food politics

I think there’s a special kind of burden placed on stigmatized people to pretend that everything is A-Okay. Would I be smiling if I was oppressed? Heck no.

The politics of food are the politics of class, and the subtlety of those politics creates a kind of deniability that makes it hard to discern the rules of engagement. One’s success in ascending the ladder is marked by fluency with these invisible boundaries.

Looking back at childhood photos now is bittersweet. In the moment the camera caught, I'm always smiling, but I wasn't always a happy child. I was fat-shamed almost daily.