dead that food can be a medicine, rather than just fuel, and that, with a bit of fine-tuning and the right cocktail of nutrients, we can not only keep ourselves alive and well, but actually optimize the ways that our bodies function." (pg. 39)
• "This quest for health doesn't need to be some joyless equation, though. Food is both fuel and medicine, but this doesn't mean we have to strip it bare of its magic and reframe it as a power source for some robot-like, maximally efficient human body.... Food can be medicine, and still be a joy." (pg. 39)
  • FOOD CAN BE MEDICINE AND STILL BE A JOY !!!
  • NOTE TO SELF: adding "less healthy / good" stuff to your food doesn't take away / cancel out the benefits of the "healthier / better" stuff !!!!! allow food to nourish you AND to bring you joy !!!!!!!!!
• "All we can really do is take the revolution a meal at a time.... Fully rejoice in all your appetites - the wise and the unruly alike. Try speaking your mind when you're alone - talk to yourself in the mirror, saying things like, 'I would like you to go down on me, and I want the last slice of the strudel.'" (pg. 52)
• "There are infinite ways that a body can look, feel, take up space in the world, be desired, love, and be loved. Every body - able, disabled, athletic, soft, tall, short - contains the whole universe within it. Fat bodies are no exception.... And in spite of all this, 'fat' has become shorthand for 'bad.'" (pg. 53)
• "To hell with toeing the line. Our bodies are magical things. We go through our lives taking little bits of the world into us, bite by bite, and turning all of that matter into us. We get bigger, stronger, brighter, bolder, taking up more space - asserting the primacy of our existence - with every morsel we eat." (pg. 56-57)
• "Nourish yourself as though you're taking care of the most precious thing in the world: strengthen your bones with milkshakes, patch up cuts and bruises with grilled cheese. Eat for your life." (pg. 57)
• "It's only right to throw yourself headlong into the madness and eat every weird and wonderful ostentatious seasonal delight you can." (pg. 60)
  • <3 !!!!!!!!!!!!!
• "When the body is seen as a constant work in progress, it invites constant scrutiny of those bodies - those people - who fail to meet the mark. That includes fat people, many of whom will recognize even in the soft, 'kind' rhetoric of wellness a deep contempt for fatness. Often, wellness culture suggests that disabled and chronically ill people are always just one elimination diet or quinton shot away from salvation." (pg 78)
  • my body is not a work in progress my body is not something to someday be perfected my body is only right here & now
  • practice satisfaction with & acceptance of my body as it is instead of focusing on what could / will be in the future
• "No matter what little things wellness can deliver on, it will always fall short on its promise of redemption. There is no way to streamline your body for maximal efficiency. You can't live forever, and there's not a diet under the sun that will safeguard you from disease. There's no reinvention through carb-cutting.... The thing is, we are always who we are.... When diet is such an integral part of our identity, it's easy to succumb to the tempting idea that you can reinvent, resurrect, and evolve simply by going on a diet. But it just doesn't work that way." (pg. 79)
  • !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• "There's an idea that nutritionist and dietitian Michelle Allison talks about on her website, The Fat Nutritionist: permission - giving yourself permission to eat what feels right, when it feels good, and in the amounts that you choose. When our eating becomes disordered, this permission becomes a curse, a burden of choice too great to shoulder." (pg. 110)
• "When I sing the praises of comfort eating, then, it bears saying that there are some urges and impulses that we should pause and consider before we indulge them. If eating what you want means eating nothing, that's disordered eating. If eating what you want means bingeing, barely tasting the food in front of you, eating until you feel ill, and long past the point of comfort, that's disordered eating." (pg. 110)
• "Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied.... Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad, or bored, or just because it feels good.... It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be underrating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating." (pg. 111)
  • NORMAL EATING IS TRUSTING YOUR BODY TO MAKE UP FOR YOUR MISTAKES IN EATING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• "Eating well means eating with compassion for yourself." (pg. 111)
• "My friend... once said to me that she likes to explode the minds of children by telling them that when ou are an adult, you can eat ice cream any time you want. Imagine the glory of realizing, for the very first time, that one day you will be able to taste the coolest, sweetest joy whenever you please. This is something to relish.... All the world's pleasure is at your fingertips.... You can have ice cream any time you want." (pg. 112)
• "When we feed each other, we give a bit of ourselves to form the fabric of someone else. This is the glue that binds us." (pg. 122)
• "Having a coke with you... is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne, declared poet Frank O'Hara. He knew that what we eat together is worth a thousand big epiphanies or Michelin-starred solo meals or grand voyages. Here are some other things that are magical: picking the last of the season's fat, inky blackberries with you; eating toast in bed with you and arguing about the crumbs; reaching into the candy packet at the same time as you and our hands grazing; unwrapping a cheeseburger with you; crying into cut onions with you; flipping pancakes with you and giving you the ones that aren't crumpled; walking home with a pocketful of Milk Duds with you; cracking open the lid of the pan with you, and having the steam and scent of dinner hit us both in the face; sharing me spoon with you; you." (pg. 134)
  • <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 !!!!!
• "Fast food... isn't the kind of thing that's valued in foodie circles.... Cheapness, simplicity, and abundance can coincide with goodness. We often forget within foodie circles that the long way round isn't necessarily the best." (pg. 170-171)
• "It's okay for cooking to be easy." (pg. 173)
• "Sometimes, regardless of where or how it was made, who suffered and who profited, food carries within it a moral weight that belies the conditions of its existence. It just is (or at least, it seems) to be good, bad, corrupting, purifying, forbidden, holy, or crass: chocolate has a moral character that aligns it with sinfulness and lust; water on the other hand is a cleansing thing, whether it came from the tap in your home kitchen or a San Pellegrino bottle. Food in and of itself is a tangled symbol of morality." (pg. 200)
  • practice viewing food as something entirely absent of moral weight
• "This is the duality of our food culture: we're more open and adventurous than ever before, and also more anxious. The minimalism of "clean" eating and the diet shills coexist with the maximalism of back-to-back food programming, adverts, and books." (pg. 204)

MISC THOUGHTS

• Food & religion / religious texts & their relationship is a really interesting topic - look into it on jstor etc ? - religious holidays & food or a lack of it, symbolism, etc.
• Look at how food is used in normal phrases - "a good egg," etc - could be interesting