Feed Me!: Writers Dish about Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image

FEED ME in a nutshell is a collection of smart, well-written snapshots by real women sharing their honest feelings about food, body image and society's message that even if you're thin you're never thin enough. Are you a woman? Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen more flaws than positive traits? I enjoyed the breadth of the essays about food and body image in FEED ME. The stories made me feel normal. A size four woman obsesses about not being a size two? This was a revelation. My favorite was the female model's take on how people treated her and how that's affected how she looks at her young daughter. These essays convey that while women know intellectually there's more to life than obsessing about food, we find it hard NOT to be preoccupied about every morsel we put into our mouths or the size tag in our jeans. The challenge for any weight/food obsessed (read: "every") woman is to make peace with the voice in her head. Turn off that negative tape (mine's an 8-track) that plays in a continuous loop, "You're not good enough." Tune into the place in our true selves and focus on the fact that people who care about us enjoy our company because of our unique personality traits. Whether we gain or lose five, ten or twenty pounds, have a croissant or a salad for lunch, no one's keeping track. There is more going on in the world around you than what you eat today. FEED ME inspired me to dare to be my true self. You are good enough right here, right now. You. Are. Enough.

Candid insights into the influence of food in daily lives encourage the reader to pause and reflect on food-related memories in one's own life. At its most basic, food is about feeling hungry or full - but it is also about being happy, being sad; about loving it for its taste or hating it for the power it seems to wield over us. We all need to eat, to live; seems simple, no big deal, but the stories shared in Feed Me remind us that food, from the day we are born, is much more than this.

FEED ME! is a terrific collection of essays looking at thoughts and feelings about food and eating from a number of perspectives. They run the gamut from joyful to miserable, with all kinds of interesting stuff in between. Kate Harding contributes one of my favorites, that manages to come across as both cranky and charming. Any reader is bound to find plenty of food for thought!

This book will remind you that being a woman in the U.S. means that your body, the food you put in it, and the triangle between you, others and your body will be complicated at best and tortured at worst. I devoured this book in one sitting but will return to it many times. I wasn't sure I needed to read this book, having read many books on this topic, but what I walked away with, and continue to marvel at, is how common and heartbreaking it is that we interact with ourselves in these ways. Thin women don't escape unscathed. Fat women who love our bodies are radical. In between women are never sure where they stand. And food is never just food. My favorite essay is Joyce Maynard's, the last, about her mother and pie (and so much more). I loved reading writers I knew from their articles or blogs for even a bit more insight into their lives (Kate Harding, Harriet Brown, Wendy McClure, and Jane E. Brody, who I understand a bit better now). I consumed with the bittersweet glee the essays about being from another culture with a different relationship to food and women's bodies, like Diana Abu-Jaber's details of being fed by her Jordanian uncle, Rochelle Jewel Shapiro's eating at a breakneck speed to keep up with her holocaust survivor father, Amity Gaige's details of the long shadow cast by her mother's childhood deprivation as a refuge from Latvia and Courtney E. Martin's revealing look at her body and relationship with food as she studies abroad in South Africa. There were stories too familiar, but mostly, I came away thinking, almost every woman struggles with this -- and why? Do we need to? I'm glad this book made me feel normal (however unfortunately) for the way I feel about my body, and that I might have more in common with a woman who weighs 100 pounds less than I do that I might have thought.

What a meal for the spirit this book is! The painfully true tales range from finger foods in a Bedouin household, to the ghost of a grandmother who says "Eat. Eat what you want. And love." The miserable middles include nasty manipulative people who almost intentionally set up food and fat issues for the women around them. And the happy endings -- because Harriet Brown's FEED ME! is full of happy endings -- range from discovering a fabulous dress shop that doesn't just cater to childlike figures, to discovering what it's like to live without self-hatred. After gobbling the first few writers' memoirs here at top speed with much elation (sorting them while reading: I don't have this writer's problem; and the problems I do have, I share with those other great women!), I found myself finally spreading out the chapters for reading as if I were trying to make a plate of cookies last. Except, of course, that this plate of goodies is magically full all the time, and I can re-read it as much as I want -- or share the pleasure with a friend. Guess I'm going to need a few more copies, Harriet!