2-27-22
On magical eating, Reagan + PATCO, wishes for Ralph Nader to raid my underwear drawer, Susan Sontag + Danielle Bernstein, asbestos snow, the 2007 lunch menu at Chapin, et cetera.
🌭🍟🍔 MAGICAL EATING 🍔🍟🌭
CW: eating disorders
When I was 13 and starving, I spent a lot of time making iMovie slideshows of cheese fries and corndogs I collected on Tumblr. I also watched many hours of Man v. Food on the Travel Channel, where an affable and ever-growing man named Adam Richman suffered through 6-pound burritos and jumbo pancake towers in record time. At first this made me hungrier, but eventually, watching him sweat and surrender to a plate of poutine vicariously satisfied me. I’ve since learned that such behavior is not uncommon, as people with eating disorders are often obsessed with food (also see Ancel Keys’ Minnesota Experiment).
Once when a friend slept over after a school dance, I woke up early to the sounds of my own stomach, bounded toward the kitchen, and popped a frozen VitaTop 100-calorie muffin in the microwave. I savored it, then began making her breakfast in bed: scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon, and fried chunks of cinnamon-sugar covered Pillsbury biscuit dough that I drenched in syrup. She woke up confused and ate what she could, leaving the leftovers for me to discard. I took them back to the kitchen where I quietly mushed everything up with my hands—wanting at least to feel it if I couldn’t taste it. Then I cleaned up and returned to my room.
In middle school at Spence, where “frail” became a coveted compliment on Facebook pictures, we would bring in cupcakes for each other’s birthdays as a kind of covert competition of self-control. “If she eats that and I don’t, I win. She’s a gluttonous pig but I’m still hungry,” the thinking went—at least it did for me. Food itself could make me mad, which manifested in my aversion to the sounds of people chewing or outbursts at my mom for eating popcorn at night. I can still conjure up that pang of disgust toward my sister, whose body I once coveted before I got smaller, for serving herself more pulled pork and baked beans at a summer barbecue.
Skip to five years later when I was at another nutritional low point and Instagram was on the rise. An account called @newforkcity, run by girls I vaguely knew, provided another opportunity to pixel-eat cronuts and burrata. And this time everyone was engaging with it, if not in the same way I was. For me, this was the start of the influencer eating industrial complex, which has since spurred the growth of stunt food and Americanized mukbang.
My time in college mostly made things better. Somehow, maybe since I didn’t see it happening, I became okay with myself at 15 pounds heavier (though certain photos could take me to a dark place). During less regular periods of restriction (which usually came between episodes of drunken late-night binging), I was watching old Man v. Food clips on YouTube or Trisha Paytas downing a 20-ounce Dr. Pepper with a salad bowl serving of fettuccine Alfredo.
In 2017, the summer between my junior and senior year, I was living in Alabama and spending more time on the Internet than usual. In the online eating space, I noticed two parallel trends: the Korean mukbang craze had morphed into something much scarier in America by virtue of its very Americanness: things were more processed (think vats of mac and cheese covered in Flaming Hot Cheeto dust) and focused on convenience (think car mukbangs and drive-through hauls).
It seemed like content creators were forgoing the foods they enjoyed in favor of foods that got more views (The most glaring example, of course, is Nikocado Avocado, who has transformed from an avocado-loving vegan to a seemingly dissociated individual who has more than doubled his weight over the past five years and apparently suffered an onscreen heart attack earlier this month.)
The other trend involved thin white women eating a lot. Someone I kept seeing was a Food Insider host whose name I don’t know with an eating face I’ll never forget (see 2:40 here). Then, somewhat sexual Instagram accounts cropped up like @thenaughtyfork, a hot blonde in Miami who (to this day!) hashtags every photo of herself (pretending?) to put down an entire Funfetti cake or biting into a burger in a bikini (reminiscent of Paris Hilton’s 2005 Carl’s Jr. campaign) with #PHAAT. The spelling, of course, points to the fact that she is not (God forbid!) actually fat, but that she eats like she is and that, of course, is hot.
And then there’s my own personal demon @cheatdayeats, who still (in 2022!) implicitly ascribes moral value to food. This language of virtue and vice that so many of our mothers used around food and passed down to us—think “I was so bad today” or “I cheated and ate a slice of pizza”—reminds me of Marion Woodman’s feminine analysis of “all food as stolen,” a topic of interest on Poog. But I digress.
According to this 2017 profile in “Entrepreneur,” Jessica Hirsch of @CheatDayEats spent seven years as a math teacher before devoting her life to eatfluencing. According to her website, she has worked with Delta, AmEx, Hyatt, Godiva and Dunkin’ Donuts—meaning she has agreed to create and post sponsored content for these companies. SponCon is not my issue here. It’s that she and her segment of content creators sustain a scary online culture of “magical eating.”
I first came across the concept of “magical eating” last winter during a long stretch of self-imposed isolation in East Hampton. A week after my family lit out for Los Angeles during what became a record-breaking month of COVID deaths in California, I found myself alone—well, with two cats and two foster puppies—at my mom’s house. Warm with my cats in Mommy’s big bed, I would get high and watch fitness influencers rack up 10,000 calories on their “Ultimate Cheat Days,” inhaling syrup-soaked stacks of pancakes and whole pepperoni pizzas while a ticker in the lower third tracked their intake. Living alone, I’d stopped cooking—a hobby which once brought me joy and purpose—and would instead boil chickpea pasta and nuke imitation meat in the microwave for dinner.
Around 9, I’d descend to the basement for my requisite hour of the Tracy Anderson Method, which meant turning the heat up to 90 degrees, strapping on my ankle weights, and mirroring the eponymous trainer’s onscreen splits, rolls, leg lifts and headstands. The slop of vegan sausage moving through my guts, I’d pass gas violently and sometimes throw up in my mouth. But I was resolute to power through, lest I re-enter the world, when the time came, bigger and homelier than when I’d left it.
If I didn’t exercise six days a week, it felt like the world was ending (and it is ending, I know—but I mean this in a more immediate sense). These body-building YouTubers exercised for hours every day, which meant it was okay for them to enjoy a day of extreme indulgence once in a while. They often weighed themselves the next morning to find themselves a pound or two heavier—something they’d erase in the days to come.
I was also interested in who else was watching these videos—was there a contingent among the 3 million+ viewers who were surrogate-binging too? Comments suggesting as much fell into two camps: those who were restricting and longing for food (e.g. “I’m on a diet so I’m just going to let her eat all my feelings away”) and those who struggling to eat and wanting to stimulate their appetites (e.g. “watching you eat actually helps me eat my food otherwise i have too much anxiety to eat”). FWIW, Stephanie Buttermore, the YouTuber I watched the most, has revealed that she had been starving herself for years when she made those videos.
It turns out that a graduate student named Samantha Gillespie had written her master’s thesis on this phenomenon in 2019. Gillespie defines “magical eating” as “fantasy of a consequence-free indulgence and liberated engagement with food through their consumption of eating entertainment.” Showing “women eating freely and without obvious consequence” (i.e. weight gain, nausea, diarrhea, acne).
Which brings me back to @cheatdayeats, whose alleged diet three-tiered cakes made of mac and cheese does not correspond with the body she lives in. Of course, I don’t know her and I’m making assumptions, but it’s possible she’s obsessed with exercise (like I often am), given this eerie New Years compilation of her lifting weights and shuffling between racks of ribs and trays of baklava.
In the caption, she tells her followers that “in addition to eating indulgent foods, dancing, working out ...I also eat a lot of whole foods and protein. I share a lot of this on my story (like my go to protein powder that I use in my oatmeal every morning) I also eat a ton of cauliflower rice, hummus, salads, roasted veggies.”
I have to give her some credit for what appears to be a recent reckoning with “cheat day” language and (performative?) indulgence. “Why post all these indulgent foods then?” she asks, “Bc they bring me joy and I want to share that with you 💕.”
She is not doing mukbang per se—which is key in that we never sit through a meal with her to find out whether she polishes off that mozzarella stick lasagna or is finished after two bites. The latter would be no fun to watch since it would strip away the magic of Hirsch’s magical eating (though to be fair she did recently make SponCon for Zantac).
As Gillespie writes, these pictures and videos “both function to rebel while simultaneously reinscribe hegemonic thinness culture.” It’s okay for thin, conventionally attractive women to over-indulge (or at least appear to), but it’s tragic for women like the Hungry Fat Chick. The former is not actually fat but #PHAAT, to quote @thenaughtyfork.
My friend Annie Holden pointed out that when we were growing up, the girls we loved on TV were skinny but ate whatever they wanted (see Rory Gilmore’s love for junk food). The main female character, save for Raven Baxter (who, in earnest, was groundbreaking) always seemed to have a “fast metabolism.” Meanwhile, the girls we hated were always on diets (see Kate Sanders of “Lizzie McGuire,” a 14-year-old afraid of carbs). Our fixation with “magical eating” is not far off.
Gillespie uses the concept of magical eating “to explain how audiences use these eating shows in an attempt to gain agentic capabilities over the constraints of thinness culture, but only further restrain and reinscribe these constructs.” Thin women eating freely allows viewers to indulge in a “fantasy of a consequence-free indulgence and liberated engagement with food through their consumption of eating entertainment.”
It’s a rebuke of Erewhon or Goop culture, as my friend Olivia Reingold put it, but it’s hard to gauge how authentic that rebuke actually is. I mean no ill will towards influencers like Jessica Hirsch, as she may be going through her own food struggles. But I feel unsettled by her habitat in the online eating ecosystem.
And just because I’m that b*tch, I’ll remind you of John Berger’s words in “Ways of Seeing” (1972).
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at… Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.
I recognize that the image world we now inhabit—Sontag’s feared “department store or museum-without-walls”—increasingly makes us all, regardless of gender, vulnerable to dissociation. But this one guy’s comment on a @cheatdayeats post of her dinner at The Smith is telling:
Hot girl 🔥 that doesn't eat like a dainty little priss....extra sexy! 😍
FURTHER READING
Originally published in Tracy Anderson Magazine, my interview with my mom about body image and diet culture (Jan. 2022)
Refinery 29: TikTok’s ‘What I Eat In A Day’ & Our Obsession With What Other People Eat (June 2021)
😡ENEMY OF THE WEEK: THE GHOST OF RONALD REAGAN😡
Of course, Ronnie is my enemy every week, but this week my animosity took on new relevance. Last Sunday, I was amused but unsurprised by the resident RHOSLC boob-lover Seth Marks’ decision to wear a “Reagan Bush ‘84” shirt to Lisa Barlow’s ‘80s-themed Vida Tequila party. That mere minutes earlier we saw Meredith & faaahm-ily do a photoshoot in support of GLAAD was rich.
After the good denizens of the Internet wondered whether the shirt was an endorsement of Reagan’s policies and legacy, Seth wrote the following message to someone via Instagram. To me it feels earnest but dumb.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I was not aware of Reagan’s ‘head in the sand’ behavior in this era. I wore the shirt as a tribute to the 80’s (sic) theme party, not to Reagan. This is a great ‘note to younger self’ about the power of education, and learning and unlearning from history.
Last evening, I was disgusted to learn about how unwilling Reagan was to properly acknowledge the AIDS crisis in the eighties. As a ‘social issues first voter’ I can assure you, he would not have received my vote (had I been of age to vote and attuned to his souless (sic) behavior. My support of the LGBTQ+ community is unequivocal and unwavering. I will die on the ‘Mountain of Equality’ [author’s note: ?] ❤️🌈 ∞∞”
I have a lot of thoughts on this statement, starting with his claim of being a “social issues first voter.” Mr. Seth, please miss me with that “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” bullshite. Who’s gonna pay for social programs, dear? Certainly not Ronnie, who made over $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs and propagated the racist mythos of the “welfare queen.” Heather Gay would never be so daft!
Meredith’s since-deleted Tweet on the matter was unapologetic and dismissive. Worse, it revealed an utter lack of historical literacy:
Since M + S were blissfully unaware as kids and teens during the Reagan era (and have apparently had no interest in the basic history of American conservatism since), I thought I’d offer five reasons (in addition to welfare cuts) why Ronnie is simultaneously in the fourth (greed), seventh (violence), eighth (fraud), and ninth (treachery) circles of Hell. NB: this list is about Reagan as president, not as governor of Ca.
1. Response to the AIDS Crisis (about which Seth just learned) - Circle VII
It took Reagan four years into the AIDS epidemic to say the acronym in public, and another two years to deliver a speech about a disease that by then had killed over 25,000 Americans. During a 1982 press briefing, Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes joked with conservative radio host Lester Kinsolving about AIDS as a “gay plague,” making the press pool erupt in laughter. Reagan also withheld WHO funds and cut budgets for the CDC and NIH amid the crisis. And finally, First Lady Nancy Reagan refused to help her old friend Rock Hudson receive AIDS treatment because it was a “gay disease.”
Watch the 2015 short film “When AIDS Was Funny,” directed by Scott Calonico.
2. Response to the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike - Circles IV, VIII, and IX
Next up is Ronnie’s firing of 11,345 PATCO employees striking for better wages, reduced hours, and better retirement benefits in the summer of 1981. What really stings is that PATCO had endorsed Reagan in 1980, believing—like so many disaffected working-class voters in the Rust Belt and across the country—that Rugged Ronnie, like he promised, would give them a “hand up” after the stagflation of the ‘70s. But like Nixon’s appeals to the “Silent Majority” (which took a hint from WFB, Jr.’s support from outer-borough “white ethnics” in the 1965 NYC mayoral race), the neocons realized that social issues were what galvanized blue-collar white voters most [see chapter 4 (“Iceberg”) in Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland (2020)]. Meanwhile, white poverty could be pinned on the Great Society and subsequent government “handouts” to Black Americans. Critical to the system of deception upholding white supremacy, an infrastructure of myths Eddie Glaude, Jr. collectively calls “The Lie,” this mess lands Reagan in three infernal circles at once.
Read “Why The Working Class Votes Against Its Own Economic Interests,” the NYT review of Robert Reich and Zephyr Teachout’s 2020 books, “The System” and “Break ‘Em Up,” respectively.
Read “The Legacy of the Crushed 1981 PATCO Strike” by Glenn Houlihan in Jacobin, for the strike’s 40th anniversary.
3. Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) - Circle VII
Despite his support of the ERA as governor of California, Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA army had gotten to Reagan and a right-moving GOP by the time of his unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. Realizing the political potential of the Christian Right and the premium it placed on “family values,” he embraced the anti-feminist agenda. Reagan, who said women were already protected by the 14th Amendment, sent Schlafly a congratulatory telegram when the ERA was defeated in 1982. Though it’s no surprise, for this offense I’ll put Reagan in Circle VII (violence) for failing to combat sexual discrimination.
Read the Brennan Center for Justice’s explanation of the Equal Rights Amendment.
4. Opposition to Abortion - Circles VII and VIII
Speaking of the evangelical vote and women’s rights, let’s move on to Reagan’s role in making abortion a key issue for the Christian Right. As reported in this fascinating 2014 Politico piece, evangelical Americans were ambivalent about abortion until several years after Roe. In order to politicize the growing religious right, who had grown worried about the rise in legal abortions since 1973, figures like Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich got the help of an evangelical theologian named Francis Schaeffer (again, see chapter 4 of Reaganland).
Schaeffer starred in a documentary series decrying the sacrilege of “secular humanism” called How Should We Then Live? A “certified evangelical sensation” that flew under the mainstream media’s radar, episode nine warned that legal abortion had enshrined the blasphemous notion that “people are seen as no different from machines,” putting society at risk of totalitarian takeover. According to Perlstein, Jerry Falwell made the book version required reading for all incoming freshmen at Liberty Baptist College. Naturally, dear Ronnie got on the bandwagon and published Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation just ahead of the 1984 election in which he carried every state but Mondale’s Minnesota, thanks in part to the help of the religious right.
5) Escalation of the War on Drugs - Circles VII and VIII
Though the term was coined by (slightly less evil) Richard Nixon in 1971, Reagan’s signing of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created mandatory minimums for drug offenses that stipulated sentencing differences for crack (cheaper and prominent among Black drug users) versus powder cocaine (prominent among white, wealthier drug users). The Brennan Center explains here how mandatory minimums reallocate power from judges to prosecutors, entrench racism and classism, and fail to advance community safety. The law also allocated $1.7 billion to fighting the drug war, which funded new prisons across the country. The U.S. prison population doubled during the Reagan era, with communities of color hit the hardest.
I know I didn’t include Iran-Contra. I felt like that was obvious, and I also don’t know what to think about all the “Dark Alliance” stuff.
Seth, I’m glad I could be of service. Meanwhile Meredith, are you drafting a new tweet?
💦❤️🔥CRUSH OF THE WEEK🔥❤️💦
I only have one crush this week, and it’s Ralph Nader hosting SNL in 1977. I know a lot of you are probably mad at him for the 2000 election, but I advise you (yet again) to read Reaganland, specifically the chapter “Boardroom Jacobins” to appreciate the magnificence of Nader’s Raiders and the consumer movement. He is weird and cool and smart, and I’d like him to formally end my incel era (it’s now been 156 days).
🌀DIGITAL DISSONANCE + UKRAINE🌀
I’m fascinated by the way celebrities and social media users in general can shamelessly juxtapose painful images of Ukraine with thirst traps and other frivolities. Now that we’re all required to demonstrate basic empathy skills online, Danielle Bernstein can post herself in a WeWoreWhat thong bikini (likely “inspired” by a small, independent designer) in an dual attempt to “raise awareness” for her new collection while “showing compassion” for Ukrainians.
In full transparency, I was in a stretch limo on my way to Applebee’s before Dua Lipa at UBS Arena on Long Island when I found out that Russia had invaded Ukraine. I proceeded to eat a soft pretzel appetizer before dancing to “Hallucinate.” How serendipitous that my first trip to Thee Neighborhood Grill + Bar was immediately followed by the company’s “disappointment” in CNN for showing its ad of a man joyfully dancing to “Chicken Fried” next to invasion footage.
But as I was saying, something is unsettling about the tendency to either center oneself (watch AnnaLynne McCord’s spoken word on how things would be different had she been Putin’s mother) in interacting with the suffering of others. Or, if we don’t center ourselves, we compartmentalize our (possibly performative) prayers and “awareness-raising” by sharing a selfie on the next slide.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important for everyone to post—perhaps especially for previously aloof celebrities with huge followings. It means more donations, which means more medical supplies, meals, clothing, and care. But there’s also something eerily Sontagian (sorry) about it all, as it brings to mind her observation that exposure to images of suffering initially cultivates empathy (then referring to Vietnam). But overexposure can also anesthetize. My thoughts are a little half-baked, I know, but hopefully we can discuss?
Anyway, here are some ways to help the people of Ukraine:
GENERAL HUMANITARIAN
FOOD
MEDICAL
CHILDREN
LGBTQ+
UKRAINIANS WITH DISABILITIES
INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
🔍ARCHIVAL🔎
1. Asbestos used as fake snow in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Fifty years later, the EPA banned all new uses of asbestos.
In 2019, my best friend Witt Fetter painted the scene: “White chrysotile asbestos was a common substitute for real snow in the 1920s and ‘30s and was used in the Wizard of Oz to create various effects: the Witch’s broomstick, the Scarecrow’s costume and the flurries of snow that awaken Dorothy from her opium-induced slumber.”
2. Pamela Anderson squaring off with Meghan McCain on The View re: Julian Assange and the 2016 Election.
3. Cursed image of Newt Gingrich on a swing for People (1995).
👄HOT TAKE👄
WASPS HAVE BAD WEDDINGS BECAUSE THEY DON’T SPEND ENOUGH MONEY ON THE FOOD. OLD MONEYS ARE CREEPY BECAUSE THEY DO STUFF LIKE ELECTROCUTE THEIR HORSES TO COLLECT INSURANCE CLAIMS.
READ:
Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons by Steven Gaines (1998).
“A Fall From the Society Pages to Prison Unsettles Greenwich” by Neil Vigdor and Eduardo Medina in the NYT (Feb. 18, 2022).
🫖CELEBRI-TEA☕
I learned from a friend, and corroborated with another, that the wife of a very famous ‘90s comedian allegedly forced the Chapin School (alma mater of the late Jen Lindley) to change its lunch menu to meet the dietary standards of her new cookbook. In a moment of pre-Goop paranoia, spaghetti was replaced with spaghetti squash and brownies were taken off the premises. Worst of all, the school’s beloved ravioli-eating contest was outlawed. In an environment like 2000s Chapin, a private all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side ripe for an ED epidemic, methinks missy did those gators wrong.
🎵SONG OF THE WEEK🎵
“What It Feels Like For A Girl” by Madonna (2000). You can watch the music video here, but I don’t really enjoy the remix. There was also a weird rendition on Glee. The best lyrics to me are “When you open up your mouth to speak, could you be a little weak?” and “When you're trying hard to be your best, could you be a little less?”
📺VIEWING RECS📺
Winter Soldier (1972), a documentary composed entirely of Vietnam vets’ testimony, mostly recorded during the 1971 hearings in Detroit, known as the “Winter Soldier Investigation," sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
“Center Jenny” by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch (2013). I will not be providing an explanation.
For lighter fare, this three-hour ASMR video of someone getting their scalp cleansed in Tokyo is soothing.
📱TEXT OF THE WEEK📱
n/a because no one was funny :(
OK. NOW I WATCH EUPHORIA. MUCH LOVE!!! 💓💓💓💓💓💓
You are such a great writer!! Thank you for sharing with us xxxx