We asked this question back in June of last year, in the call for pitches for our BODY issue. The responses we received revealed just how layered, intimate, and politically charged the answer can be when we pause long enough to listen.

We received over 250 pitches, and as always, narrowing them down into a final lineup was agonizing. An analysis of a recipe for “strawberry breasts” as a Futurist response to misogyny in the time of Mussolini; subject lines like “the princess and the flesh-eating bacteria”; critical explorations of neurodivergence and experiences of food textures — we were honoured to have so many incredibly talented writers throw their hats into the ring, and wish we could’ve comissioned far more than our tiny team could take on.

That said, BODY was still one of our most ambitious issues to date: 13 pieces published over the course of the last 11 months, with support from contributing editors Apoorva Sripathi and Austin Romeo. Most of these pieces were original to this issue of FFJ; some were syndicated from other Substacks, non-fiction novels, and past FFJ issues. (Paid subscribers had access to audio readings of many of these pieces.)

BODY: Our full lineup

Bottomless: A journey through grief, gas, and gut instincts, by Shena Cavallo

In this piece, Shena traces how their relationship to their body — particularly their gut — became the most honest guide to their emotions and needs. The essay reveals how physical sensation can hold truths the mind struggles to name.

Questioning Lumps: Encountering obstacles in a smoothening world, by Clare Michaud (originally published in Beurrage)

This piece is an examination of lumps — in bodies, baking, and modern life. Like all of Clare’s thoughtful and deeply intimate writing, it challenges us to see the everyday with more clarity.

Esophageal Yearning: this sounds violent / but it’s fun, by Taylor Hunsberger

This poem, about learning to cook while experiencing body dysmorphia, is body horror with a side of playful kitchen experimentation.

Where Does All the Food Go?: On body size and Nigerian beauty standards, by Rejoice Isaacc

Rejoice chronicles the scrutiny, pressure, shame of being a skinny woman in Nigeria — where curvy woman are seen as the pinnacle of desirablity — revealing just how constructed our cultural ideals of the body truly are.

Pregnancy in the Time of Healthism Abundance: On pregnancy fitness influencers, algorithms, and breast-is-best pressure, by Dr. Sarah Duignan (originally published in AnthroDish)

This essay traces the social norms, moral pressures, and capitalistic excess exerted onto pregnant bodies. Pregnancy, Duignan shows, becomes a site where cultural anxieties about control, wellness, and femininity collide.

Bite Me: Cosmetic cannibalism and selling identity through scent, by Lily Wakeley

This piece is about our desires to render ourselves edible through cosmetics — with preferences for scents and aesthetics that we may feel are biologically ingrained but have roots in colonial, racial, gender, and class-based control.

Milking Bodies to Make a Nation: Women and cows as founding mothers, by Apoorva Sripathi (originally published in FFJ Issue #01 - MILK)

This piece weaves together the history of milk production, caste oppression, and patriarchy in India to explore the exploitation of women and bovine bodies in the making of a homogenous Hindu state. Re-examining Apoorva’s words in the context of BODY offers new perspectives on the micro and macro-politics of bodily control.

Be the Boar: Sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm, by Katy Overstreet (originally published in FFJ Issue #03 - SEX)

This piece looks at how industrial meat production seeks to turn the bodies of sows into reproductive bio-machines — yet the process of artificial insemination unsettles the boundaries of interspecies agency and desire.

Soy Boy: How soy milk went from proto superfood to alt-right rallying cry, by Julia Norza (originally published in FFJ Issue #01 - MILK)

Julia unpacks how the insult “soy boy” mutated from nutritional misinformation into a full-blown culture war weapon — one that’s still wreaking havoc on anyone who dares to live outside rigid, toxic ideals of manhood.

To Eat is to Perform: Reclaiming eating practices, one handful at a time, by Lara Mohammad (guest edited by Apoorva Sripathi)

Lara explores the cultural tension surrounding table manners within the British Iraqi diaspora, tracing her discomfort with traditional eating practices back to colonial narratives about “proper” behaviour.

Sugar on My Tongue: How flavoured orgasms taught me I don’t need permission to feel good, by Giulia Alvarez-Katz (guest edited by Austin Romeo)

When Giulia realized her orgasms triggered flavours, she began to reconsider her relationship with gluttony, desire, and shame. Her essay explores the radical potential of pleasure as power.

Man is a Dining Animal: A (very) short history of the fork, by Zoë Johnson

Inspired by Lara Mohammed’s reflections on the presumed “civility” of eating with a fork, this piece traces the fork’s surprising journey from Middle Eastern courts to British dining tables — and how it always carried meanings far beyond the act of eating.

My Trans Body Longs for Love and Salt: Does difference in taste mean difference in love? (Part I: Pickle Cravings, Part II: Sharing Meals, and Part III: Comfort Food), by Lira Green

In this three-part memoir, Lira traces her experiences of transition, first love, and heartbreak as a young trans woman in an American college town, and the role played by food along the way. In her story, salt — in the form of crispy dill pickles — emerges as a symbol of gender, desire, and the aching tension between difference and belonging in a hostile world.

‘I am but a blank exotic canvas’: Navigating gender and racialization in the world of hospitality, by Anna Sulan Masing

Using excerpts from her new book, Chinese and Any Other Asian: Exploring East and South East Asian Identity in Britain, in this piece Anna offers her reflections on the sexualization of racialized bodies, including in the world of hospitality, and how this gaze can distort one’s sense of self.

There are so many interlaced threads between food, body, and gender to pick up on in these pieces. Intimate personal essays like Shena’s and Lira’s explore internal perceptions of body, while narrative essays by Lara, Lily, Julia and Guilia explore external perceptions and pressures on bodies. Apoorva’s piece expands to the role of women and bovine bodies in building the body politic of the nation state; Katy’s piece looks at the sexual politics of inseminating non-human animal bodies for eventual human consumption.

As well as being the longest-lasting of any FFJ issue so far, BODY also generated a ton of invigorating reader engagement. Lara’s piece on table manners is now one of our most-liked essays of all time, and we were buoyed through the direness of the current political moment by some comments that readers left on other pieces. It is without a shred of irony that we can say “Disturbing. Thank you for your work.” single-commentedly makes the last three years of hard work on FFJ worth it.

Reader feedback on Katy Overstreet’s piece Be the Boar

Reader feedback on Lira Green’s piece My Trans Body Longs for Love and Salt (Editor’s note: This is a really special piece, and one of the most unique we’ve featured in FFJ. Please do check it out.)

BODY reminds us that we are, at our core, feeling beings — “minded bodies” — moving through the world in flesh that feels, hungers, labours, and resists. Our bodies shape and are shaped by how we’re seen, how we live, and how we eat. The pieces in this issue of Feminist Food Journal explore these relationships with honesty and intimacy, taking us into moments of bodily rupture and repair, into kitchens and bedrooms, doctors' offices and college campuses. As editors, we are moved by the vulnerability and rigour our contributors brought to this issue, and we’re nostalgic to see it conclude. If you haven’t had the chance to read everything BODY has to offer, we encourage you to dive back in. And as you do, we invite you to tune into your own body: your breath, your hunger, your fullness, your fatigue, your pleasure, your pain. What are you feeling, right now?

Gratefully, as always,

Zoë and Isabela

If you enjoyed BODY, we encourage you to become a paid supporter of FFJ: for just US$30 a year, you can help us keep our work going. There are nearly 4,000 of you here, but just over 100 people pay, and every paid subscriber really helps! Premium subscriptions include access to audio readings of pieces by authors themselves, BTS and paywalled content, and soon, our Feminist Food Friends meet-ups, which will be launching in the fall.

Support FFJ now!

We’re taking a short break before launching our CELEBRATE issue. If you find yourself missing FFJ, in addition to BODY, we have a massive back catalogue:

MILK | WAR | SEX | EARTH | CITY | SEA

MEAT | BODY

and a ton of podcasts that make for great summer listening. See you soon!

By Anna Sulan Masing1

I became acutely aware about my racialized place in the world at the same time as I was beginning to understand desire, sexuality and my body. My gender, and how it intersected with race, was my crucial and brutal introduction to realizing exactly how my difference played out in public. My identity was not my own but seemed to belong to the world at large. It was for others to decide who I was.

Those awkward teenage years were where I experimented with makeup (too much of it, poorly applied), or wearing boys’ T-shirts, loose-fitting to cover any curves, outfits bought at the army surplus store. I ricocheted between wanting to explore my personal identity and gender, and wanting to hide from the world and the predatory looks I was receiving. At eighteen, I didn’t just feel the looks, but I heard the words that put my body on a stage for others. Everyone is beautiful at eighteen. Then, like now, my hair was long. I’d discovered hair straightening products, and I was desperate to tame my hair, make it obedient. I had just stopped dancing and playing sports so everything about my body was slowly softening. I weighed 50 kilograms, had a C-cup bra size, and strange men in the street would tell me I had ‘big tits for an Asian’. A renowned amateur theatre director told me if I wanted to study theatre in London, I should audition for the ‘proper schools’ because: ‘I was just the right type of exotic they’d want.’ What she meant was I was different enough to be interesting, but familiar enough to be desirable, non-threatening, not dangerous. The ‘right’ things were my whiteness, my thinness, my youth, my long hair. I felt like she was describing a product for sale. It was 2000 and for a moment in time, I was perfect — for a very specific lens. To be told that your flavour of difference is OK in other people’s mouths is bitter. I was navigating racialized gender and sexuality at a time when celebrity magazines were ripping apart women like it was war or sport.

I have a joke about how white men flirt with me, trying to guess where I am from, without me uttering a word. Then I speak with the broadest New Zealand accent I can muster, and their disappointment is palpable. They want something far flung, ‘exotic’. The most common guess in a dimmed bar is South America — Chile or Peru, usually — from white men who have been to South America for three to six months (any shorter they know it’s a holiday, any longer they know they don’t know anything). These men have insisted that I must know Spanish even after I’ve said ‘No, I said I’m half Malaysian!’ I am but a blank exotic canvas for fantasies to be projected on.

I remember being a child at ballet, and the mothers discussing making sure outfits were adjustable so that when we grew they didn’t have to make or buy a new character skirt and the like. One of the mothers nodded to me, and said to my mother: ‘Well, yes, your girls mature faster than ours, don’t they?’ with a slight hand gesture demonstrating curves. I remember thinking, what was my body going to do that my white friends’ bodies wouldn’t? The sexualization of my body was seen at the age of eight.

When you are othered, you are hyper-aware of how much space your body takes up. The racism in school was contained to microaggressions that I could brush off, but entering into the adult world, for me, felt dangerous. I had internalized so much about the ways I could be acceptable, palatable, that I was constantly aware of when my body was misbehaving. My hair was frizzy, my skin marked by freckles, spots, moles. My body was rounded and my thighs were built for running through jungles, whereas Asian women were (I thought! Media told me!) supposed to be small and delicate.

I have spent so long trying to tame myself, trying to choose an acceptable racial identity or an ambiguity or to lean into my whiteness. Every day, I still think about how I can move through space, how I will meet with people and I ask myself: How will they see me? What do I want them to see?

***

So much of my adult working life has revolved around hospitality — restaurants, bars and events, primarily as a worker, and then in the last decade as a writer and researcher. I am now back working front of house at one of my favourite restaurants in London: Sambal Shiok, a laksa bar owned by my friend Mandy Yin. I love the buzz of a restaurant or bar, the camaraderie of the team — restaurants are always a place to gather the best and most interesting people a city has to offer. There can be a fun dynamic when I get to talk about food I love, to guests. I’ve worked in fantastic places, and Sambal Shiok in particular has been one of the safest work environments I have ever worked in. But restaurants are also where I have experienced the most racism. The combination of performance and providing a service makes the space ripe for racialised sexualisation. It always starts with ‘where are you from?’ before I’ve barely said a word. A real-life conversation I experienced:

‘Where are you from?’ ‘London.’

‘No, that’s not what I mean.’

‘New Zealand.’

‘Oh, are you one of those Māori?’

‘No’ – I took the bottle of champagne and topped up another wedding guest, looking over the rolling hills of the estate in the Midlands and sighing at how a beautiful landscape could feel so ugly.

Another time, I served a table of three middle-aged white couples, where one man moved from ‘where are you from?’ (accompanied by scanning my full body, as he leant back in his chair), to comments about my appearance, the heat in Malaysia and a continuous stream of innuendoes directed at me for the whole table to hear. Finally, when he was paying, I explained the card machine needed to be closer to the front to get the Wi-Fi connection and asked if he could follow me. He smiled, wiggled his eyebrows and his wife said, ‘He’s been waiting for you to say that all night.’ This isn’t a funny joke. An entire table were making me their plaything, their joke, an object to look at. I felt so worthless. A decade later, I can still see his face and the look he gave me.

Once, a very drunk white man asked me, while I tried to make him a drink: ‘So, what are you? You don’t look yellow, or brown, you look sort of….’ and put his hand three inches from my face and made a circular movement and said ‘orange’.

***

In a world now of video calls, my face becomes a site of uncomfortableness and is fraught with (self) hatred. I spent a week on Zoom calls with white people. During one interview, with a really lovely and interesting white woman, I became aware of our physical differences.

The width of my nose, the slant of my eyes, the pallor of my skin mid-winter when it really needs to see the sun — everything felt in contrast to her, and my internal systems interpreted that as negative. The actor Vera Chok and I were on a podcast once, and we spoke about these moments where you stop and realize ‘shit, I’m not white!’ These moments are jolting. In a very visceral way, you realize you are not ‘the norm’ in a white world, and that is understood as A Bad Thing. It is often gendered as well as racialized. That Zoom call was yet another moment of self-realization – of being ugly, of being unacceptable, of ‘shit, I’m not white!’

I don’t want to hide my ethnicity and heritage and I don’t want to play up to it. I still chemically straighten my hair and curse my thighs, but I am finding my way into being the wrong kind of exotic — dangerous and uncomfortable, speaking out. My friend Frankie and I talk about identity a lot (she is mixed race too, white British and Dominican heritage). She said to me once: ‘We are doing the work so that our great-great grandchildren will be OK, safe and do not have to do this work.’ I think about this all the time, the unlearning in ourselves, so that each generation passes on less embodied emotions of otherness. It is a lifetime’s work, navigating our own identity and intersections.

Dr Anna Sulan Masing is an academic, poet, and journalist. She co-founded SOURCED, a public research platform that explores our global food and drink systems, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Cheese magazine.

Looking for another short read? This time last year, we published a fascinating interview with pastor, activist, and organizer Aline Silva on the intersections between religion and plant-based eating.

READ IT HERE

Says Aline: “In my experience, Christian leadership and ministry have taken many forms. But perhaps the most significant has taken place on my plate and in my work centering non-human animals.”

If you enjoy this story, we and Lira invite you to support trans life beyond the page by donating to Trans Lifeline or another organization in your area that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities.

As Lira Green traces her shifting relationship to food as a trans lesbian — through transition, first courtship, and heartbreak — she is faced with questions about how gender shapes taste. Do our bodies crave the same things? And when we do, do we taste them the same?

By Lira Green for our BODY issue

PART III: Comfort Food

Elena avoided me for the rest of the night. Even as I lay in bed texting her, my arm was warm, like she was still holding me. I cautiously asked her about her recent decision to get back on dating apps, and she said that she'd changed her mind and would rather meet someone in person. Somehow, she explained, she didn't feel as hopeless about it anymore.

I wasn't sure what to think.

There would be moments when she’d say strange things, like that I’d look good in her clothes, and yet also moments of incredible distance. My normally bashful friend, who could barely survive an oral presentation, would light up and call out my name every time I walked into class, even in a dead-silent room. When I told her a hair bow she wasn't sure suited her was cute, she wore one every day for the rest of the semester.

As Valentine’s Day approached, Elena started ruminating that she was too undesirable to find love, and it shattered my heart. I found a little box of strawberry-flavoured sweets that I hoped wouldn't be too much — chocolates were too overtly romantic, I’d decided — and gave it to her on Valentine’s Day after class. I expected her to be a little flattered and gently rebuff me. Then we could return to being friends like always.

“Is this for Gal-entine's Day?” she asked, looking in the bag.

My face flushed with warmth. “No, it’s for Valentine’s Day.”

Elena thought for a moment, then looked right at me and smiled. She was sorry, she said, that she hadn’t gotten me anything, but she’d bring me something the next time she saw me.

That night, Elena texted me, saying that she was miserably lonely and planned to spend Valentine’s Day weekend getting drunk. I was already drunk, so I asked if she wanted to do something with me, then went to press my burning face into a pillow. That was way too forward! I knew she'd reject me; my offer was too obvious to be taken platonically.

Instead, she invited me to drink with her, though she cautioned, I'd have to stay the night. My cheeks flamed with heat as I told her I wouldn’t mind, but the next moment, she changed gears and suddenly suggested we could go to the mall for bubble tea. I accepted enthusiastically, struggling to think through a haze of alcohol and confusion and blind hope. A date? Was it a date?

I tried to ask Elena whether she still wanted me to get drunk with her, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it and I didn’t want to be pushy, so I dropped the topic. Later, I would realize that as far as I knew, Elena only drank with women she planned to kiss.

By the time I’d done my eyeliner, picked out my most colourful skirt, and parked at the dorm to pick Elena up, I’d mostly talked myself out of the idea that this could be anything more than a platonic outing. Then Elena got in my car and handed me a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a case of Ferrero Rochers. For me. I didn’t hear most of her bashful explanation, besides that she’d picked out a box she thought I’d like, and that she hoped I liked hazelnuts.

I did.

We wandered through the mall, laughing. Elena insisted on buying me boba, and after we’d been enjoying the tea for a while, she offered me a sip of her own drink, which I tried to accept without blushing too much. It tasted of coffee and cream and good company. I wondered about that little gesture, but clamped down on the thought before it could be expressed.

We tried on makeup, and hidden behind the clearance aisle, Elena grabbed my hand and swatched it with a lip gloss she’d chosen — “Trust me!” — and besotted, I told her that trusting her had always worked out for me.

She wavered. “You shouldn't trust me so much. I’m bound to let you down eventually.”

“Then I'm just going to ride it out,” I said.

***

By then, I’d gotten used to the intimacy of female friendships and would regularly tell my friends I loved them. But Elena felt more attentive to me than any friend I’d ever had, intuitively knowing when I was upset and how to calm me. It was clear I mattered to her.

I started to test the waters. I needed clarity, to know that I could reach out and touch her the same way she would sometimes reach for me — I had never been the one to initiate. I obsessed over how to articulate my feelings until I finally gave up, afraid to risk our friendship.

But Elena had known how I felt all along. One evening, she sent me a strangely anxious text. It simply said that she didn’t feel the same way I did.

I'd never actually had the chance to tell her what I was feeling or what I wanted. But now I was losing the chance forever. Before it slipped away, I told her I liked her for the same reasons I treasured her friendship. Had I made her uncomfortable? I hadn't. Did she want any new boundaries? No, she was comfortable with how I acted around her.

I knew that the accepted thing to do as a heartbroken woman was to hood yourself in a heavy blanket, listen to music on repeat for hours, cry, and eat ungodly amounts of chocolate or ice cream. Almost all of these clichés came naturally, but being trans, I only wanted salt. I must have needed it. After a lifetime of repression, the combination of grief and estrogen finally let me weep a torrent of saline tears.

We had class the next morning. Elena and I weren’t sure what to say to each other. The first flowers of the year had started to bloom, and I gave her a daffodil I’d picked that morning — “yellow, for friendship,” I said — and then we went and sat by each other in our usual spot. Elena scarcely let go of the flower, twirling it throughout the lecture.

I followed her to the campus lounge like always. Hours later, she was still holding onto the daffodil and asked me for a clip so she could put it in her hair.

***

By the next week, Elena would barely speak to me. Heartbroken and betrayed, I confronted her about avoiding me, and we fought. I told her I felt strange about her behaviour and accused her of discarding my friendship. Elena insisted that I was no different to her than to anyone else and that she couldn't understand how I even would think she might have been interested in me. I wept horribly. It made no sense that a friendship so strong could deteriorate so quickly.

There was nothing to be done, besides licking my wounds. I huddled in my blanket and binge-watched a series that I’d been optimistically saving to see with her. I drank a few glasses of wine and ate a bowl of popcorn doused in margarine, nutritional yeast, and salt.

I enjoyed myself at first. I crossed over into drunk around the same time the two female leads had their end-of-season kiss, and soon, I was crying again. I curled up in a corner and thought about how wretched I was, to think that this woman had loved me.

As devastated and confused as I was by her dismissal, I didn’t have the experience necessary to defend myself. Maybe I really was delusional. Maybe she really was that touchy with everyone, even though, truthfully, she seemed very reserved with most people. How would I know? What I did know was that as a trans woman pining for a cis woman, if I complained about how I’d been treated, I’d be in danger of sounding like the media narratives I’d heard of predatory trans women transitioning only to chase cis lesbians around. I loved Elena, and didn’t want to hurt her. So I stopped talking to our friends, and let myself disappear.

***

A few months later, I was still a pitiful creature, but now incongruously resplendent in rainbows and the colours of the trans and lesbian flags as I marched near the front of that year's Pride parade. I knew Elena would be there somewhere, and the thought made me want to throw up.

I wandered. I attempted to flirt with a woman with rainbow-dyed dreads and sang along to Chappell Roan in a dancing crowd, but I was adrift. As much as I loved these celebrations — I'd desperately wanted to be the one to introduce Elena to them — nothing really held my attention.

Finally, I arrived at a table for HIV services to do my usual hellos and thank-yous, and the woman there invited me to look at the stuff they were offering. I gazed down at the pamphlets, then darted my eyes to the other side of the table. There sat the biggest box of condoms I had ever seen in my life. I hesitated.

“Do you have any dental dams?” I asked, already blushing.

“There's some right there,” she pointed to a small box of discrete little envelopes next to the condoms, which I’d completely overlooked.

“Oh!”

“No wait, let me get you some of these,” she said, pulling out another massive cardboard box.

“I’m sorry, I'm still not entirely used to this sort of thing. I haven't been able to find any before, I just...” I trailed off into a nervous giggle, “...figured we were stuck using a sheet of Saran wrap?”

“You can also cut the top off a Ziploc bag,” she said helpfully, as I pawed through the colourful individually wrapped squares and grabbed a few at random. “What flavour do you want?”

“Flavour?” I looked down at the dams I was holding, and my face burned even hotter. I'd accidentally chosen dams in Elena's favourite flavour.

“..Strawberry sounds nice?” I squeaked, reading the label.

There's a poem by May Sarton, “Of Molluscs”, which comes to mind in moments when I feel vulnerable, for better or worse. The ocean rises, I thought as I sheepishly tucked the dams in my purse, salt as unshed tears. Love strikes down everyone, sooner or later. The only way to live is to accept your own vulnerability.

I'd shown the poem to Elena, once, but she didn't like it very much.

***

Summer waned into a series of oppressive rainstorms, and on one particularly dreary day, I found myself back on campus for my last few errands. The only shelter from the downpour was a little outbuilding at the edge of the now-empty campus parking lot. Inside it was the food pantry, where I could get some nuts and dried fruit and maybe run into some old acquaintances. Since my old dorm only had running water in the showers, it was common for students to pick up food and drink there.

The small, dark-haired goth staffing the pantry was quite new to me. I watched her, wide-eyed, as she sat me by the radiator, wrapped a knit shawl around my shoulders, and pushed a warm paper cup of instant stuffing into my hands. Another with hot chocolate soon followed.

“You look pretty in that shawl,” she told me as I pulled it up over my head like a hood. “Especially your eyes.”

My cheeks warmed as I batted my eyelashes at her, wondering if I'd wandered into a romance novel and laughing at myself for being so easily wooed by warm food.

It seemed my new friend Stella was quite the cook, which I found comforting. She talked at length about dishes she'd prepared, and I felt an almost competitive need to prove that I also knew my way around a kitchen. A spirited conversation arose, and I couldn’t help myself, finally agreeing to join her at a farmer's market later that month, which she insisted was the ideal lesbian date.

We sang together as raindrops rattled the tin roof, and I sighed happily, safe and content. By the time she pulled her chair closer so our knees were touching, I was blushing too hard to be cynical. I was ready for her.

But as Stella drew me close, resting my head on her shoulder and lacing her fingers into mine, I felt a pang. It wasn't like being with Elena at all. My thoughts were still racing, and I was painfully aware of how our cold hands didn't quite seem to fit together.

Maybe if I’m patient, I thought, nuzzling closer and closing my eyes, it’ll be like before.

***

The next time I saw Elena, it was a bright autumn day. I was at a café downtown, squirming at a little streetside table, fussing with my sunhat and diaphanous skirt. The café was on a familiar street where I could see a memory anywhere I looked, and I watched leaves and passersby skittering over the brick sidewalk until I heard my name.

I cried out for her as I rose, and Elena ran into my arms. She rested her head on my shoulder, kicking up a leg and letting me support her, and we lingered for a few breaths. Then the moment was over, and we watched each other, guarded and unsure.

We ordered espressos. Elena wasn’t hungry, but I ordered a lox bagel to nibble on as we talked. I was surprised, expecting it to have something pickle-adjacent — maybe some dill, or capers — but the fish was delicious on its own. Before long, we were commiserating over the oppressive societal expectations of how women should eat. Elena bemoaned her inability to entirely escape the thrall of such habits, and I talked about how easy it is for trans women to absorb unhealthy expectations from cis women, starting the cycle anew.

“You seem different,” Elena said appreciatively. “You never used to talk about trans stuff in public.”

I'd recently found an extraordinary document that collected the anecdotal experiences of transgender people on hormone replacement therapy. Some of the things were so accurate it was uncanny: my former clumsiness, dubious attention span, longing to be cuddled, and even the foods I craved. I had to bury my face in my hands while reading it, peeking through fingers at one unbelievable revelation after another. It was like being a butterfly pinned to a board. Being trans has always felt like being naked.

As we walked, I shared some of my findings with Elena.

Coffee tasted different to me after taking estrogen, I told her. I could appreciate the complexity of the taste more, picking up different notes of acidity or bitterness than I did before. The difference had been like having my first fresh-brewed cup after a lifetime of warmed-over dregs.

It made sense, because in that document, I'd read that trans women often grow to appreciate spicier and earthier flavours in their food, seeking out the flavours previously denied to them. And there was the answer to why we wanted pickles, too: taking spironolactone, a drug which neutralizes the effects of testosterone, causes your body to excrete more sodium, triggering cravings for salty foods.

Trans women develop a more perceptive sense of smell, too. The moment I'd read that, I ran outside and I realized that for the first time that I could smell flowers on the breeze. I couldn’t believe the delicacy of the scent, or how I’d always known flowers smelled somehow wrong to me until I transitioned. At that moment, I wept.

Something I didn’t mention to Elena was that I’d also learned that the way I smelled and tasted was hormonally controlled, too. That meant that in the end, I was no different from a cis woman. It didn't matter. Elena had always treated me as her equal, treated me like someone who mattered.

Each time she had held my hand, my fearful mind had stopped. I was safe with her. I would look into her grey eyes, flitting with nerves, and feel the weight of all those years in which I hadn’t really lived.

Thousands of women have fallen in love with their best friend. That's really all this was, wasn't it? All this time, afraid I wouldn't be loved as a woman, when in the end, it simply came down to whether I’d be loved as myself.

I was exactly who I wanted to be, and I wasn’t what she wanted.

Alone in my car, Elena apologized for hurting me. “You didn’t hurt me, Elena,” I said impulsively. “I just wanted to kiss you, that’s not your fault.”

As Elena got out and started walking away, I smiled and blew her a kiss.

Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk.

If this piece struck you, please consider supporting a local organization that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities! Often understaffed and underfunded, these groups are vital, and if you've been feeling helpless, there is always meaningful work to be done if you're willing to learn about your local support network.

You can also help by donating to the Trans Lifeline project, which operates a hotline for trans people to speak safely to other trans people if in crisis. And if you have trans or nonbinary loved ones, a hot meal can work wonders in dark times, when cooked with love.

Donate

Read Part I

If you enjoy this story, we and Lira invite you to support trans life beyond the page by donating to Trans Lifeline or another organization in your area that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities.

As Lira Green traces her shifting relationship to food as a trans lesbian — through transition, first courtship, and heartbreak — she is faced with questions about how gender shapes taste. Do our bodies crave the same things? And when we do, do we taste them the same?

By Lira Green for our BODY issue

Part II: Sharing Meals

One sunny day in the fall, I sat down on the steps of the dean's office, set my little insulated container of homemade egg fried rice on my lap, and kicked out my stockinged legs as I waited for Elena. I watched lackadaisically as students wandered past, listening to the casual ring of different languages, not caring if anyone was stealing glances at my calves. I was simply smiling too much.

The day before, Elena had been caterwauling to me over text about not having food in her dorm. This was a travesty, she explained, especially since she couldn’t afford to keep getting it delivered. I decided to do something about it, and sent her a text:

I just made a lot of fried rice and I have leftovers, would you like some?

Her reply was instantaneous, and the capital letters made me burst out laughing.

GOD BLESS YOU LIRA

dude i’m broke and barely have food in my dorm

I sighed with relief. As simple a gesture as it was, I’d never offered anyone food before. I wanted to cook for all my friends, but of course, Elena was first in line.

this is unacceptable no you deserve food

Im going to bring you fried rice the next time Im out and about

I love you, she replied.

The hyperbole made me blush like the schoolgirl I indeed was, and the next day, I was still beaming as I waited for her. After a few minutes of fussing with my ice packs and worrying if the food was good enough, she finally appeared in a cloud of apologies, dressed in a cream-coloured blouse and skirt. I handed her the egg rice and watched with muted horror as she thanked me and absent-mindedly stuffed the entire container of food into a messenger bag as she went off to get textbooks.

It felt a little anticlimactic. I wanted to watch her eat it, to see if she was enjoying it. But once she was safely ensconced in her dorm, she started texting again.

i haven’t eaten dinner yet but i tried a bite of the fried rice

SO good

even though i didnt heat it up or anything it was still REALLY tasty

As the evening progressed, Elena informed me of every detail as she circled the rice container like a tiger circling a gazelle.

Lira this is so fucking good

thank you so much

you put baby corn in it also which like god bless you i love baby corn

I glowed with such a pure kind of happiness that I couldn't help but feel embarrassed.

***

Not long after I gave her the rice, Elena invited me to a queer event at a local café. She'd never gone to anything that marked her as queer before. She was terribly nervous about it and wanted someone there for support. I understood that — it was still hard for me to call myself a lesbian.

I picked her up, and to distract her over the drive, I told her stories about interning as a beekeeper after high school: that a crate of ten thousand bees smells like warm fur, how I would sometimes dip my fingers into the stream of honey coming out of the centrifuge and taste its musky sweetness. The apiary was the first place I’d felt safe enough to introduce myself with a female name, and it was a second home to me. I’d had a crush on the head beekeeper — a woman with sparkling eyes and an impish grin— and Elena could tell just from how I sank into the steering wheel and sighed each time I said her name. She rolled her eyes at my obvious fawning, and I laughed and defended myself by listing her many charms.

At the café, I smiled as Elena gradually shook off her nerves and fell into easy conversation with our new friends. It all went perfectly. By the time we left, it was after dusk, and as we stepped across the street, she turned and thanked me.

“I’m glad I asked you to come,” she said, with rare earnestness. “You were the perfect person for this; so calm and relaxed.”

When I opened my mouth to reply, my eyes caught on Elena's glossed lips, and I was stunned. I wanted to kiss her.

I let out a breath and bloomed, not with longing, but relief. Never in my life had I wanted to kiss someone before. What a gift, I thought, for someone to finally, after all my life, make me feel so safe that I'd want to kiss them. It didn't matter then if I'd wind up kissing Elena, or someone else. I could love, I would love!

Elena insisted on buying us both curry before we went home. She preferred salty food to sweet, too, which was oddly reassuring. As we sat in my car, waiting to pick up her order, Elena got momentarily bashful, worried she had been a bit much in conversations she’d had that night. That struck me as so absurd I blurted my response without thinking.

“Actually, I think you're charming.”

Elena blushed so hard she had to look away.

After we parted ways, I stood in the dorm parking lot, looking up at the stars, all but convinced that I'd died and been given a second chance at life. After all, wasn’t that sort of what transition was? I was truly happy with just what I had in that moment, and grateful for it, however long it would last. None of it had ever felt possible before.

But even then, I was scared of losing it.

***

As the leaves started to fall, Elena and I found our paths beginning to diverge, and political strife began to intrude deeper into our lives. Distant wars felt closer and closer to home. Everyone at our university knew someone who knew someone in Kiev, Jaffa, or Sevastopol, and my friends now talked about violence and cruelty with a familiarity that terrified me. At the same time, I was hearing more and more rumours about horrifying things happening to trans people, sometimes in the places I’d grown up in. Local political opposition to trans people turned sharper and more targeted, and every time I heard of a new bill, I’d lie in bed worrying all night.

I helped host an event for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, setting up a wall of photos in one corner of the campus printmaking workshop, and as I prepared memorial photos and obituaries, I started noticing how many blurry selfies were in the bunch. Trans people tend to be photo-adverse, and it struck me that many of the deceased might never have had the chance to be represented by a decent photo. I didn't really have many good images of myself, either, and I started wondering what my own memorial would look like, if I was murdered. Life started to feel shorter, tighter.

I advertised the vigil as a potluck, hoping companionship and a pot of scalloped potatoes might help my kin at the university heal. For my pleading, the caféteria staff took pity on us and provided fruit and pastries, which assuaged my fear that there wouldn’t be enough for everyone to eat. I pictured a small crowd of trans and nonbinary students, eating and befriending each other, maybe even figuring out how we could keep each other safe.

Not a single student came to the print shop. Elena was at work, and most of my trans friends were in class.

I paced around the rusty old printing presses lining the shop in a black dress that was too tight, finally taking my place by the photo wall. It was hard to hide my disappointment as I shook hands with the dean and the college president, who were the only attendees. As my fellow coordinator, Olive, finally started reading the names of the deceased, I bit my lip and worried that the vigil had become a maudlin performance for cis people.

My old sparring partner Alex watched the event over Zoom, but I forgot there was anyone behind the black box on Olive’s laptop. When I remembered her, my stomach twisted. I was grateful, but I felt embarrassed to have her eyes on me when I was so vulnerable. She hadn’t always been gentle with my insecurities.

The food went untouched.

After cleaning up, I took my transgender pride flag, which I'd attached to a long wooden dowel, and went out into the November gloom in my mourning black. I wanted to be a spectre, a reminder of the enormous loss I was trying to honour. Maybe at least I could make a few cis people feel guilty, so the event wouldn’t be completely forgotten. I continued my procession. It took me to the edge of the shore, where the coastal wind whipped my flag so hard the ends frayed. I wasn't sure what I was trying to accomplish. I stood there for a long time, grieving and wondering what sort of life I was going to have.

That night, after eating the leftover potatoes for supper, I confided in Elena over text about the strain the vigil had taken on me. It wasn't quite coming out, but I knew she'd probably figure out I was trans. Cis women do not generally stalk the trails in black, waving trans flags.

Elena was sympathetic, but I wanted warmth more than words. I wanted to cling closer to her, but things weren't as simple as they were when we were only fencing. Her laugh had recently taken on a sharp edge; and she would often brood and make bleak jokes. A lot went unsaid between us, but it was clear that something vast and dark had entered my friend's life, and there was nothing I could do about it. She might not have known, but I was starting to feel the same way.

***

Winter set in. Elena didn't smile as often anymore. I stopped excitedly rambling about my work. Our friends wouldn’t stop repeating a dirge about how much they were going to miss “all this” after we graduated that spring, and it started to feel apocalyptic. The job listings I'd been searching filled up with scam jobs asking for help training AI models. I stopped writing my novel. Elena started joking that she was going to die of a heart attack at twenty-four, and I privately snarked that trans women measure life expectancy in dog years. We could all feel bad news coming, the way dogs feel in their bones that it's going to rain.

And then Elena invited me to come ice skating with her, and it felt like a last chance at something — at being young.

That night, the rink shone, bright and cold. I looked out at the skyline and the blinking lights of airport runways, and shivered. This was a special night. I was certain of it.

Neither of us could skate, but we were both too proud not to try. We limped around the edge of the rink, laughing, until our friends came and dragged Elena off to the centre. I wanted to join them, but I was still too unsure of my footing. But before I could force myself out onto the ice, I saw Elena break away from the rest and glide towards me.

“Hi Lira!” she chirped, linking her arm into mine and using me to come to a stop. I laughed and let Elena ramble about the difficulty of skating and how cold it was. After a moment, I noticed that she was still clinging to me, and there was an odd giddiness in my friend's voice. Somehow, she’d slipped her fingers between mine without my noticing, and we were now holding hands. Her grip was quite firm, and it felt strangely natural for us to be touching like this, although the more I thought about it, the more I felt faint.

Elena was acting differently than usual. She was blushing, and looking right at me. I trembled. Our conversation was going nowhere; she was waiting for me to do something.

It couldn't be that she wanted me to kiss her. Could it?

The moment I made up my mind to lean a little closer to her, my friends called out to Elena, and she startled. Casting her eyes downward, then back up at me, she squeezed my hand. “Love you,” she said, quietly enough that no one else could hear. She sounded disappointed, almost longing, and her tone was so unusual it struck me. The only thing I could manage was to squeeze her hand back.

Then she was gone.

📺 Stay tuned for Part III of Lira’s story, coming to your inbox next week!

Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk.

If this piece struck you, please consider supporting a local organization that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities! Often understaffed and underfunded, these groups are vital, and if you've been feeling helpless, there is always meaningful work to be done if you're willing to learn about your local support network.

You can also help by donating to the Trans Lifeline project, which operates a hotline for trans people to speak safely to other trans people if in crisis. And if you have trans or nonbinary loved ones, a hot meal can work wonders in dark times, when cooked with love.

Donate

At a moment when trans rights, in the US and beyond, are under violent attack, Lira’s writing offers a moving portrait of what it’s like to long for love — a quintessential human experience of anxiety, uncertainty, desire, and elation — in a body that is highly politicized, often misunderstood, and increasingly maligned. Through this portrait, Lira sheds light on day-to-day aspects of the trans experience that many of us might not be familiar with, pushing us to think of how we can find belonging in our bodies and with each other.

If you enjoy this story, we and Lira invite you to support trans life beyond the page by donating to Trans Lifeline or another organization in your area that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities.

Donate

Until next week,

ZJ&IJbV

As Lira Green traces her shifting relationship to food as a trans lesbian — through transition, first courtship, and heartbreak — she is faced with questions about how gender shapes taste. Do our bodies crave the same things? And when we do, do we taste them the same?

By Lira Green for our BODY issue

Part I: Pickle Cravings

Unlike most butterflies, my metamorphosis began on the cold, mouldering tiles of a women’s bathroom. I was there for a quick shower before dawn, as always, hiding from the cis students I’d been hired to tutor so I could tend to my idiosyncratic body in peace. I climbed eight flights of stairs to reach the quietest bathroom in my dorm, every single morning.

One morning, something felt different. Stepping out of the frigid water and reaching for my towel, I gave myself a good once-over, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The sink mirror didn’t reveal any more than the darkness beyond the room’s sole window, so I resigned myself to my routine, still confused.

I reached up to fix my bangs. The next moment, I completely shattered. My hair was so soft, the softest thing I’d ever touched, and it was so sudden and different it felt like raking my fingers through someone else’s scalp. I trembled so much I accidentally grazed my cheeks, and realized I felt like satin. Even my hands had changed shape; so much smaller and slimmer.

A long time passed as I stood at that mirror, treasuring little strands of straight brown hair and gently stroking my face. I wondered what was going to happen to me. I had no idea that taking estrogen would make such a change in four days; what else was in store? My doctor had merely said that after months or years, it would “feminize the shape” of my body, I’d “likely grow breasts,” and I might notice “emotional and psychological changes.”

What would psychological changes look like? How much of our personalities come down to hormones? It was obvious that I was finally restoring my long-neglected body to something that would have always felt natural, but I’d spent my formative years attempting to live with a body that didn’t. Was I about to discover that everything in my life had merely been a coping mechanism? And how different are men and women, after all?

All I knew was that my body had never overpowered me before. It felt like absolutely anything could happen to me, and I wasn’t sure how prepared I'd be, even though I welcomed the changes. I’d never heard a man talk about feeling that way, having this fear of one's own body. I didn’t feel entirely in control anymore, and my mind wandered to the way cis women would talk about the whims of their bodies, like they were complaining about the weather.

Did I understand them, now? And if I did, was anyone ever going to believe me?

***

Online forums had many colourful ideas about what might happen to me next. People argued about whether it was possible that taking estrogen could make you shorter. Some, to my growing distress, delighted in jokes about the gentler “mouthfeel” trans women could expect certain soft parts of our bodies to take on, and others were convinced hormone replacement therapy (HRT) changed trans women’s sexual orientation. That stung. I was a woman and could only like women, no matter how hard I tried. The implication that my sexuality was something wrong with me that’d be ironed out with time seemed to lurk behind every post on the subject.

However, I did have one thing to look forward to, one thing that everyone seemed to be in total agreement on: trans women on HRT become obsessed with eating pickles. After starting hormones, I was assured I would be helpless for the snap of a crisp dill spear.

What a bizarre detail. Pickles? I thought. Like with pregnancy cravings? Butterflies eat milkweed as they prepare for metamorphosis, and apparently, I was fated to eat pickles.

The whole thing was strange. Food is rarely mentioned in trans spaces, where discussions more often revolve around the grim facts of survival. But in these forums, I kept seeing excited trans women discovering together that they had started longing for pickles. I found it strangely endearing, in the same way as posts I’d seen in lesbian communities about women baking bread for each other as courtship gifts.

But something about it also didn’t sit well. Pickle cravings felt like one more thing I couldn’t have in common with cis people. Worse, salty food seemed somehow masculine — it suggested steaks, sausages, bags of chips illustrated with flying sparks and explosions. Salt reminded me of Lot's wife, the biblical figure who was turned into a pillar of salt as Sodom and Gomorrah burned, and of The Price of Salt, and so many more books where the lesbians meet horrible fates at the end.

I didn’t want every meal I’d have with other women to become a performance of difference. Food was supposed to bond people, not separate them.

***

One week after my revelations in the dorm showers, I burrowed into a scarf and emerged into the wide atrium of the campus cafeteria, full of greetings and quick glances at the familiar faces around me. My classmates liked me, but I still preferred to eat alone, away from prying eyes. I picked up some eggs and hash, and one of the green apples that I made sure to eat every day. It was an old trick I learned while doing voice training for my transition: the tartness of the apple would make me salivate, which kept my voice from drying out and going flat.

I breathed in the smell of my food as I approached the caféteria exit and put my palm to the heavy metal door, as always. But this time, it didn’t budge. My arm ached, my plate teetered in my other hand, and even though my arm was twinging with strain, I realized I couldn't push any harder.

I’d been warned that HRT would cause me to lose muscle mass. I hadn’t been told it would happen all at once, and I was so stunned I just stood there, taking measured breaths. A man came up from behind me, and an instinct rippled through me that I was trapped, that I needed to get away from him. I braced my feet, put my elbow to the door, and threw my whole weight into it, shoving my way outside.

Wandering towards my usual spot on the patio, I frowned, taking in the clear autumn skies and the tang of fallen leaves. Losing so much strength so quickly was frightening, especially as I was now getting catcalled and hit on by random men for the first time in my life. A few days earlier, when I was eating lunch, a man sat down by me and tried to charm me, leaning over the table and agreeing with whatever I said. That evening, someone I knew pulled me aside to warn me that I had been talking to a known lech.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that door. I’d need to take self-defence classes, exercise more, and be more careful where I went until I got used to my shifting body. Thinking of an article I’d read about a recent panic over trans athletes, I almost choked on the irony.

Breakfast was usually the only break I allowed myself, so I took the time to watch sailboats drift past the cliffs as I nibbled on cubes of cantaloupe. I’d always been a slow eater, treating food as an opportunity to rest and savour each flavour. Dysphoria had once dissociated me from my body so badly that I felt like I was sleepwalking every moment of my life, yet when I sat down to enjoy a meal, for a few precious minutes, my senses would be in complete harmony.

Out of a haze of memories that didn’t feel quite real, I could still recall cherished meals from my past with a rare clarity, like I'd read about them in a book rather than lived them. I remembered foraged blackberries from the trail by my childhood home, my grandmother's rice pudding, and the fancy cheesecake I'd had at a tea house when I first moved to a real city, even when I could barely grasp onto much else from that time.

So when I found myself painfully full before halfway finishing my plate and realized I was starting to lose my taste for breakfast meats, I felt a pang of fear. When my tastes finished changing, who would I be?

***

“Lira!”

A woman with warm grey eyes and a gentle cloud of light-brown curls reached towards me, offering the hilt of a rapier. I accepted with a laugh, curling my fingers around the handle and sitting cross-legged on the waxy gym floor. My two companions, Alex and Elena, were classmates from my major whom I’d brought along to the fencing practice my university held every Tuesday night. I told anyone who asked that I was doing research for my fantasy novel, but in truth, I was just terrified of how weak I'd become and wanted some company as I relearned how to move in my body.

Elena was enormously pleased to have found a sword for me. She’d remembered my disappointment at having to wait to borrow one the week before, and she’d somehow managed to convince our instructors to set one aside for me. I was delighted. As I weighed the blade in my hand, Elena smoothed down the frills of her skirt and leaned over to talk to Alex, who was short and athletic, her hair cut down to the scalp. Her eyes were quick to alight on any source of irony, and she was so fierce at practices that it was like we were fighting for our lives.

I adored my new friends. They were intimidating, though, because they were both cis. I certainly didn’t have any advantage over them at fighting — Alex was a head shorter than me and still regularly thrashed me. But no matter how natural our friendship felt, I instinctively feared that I was only ever one misstep away from losing it all.

It had been half of my life since I’d had any female friends. As a teenager, I was disgusted by the chest-thumping of the boys and humiliated by the attention of the girls, which only reinforced a male identity I never wanted and made my longing for female companionship cruelly ironic. Back then, I rebuffed everyone who approached me. But now I was a woman among women, and in completely new territory. Things could be different.

I held my sword aloft to check the blade, and Alex and Elena raised their weapons as well. “Yours is the longest!” Elena declared, proud to have found me one that matched my height.

“This is how women compare dicks,” Alex laughed as we brought our blades back down and ran our fingers over the ornate twists of metal in the hand guards. I shivered, uncomfortably aware of the lengths I went to pass. My friends sometimes talked about their periods, and these conversations always made me feel confused and pitifully barren.

But when Elena and I pulled on our armour and faced each other, raising our swords to signal the start of the match, I was completely at home. I was agile, but she attacked quickly each time my sword whiffed by her head. I stalked around her in circles, nearly tripping over my skirt, and she cautiously advanced, still wearing her three-inch heels. By the time we ended up in a tie, we were already giggling.

As we collapsed to the floor, our armour strewn around us and our swords resting on our knees, I started to gush. Elena was such an impressive fighter, but she wouldn’t hear it. “It's not fair,” she panted, “how you've suddenly gotten crazy good in the week I've been gone!”

“I heard ‘not fair,’ what's the problem?” My instructor had wandered over in case we needed a referee, but Elena and I were laughing too hard to respond.

“They're just kissing up to each other,” Alex told her, before turning back to us.

“I really like Lira,” Elena said, quite seriously. Alex gave us a long, strange look.

“You two are so close, I’m envious,” Alex said, slowly shaking her head. “Just kidding — but I also kind of am.”

Later that night, as I finished my last fight, Elena called out to me from the bleachers. I leaned on my sword, breathing raggedly and sweating off the foundation I’d carefully layered to hide the slight shadows along my jaw, and as I turned to look, Elena blew me a kiss.

I froze in place. I had heard so much about how much more affectionate women are than men, but... blowing kisses, really? I was a little taken aback, terrified that if I didn’t hit just the right notes of playful banter in response, I’d be ejected from womanhood before I’d even begun.

After all, Elena had said she was straight. Frequently.

“She didn’t accept my kiss!” Elena complained to Alex, still giggling but genuinely sounding a little hurt.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my voice a little higher than usual.

Alex snorted. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

***

Another night, I was driving my friends back to campus for fencing practice when Alex decided we should stop for a burger. As we crawled through the dimly lit drive-through, a fear bubbled up inside of me. What if I ordered wrong? Was I eating like a cis woman? I was so far outside my comfort zone that I was taking even absurd worries seriously. I ordered the same thing as Alex, but forgot about the food in a fit of self-consciousness, leaving it uneaten in the cup holder next to me. Elena, as always, insisted that she wasn’t hungry.

“So, you’re bi, right?” Alex asked from the passenger seat, searching for my eyes in the rearview mirror. I bit my lip, and Elena looked on from the back with interest.

“I’m a lesbian,” I said, slowly turning the Outback onto the road by our campus. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever said that out loud.

“Oh, cool, so we’re all gay people,” Alex said, then quickly glanced back. “Besides Elena.”

Back home, I ate the burger, the bun soggy and the pickles cold; I didn’t want to waste it. Elena was unusually talkative over text that night, and gradually steered the conversation around to queerness, asking me about how I knew I was a lesbian, and if I’d been confused. I didn't really know what to say. I felt like a fraud. How was I supposed to have a lesbian awakening if I didn't even know I was a woman until I was halfway through my teens?

My response was vague and confusing as I tried to figure out what I should consider my awakening, but Elena was happy with my answers anyway. She told me, in an aside, that she was a lesbian too, but closeted, only telling close friends. I was beyond honoured, but as I drifted off to sleep that night, I wondered if I was the right person to trust with something so enormous, and which Elena was clearly so worried about. I decided to try my best to be worthy.

***

As the snow melted and the semester waned, so did Elena’s interest in fencing, though she kept tagging along to practice. I worried she’d feel neglected, so after my bouts, I sat with her against the bleachers and kept her company as she sketched. Things had changed after Elena came out to me, and we started texting regularly, nearly every day, sometimes on and off for hours. I was surprised at how easy it was to talk to her and how happy she was with my company. She was perceptive, witty, and charmingly opinionated.

The moments on the sidelines became more interesting than the fights. I learned that Elena kept a notepad document on her phone filled with scathing reviews of books she’d read, and that any dog or cat she encountered immediately worshipped her. I watched in bewilderment one day as someone’s dog came up to the bleachers and nuzzled her.

“Aww, he’s so stupid,” she said in dulcet tones that made it sound like the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. For some reason, this was how she always praised animals, her gentle stroking touch along their fur betraying her affection, making me smile. “Stupid idiot.”

My friend started to take shape in my imagination as something complex and wonderful. There was a surprising symmetry in our relationship. Elena’s fears about being a lesbian mirrored my fears about being trans, and we could talk to each other about things we were reluctant to explore with most others. She was, in so many ways, the best friend I’d longed for since I was a child.

***

Classes ended, and I returned home. My tastes had already shifted enormously — I was eating less than half as much as before, had lost most of my taste for meat, and now craved earthy, complex flavours, and oddly, eggs. I mastered every egg recipe I could — boiled eggs that peeled effortlessly, fried eggs with lacy brown edges and jammy yolks, egg fried rice with separated yolks and whites as bright as summer — and it soothed me.

And, of course, I craved pickles, too.

It had been a long time since I’d been in the kitchen. When I was little, I spent most of my time with my mother, cooking, baking, or gardening, and took to it all so passionately that my father worried I was gay. I was good at cooking; it made me feel independent and capable. Indulging the senses, breathing in the smells of the kitchen, was when I felt most real. Now that I was using the food I cooked to literally build myself a new body, the experience felt genuinely profound.

By then, the transformations my body had gone through were almost unbelievable, and each morning, I’d wake up to a miracle. The feeling of my body against the sheets had changed, and my whole sense of myself was altered. I felt lighter, softer, and my weight was distributed differently. I surprised myself every time my breasts pressed into my pillow. Little movements I made were strangely fluid, and sure enough, I actually had become an inch shorter. Things felt right, at last. Just lying in bed as the sun filtered in and feeling the way my blanket brushed against my ankles as I moved was enough to fill me with contentment and peace.

Incredibly, I’d stopped mentally separating myself and my body. If my foot touched something, I was touching it. Until that moment, I’d been feeling like I was piloting my body as a vehicle. But if I was my body, I slowly realized, then when people looked at my body, they were looking at me.

I cowered in my blankets. My desires, which had declined as dramatically as my appetite, were returning, too, and the recognition of my sexuality was overwhelming. I still loved other women — but it felt different, now, more intense, more emotional, more personal.

As I plodded through gentle fantasies, which now included my own body, I gradually came to realize what I wanted most was to eat and be eaten. The tenderness of being tasted by a lover, the gentle lift of someone's tongue against me — the idea of these things made my whole body thrum with vulnerability. I’d never hackled at this before, never felt these washes of warmth which sent my head rolling back into my pillow. Everything — every single thing — had to be learned over again, and I wanted help.

Two ironies stabbed me. I didn't have a vulva. And even if I got one, there was that nasty rumour I'd read once, deep in some forgotten forum — was it really true that the surgery would make me taste horrible? It was surely just a vicious little lie; my own transition had already disproved dozens of those. But the thought of looking up at a lover's face only to watch her features tighten with disgust —

Those were nights when I couldn't sleep.

📺 Stay tuned for Part II of Lira’s story, coming to your inbox next week!

Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk.

If this piece struck you, please consider supporting a local organization that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities! Often understaffed and underfunded, these groups are vital, and if you've been feeling helpless, there is always meaningful work to be done if you're willing to learn about your local support network.

You can also help by donating to the Trans Lifeline project, which operates a hotline for trans people to speak safely to other trans people if in crisis. And if you have trans or nonbinary loved ones, a hot meal can work wonders in dark times, when cooked with love.

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By Zoë Johnson for our BODY issue

I drafted this brief history of forks while editing Lara Mohammed’s beautiful piece on eating with her hands. Growing up as a second-generation British-Iraqi woman, Lara was taught that forks were essential to “proper” table manners, only to realize later that this conflicted with the eating traditions of her Iraqi heritage. Her piece, which traces the shame she felt around eating with her hands back to colonial ideas of civility, sent me down a rabbit hole: When and why did people in the UK start using forks? And how did this utensil become so entangled with ideas of superiority, refinement, and colonial control?

As it turns out, the link between cutlery and “polite” eating is relatively recent and, as frequent FFJ readers might expect, deeply political. What we now think of as table manners in many Western countries evolved to discipline bodies, especially those of women, the poor, and the colonized. In the context of our BODY issue, the fork’s journey is a reminder that eating has always been a bodily act shaped by social power that dictates whose hands are allowed at the table, and how they’re expected to move.

The earliest forks were two-pronged, used as tools for cooking rather than moving food from plate to mouth, but they made their first appearance as table implements in the noble courts of the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire in about the 7th century. By the 10th century, they had become common among the upper, monied classes in the region.

When Maria Argyropoulina, the niece of Byzantine Emperor Basil II, married Giovanni, son of Pietro Orseolo II, the Doge of Venice in 1004, she brought with her a set of gold forks, insisting that they be used at her wedding feast. This behaviour was decried by local clergy for its decadence.

"God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers," one reportedly said. "Therefore, it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”

Like many women who came before her — and after — Argyropoulina’s manners were the subject of intense public scrutiny and understood as a reflection of her lack of morality and social worth. Argyropoulina died of the plague a few years later. Many years after that, an Italian monk, Saint Peter Damian, allegedly suggested that her death was God’s revenge after she so insulted him by eating with a fork.1

Despite this moral condemnation, the practice of eating with forks persisted quietly in parts of the Mediterranean. By the 1400s, members of Italy’s upper class were increasingly using forks at mealtimes. This may have been in part due to the influence of Arab and Byzantine traditions that continued to shape courtly life, aesthetics, and cuisine. The Renaissance also brought a renewed interest in bodily refinement and classical elegance, and forks became associated with ideals of grace and order.

They then spread France through another royal marriage, this time between Catherine de Medici and Henry II in 1533. Popular lore attributes Catherine with bringing not just forks but a whole host of Italian table manners, culinary techniques, and aesthetic sensibilities to the French court. The earliest known mention of Catherine de Medici as the source of Italy’s culinary sway in France appears in the 1754 Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The entry on “cuisine” casts haute cuisine as indulgent and effeminate, attributing its arrival to a wave of Italian courtiers who, it claims, brought their elaborate sauces and extravagant cooking styles to Catherine’s table — and, by extension, to France. While food historians have debunked this as a myth, the endurance of the story itself is revealing. Whether or not Catherine actually transformed French dining, the fact that she was blamed for its perceived decadence reflects a familiar pattern: women at court were often cast as the agents of cultural change, and simultaneously held responsible for its supposed excesses.

From France, the fork’s path to Britain was more winding. An English traveller, Thomas Coryat, brought a fork back from Italy in 1608 and began using it publicly, defending it in his travelogue Coryat’s Crudities as a cleaner, more refined way to eat. Coryat’s fork use was ridiculed by many back home, who saw eating with such an implement as a “feminine affectation” of the Italians, and not fitting with the hyper-masculinity that has defined British (food) culture for centuries. In her essay in Feeding Desire on the sexual politics of cutlery, Carolin Young traces Briton’s perception of forks as having an “unsettlingly effeminate aura” through to 1897 when British sailors were still writing them off as unmanly.

By the Victorian era, forks had trickled down to the tables of Britain’s growing bourgeoisie, and the etiquette around dining had become of paramount importance to all of those seeking upward mobility within the rigid social hierarchy of the time. As such, table manners were also used as a tool of social exclusion or evidence of the superiority of the upper (white) classes. As Isabella Beeton explains in the famous 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Book on Household Management:

“Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines.”

This was not just a quip but a claim to civility, empire, and control — the fork, in this framing, stood as a badge of belonging to the “dining” class of empire-builders.

More than 150 years later, the fork, as Lara describes in her recent FFJ essay, is still wielding power over people. I saw this most clearly while studying at Oxford, attending formal dinners in the grand halls of the University’s famed colleges. Seated at long tables beneath vaulted ceilings echoing with Latin graces, surrounded by portraits of long-dead white men, each place setting was guarded by multiple forks — fish fork, entrée fork, dessert fork. It was impossible not to feel that these tiny gates were there to guard class divisions, to make those who belong feel superior, and those who don’t, uneasy. Lara’s piece reminded me that these feelings aren’t incidental; they’re the point. Forks, after all, have always been about more than eating. They are tools of social choreography, used to signal civility, superiority, and control. And yet, their history also reminds us how constructed those signals are — and how, by understanding this, we can choose to challenge and rewrite the rules of the table in ways that honour all bodies and cultures.

Zoë Johnson is a founding editor and illustrator of Feminist Food Journal. She also works as the communications manager at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin.

Editor’s note: It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since our pitch window for BODY closed and we read the first seeds of the thoughtful, surprising stories that have bloomed throughout this issue. While BODY will soon begin to wind down, we’re not quite there yet — there’s still more to come! But in case you need to catch up, here’s the full list of what we’ve published so far:

• Bottomless: A journey through grief, gas, and gut instincts by Shena Cavelo

• Questioning Lumps: Encountering obstacles in a smoothening world by Clare Michaud

• Esophageal Yearning: this sounds violent / but it’s fun by Taylor Hunsberger

• Where Does All the Food Go? On body size and Nigerian beauty standards by Rejoice Isaac

• Pregnancy in the Time of Health Abundance: On pregnancy fitness influencers, algorithms, and breast-is-best pressure by Sarah Duignan

• Bite Me: Cosmetic cannibalism and selling identity through scent by Lily Wakeley

• Milking Bodies to Make A Nation: Women and cows as founding mothers by Apoorva Sripathi (from MILK)

• Be the Boar: Sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm by Katy Overstreet (from SEX)

• Soy Boy: How soy milk went from proto superfood to alt-right rallying cry by Julia Norza (from MILK)

• To Eat is To Perform: Reclaiming eating practices, one handful at a time by Lara Mohammed

• Sugar on My Tongue: How flavoured orgasms taught me I don’t need permission to feel good by Guilia Alvarez-Katz

And if you like something you’ve read… please do share it with a friend!

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By Giulia Alvarez-Katz for our BODY issue | Guest edited by Austin Romeo

When I come, it’s like there’s sugar on my tongue. I taste dense sweetness, like overripe plums or the jammy interior of an expensive date. It’s not a memory or a daydream. My taste buds feel far too active for an absent stimulus. The flavour rises with the orgasm itself — like a sneeze you can feel building deep in your core. At first, it’s subtle, like licking a few sugar crystals off your thumb after pouring them into coffee. The sweetness intensifies as I near climax, melting on my tongue like hard candy. At the peak, it’s almost unpleasant— erotically so — before retreating as my body softens. When it’s over, my mouth returns to blank.

The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I worried I was having a stroke. The third time, I blamed my overactive imagination. Then I left it alone.

I’ve always had a habit of filing away my more mysterious physical experiences as flights of fancy — psychosomatic, emotional, or just plain weird. My fruit-flavoured climaxes were no exception. I enjoyed hundreds— maybe thousands — without ever probing their origins. But adulthood brought a shift. I became better at noticing what I was feeling, at naming it in the aftermath. Eventually (and not without a recurring fear that I had a brain tumour), I got curious.

The flavours feel too real to be imagined — like they have weight, memory, and intention. They always taste the same, like mature fruit. And they always take place under the same conditions.1 That uncanny consistency made me hesitate. What if it wasn’t my imagination? What if this were a real phenomenon, something with a name, something outside my control?

***

My journey began the obvious way: a Google search of “orgasms flavour.” Big mistake. So much porn. And none of it was helpful in terms of understanding my predicament. Eventually, I added “synesthesia” to the mix, hoping for something scientific. Or at least PG-13.

Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon where one sensory input “awakens” another. In grapheme-colour synesthesia — the most common form — letters and numbers elicit colour perception. I have this kind; I’d never thought of it as much more than a neat party trick, the weird brain equivalent of being double-jointed — useless and oddly satisfying. But now I wondered: could it help explain my plum-flavoured orgasms?

I dug into rarer forms like lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where words or emotions trigger taste. Still, nothing quite fit. Gustatory synesthesia is rare to begin with. The idea that it would show up in the middle of sex? The research — in language that was dry, sexless, and scrubbed of anything sticky or strange — was too sparse to confirm. It felt like trying to Google a fever dream. So I turned inward instead. Why was I so obsessed with naming this experience? Why did I need to understand it so badly?

Perhaps it’s because, deep down, I felt guilty. The idea that I might be the only person alive tasting ripe fruit mid-orgasm? It felt wrong. Like I was dipping my hand in too many pots, taking too much from life, enjoying my body to an unacceptable degree. If I could prove this was a brain quirk — neurological, not moral — maybe I could call it science instead of sin.

***

Sex and shame entered my life like a ton of bricks during puberty. I remember the exact day it happened: I was eleven, new to a school, when a boy in my class grabbed his crotch in my direction. I burst into tears. That morning, I was blissfully unaware of sex. By evening, it felt like a threat — something I needed to protect myself from. And for some reason, I felt that was my fault.

Food and I had a similarly fraught relationship. I inhabited a body larger than society liked, and I was already taught that pleasure was something I should suffer for. But food? It still tasted good. Bread, ice cream, and chocolate chips eaten in secret — I never stopped wanting them. Sex, though? Sex was less dependable. It was riskier and messier. If both food and sex could kill me, I figured I’d rather go out having eaten something decent. But in spite of their differences, food and sex became sources of shame that fed off each other in their call for me to restrict myself, to make myself small. The message I took from both: pleasure equals bad.

Then as a teenager, I found “tumblr feminism”, replete with SlutWalks, Audre Lorde quotes and Pussy Riot. Suddenly, there was a digestible framework to understand my sexuality as a woman and its corresponding shame. In college, I even had a brief moment of sexual liberation, emboldened by my nascent feminism to chase casual hookups and one-night stands without worrying about shame or rejection. But culture doesn’t stay still. Eventually, tumblr feminism died, and uglier things came to replace it — tradwife aesthetics, the algorithmic return of purity culture, and a sexual predator for a president. My country’s politics careened rightwards.

***

Today, we’re at a precarious cultural moment when it comes to pleasure. The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 exposed the raw truth that our bodies were never truly ours. When it was overturned, it felt like confirmation that my brief moment of sexual freedom in college was just that — brief. Something I — or any woman, for that matter — might never experience in the same way again.

The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t stand alone. Its fall has been flanked by other challenges to seemingly immovable structures that empowered me to fuck freely: birth control, divorce, access to healthcare. What once felt like the scaffolding of my sexual liberty suddenly looked flimsy.

In response, my sexuality began to shrink. I learned to keep it to myself. I stopped taking thirst traps and selfies, or really any photos of myself at all. I retrained myself for sexual anonymity, to publicly operate my body as un-sexually as possible. I told myself it was about dignity. But deep down, I knew it was about fear.

And sex wasn’t the only liberation that felt like it was receding. After decades of cultural trends towards body positivity — buffeted, still, by societal contempt for fat bodies — the thin ideal came back in a big way. This time not through diets, but drugs. GLP-1 medications like Ozempic have swept through American culture, dulling both hunger and libido. One in eight Americans, studies say, have tried them. Some users report experiencing apathy: cherished activities no longer bring joy, and any kind of craving — including for sex — is muted.

The popularity of these drugs — and the ease with which they were embraced — created the sense that now, perhaps, there’s no longer an excuse not to be thin. This message has reawakened an old voice within me. The urge to restrict came back. My carefully patched relationship with food began to fray.

Today’s United States is a context in which desire is stifled and pleasure is dangerous. Acting on what you want feels subversive — like a small betrayal of the system. What happens when your pleasures are framed as excess, your appetite as pathology? In that landscape, the mere act of wanting becomes fraught. Enjoying what you get? Borderline criminal. And flavoured orgasms — my ability to experience taste and climax simultaneously — felt like a step too far towards pure gluttony. An orgasm is one thing. A good flavour is another, but both at once? Excess. Bad.

Part of my drive to find a scientific explanation2 for my flavoured orgasms was to relieve my culpability for experiencing such self-indulgent pleasure all at once. If I could prove it was my brain’s fault — some glitch of synesthesia, totally out of my control — then I might be spared the judgment. Maybe even my own. Deep down, I knew this kind of pleasure was my birthright, radical even. But it’s hard not to feel worn down by the endlessly whirring machines that would rather sculpt us into lean, obedient female vessels than let us feel good for too long.

***

Even when I try to lean into hedonism — good food, good sex— I often finish feeling ashamed and guilty. Like I’ve raided the pantry for a chocolate bar at midnight and now wait to be caught and scolded.

Flavoured orgasms make it worse. No one is scolding me, but I still feel I must navigate desire in code — in subtleties, in metaphors, in acceptable forms. I can eat and drink and climax to my heart’s desire, but to keep my dignity intact, I must be silent. I do not speak my wants aloud, because somehow saying them feels worse than having them. Be greedy and lustful, sure — but only in the privacy of your own home, with the volume turned down. That’s how you preserve the illusion of femininity.

Of course, this silence isn’t enforced equally. Years of disordered eating and an Adderall prescription have put me in a much smaller body than the one I grew up in. When I was bigger, I was expected to manage my appetite more strictly. That management was gendered, racialized, classed. It extended to food, sex, and how I moved through the world. People treat this thinner version of me differently. They assume I’ve figured it out.

Sociologist Samantha Kwan calls this “body management.” In Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life, she writes:

“the thin body is such a coveted cultural standard that it is an unchallenged norm…those without privilege must negotiate daily interactions, sometimes feeling shame, guilt, and anger because of their bodies.”

In this smaller body, I do less managing than I did in a larger one, not that it resolves the core conflict: the tension between appetite and acceptability, between wanting and being punished for wanting. Without the weight loss, I might have never felt free enough to seek this kind of pleasure — even if secretly.

***

Writing this essay has forced me to trace the contours of my shame. To ask: why was I so hell-bent on making my flavoured orgasms make sense? Why was I so eager to file them under science, to drag them out of the realm of sensation and into something peer-reviewed?

Eventually, I saw it. The drive to explain was itself a form of self-inflicted misogyny — a defence mechanism dressed up as inquiry. A quiet, conditioned belief that this kind of embodied pleasure required a permission slip.

By insisting I couldn’t be responsible for my pleasure, I bought into the same logic that says women shouldn’t feel anything to begin with. I wanted to believe I hadn’t chosen this pleasure, that it had happened to me. That I was still innocent. That I could still be pure. But the desire to be seen as innocent wasn’t neutral. It was part of the heteropatriarchal machinery, which is a machinery of whiteness, too.

As a white Latin American woman, I’ve often felt pulled to distance myself from my own Latinidad. To chase the purity associated with whiteness. Maybe that’s what I was doing: trying not to seem gluttonous, deviant, too much — traits so often projected onto racialized bodies.

***

The real work begins when we stop asking pleasure to explain itself — when we can create distance between shame and our bodies’ sensory experiences of joy, whether epicurean or lustful. When we can live in the moment, not the apology. That’s when pleasure becomes power.

I found guidance in adrienne maree brown’s collection, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, which offered an alternative to my grasping need for absolution. brown defines pleasure activism as “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”

For brown, seeking and enjoying pleasure is not indulgent but radical — especially for those of us who fall outside the norms of whiteness, thinness, and able-bodiedness. She writes: “In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression… Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good.”

brown reminds us how capitalist systems rely on dissatisfaction — on people spending endlessly in search of satiety that never arrives. As she said in an interview with the ACLU:

“There's something there [in an orgasm] that gives you a power that no one else can touch.”

As a fat woman, says brown, orgasms are the way that her body communicates that she is worthy of pleasure, even if the world tells her that she is undesirable and undeserving of it. In her view, collectively assuming pleasure as our birthright is a key step toward building a more joyful and liberated world.

Reframing my sugar-coated orgasms as part of pleasure activism is helping me enjoy them without flinching. No apology, no justification — just the thrill of being in my body, and believing that’s enough. In a world bent on policing what women’s and trans people's bodies should feel, pleasure becomes a kind of defiance. All bodies deserve it.

Maybe the first step towards a life of pleasure activism is a quiet decision to stop feeling bad. Maybe it’s a conversation. Maybe it’s a riot. For me, the first step was writing a novel-length Grand Theft Auto fan fiction complete with thirty fruit-flavoured orgasms described in loving, gastronomic detail, which I started working on while I was writing this piece.

After all, power has many forms. Mine just happens to taste like figs.

Giulia Alvarez-Katz is a writer and content creator living in Queens, New York. Find her at giulia-ak.com

Austin Romeo is a contributing editor with FFJ. Austin edits essays where appetite tangles with nature and desire. He hones every line until it earns its place and always keeps the door open for gloriously unhinged pitches. Learn more about Austin here, or get in touch with him at austinromeo@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.

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Further reading

Brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure activism. AK Press.

Buerkle, C. Wesley. (2009). “Metrosexuality can Stuff it: Beef Consumption as (Heteromasculine) Fortification.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 29:1, 77–93.

Brang, D., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why Do People Hear Colours and Taste Words?” PLoS Biology, 9:1, p. e1001205. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001205

Davidauskis, A. (2015). “‘How Beautiful Women Eat’: Feminine Hunger in American Popular Culture.” Feminist Formations, 27(1), 167–189. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43860782

DeLaet, D. L., & Mills, E. (2018). “Discursive Silence as a Global Response to Sexual Violence: From Title IX to Truth Commissions.” Global Society, 32(4), 496–519. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2018.1516200

Dennis, A. (2008). “‘The Spectacle of Her Gluttony’: The Performance of Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian Grotesque in Angela Carter’s ‘Nights at the Circus.’” Journal of Modern Literature, 31(4), 116–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167573

Douglas, E.R. (2013). “Eat or Be Eaten: A Feminist Phenomenology of Women as Food.” PhaenEx, 8(2):243.

English, D., Hollibaugh, A., & Rubin, G. (1982). “Talking Sex: A Conversation on Sexuality and Feminism.” Feminist Review, 11, 40–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1394826

Jovanovski, N. (2022). “Feminine Hunger: A Brief History of Women’s Food Restriction Practices in the West.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences (pp. 1877–1895). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7255-2_29

Kwan, S. (2010). “Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life.” Feminist Formations, 22(2), 144–166. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40835375

Richer, F., Beaufils, G.-A., & Poirier, S. (2011). “Bidirectional lexical–gustatory synesthesia.” Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1738–1743. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.12.015

Simner, J. (2007). “Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11:1, 23–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.010

Sobal, J. (2004). “Sociological Analysis of the Stigmatisation of Obesity.” In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, ed. John Germov and Lauren Williams, 187-204. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vance, C. S., & Snitow, A. B. (1984). “Toward a Conversation about Sex in Feminism: A Modest Proposal.” Signs, 10(1), 126–135. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174243

By Lara Mohammad for our BODY issue | Guest edited by

One evening in Doha — where I was this time last year, on a six-month internship — I went with some friends to dinner at an Iraqi restaurant at Souq Waqif. We ate classic stews — the kinds you usually eat at your mum’s house. One had white beans (fasoolia beytha) and one had okra (bamya). Both were simmered in tomato broth with lamb chunks and served with white basmati rice. We shared tabbouleh and an “Iraqi salad,” which I’d correctly guessed would be like the iceberg lettuce-based salads that my mum used to make for us when we were younger, and had some Iraqi dolma (rice-stuffed vegetables); one brave soul even ordered pacha (stewed sheep’s head) to try for the first time. Finally, we ordered masgouf, a dish of butterflied carp, brushed in a tamarind marinade and mounted on spikes before being cooked on a fire.

When the masgouf finally arrived, it was butterflied from head to tail, glistening with the sweet marinade, cushioned on either side with a sliced white onion and parsley salad and topped with lemon wedges. Accompanied by complimentary stacks of khobez tanoor — a large chewy flatbread cooked in a vertical clay oven — and small bowls of amba (a spiced mango pickle), the dish beckoned us to dig in. But I hesitated.

Traditionally, masgouf is eaten using your hands. This makes sense, as the fish is extremely bony and fingers are the perfect tools for picking out tiny bones. Yet I felt shy about eating this way in public.

I couldn’t help but watch all the cargo-clad tourists pass by us on the busy streets of the souq. I thought I could feel their eyes on me. The tables around us were mostly occupied by locals, who, I’m sure, knew that using your hands was the proper way to enjoy masgouf, but even they made me feel self-conscious. Afraid of being judged, I turned to my dining companions, all fellow Arabs.

“Masgouf should be eaten with your hands,” I said aloud. The table was too distracted by the food to respond, but as we all began eating, I looked around to see some of the men and women around me digging into the carp with their hands, while others chose to use cutlery. Despite my hesitations, nobody batted an eyelid when I used my fingers to pull the bones away from the tender flesh before popping each delicious bite, with onion and bread, into my mouth.

***

Masgouf has been one of my favourite dishes since I first tried it at home in London.

My mum happened to know somebody who knew somebody who was grilling it in their garden, and we ordered some for pickup.1 My sister and I were sitting at the kitchen table for lunch when my mum served it, as we might do on any other day we happened to be together — aside from the unfamiliar fish sitting in the middle of us. My mum brought out a jar of amba, which at the time my sister and I were only vaguely familiar with, and spooned it into ramekins. This amba is made from mangoes, she told us. It’s an important part of this meal.

She also told us that, unlike most other food we ate at home, this strange fish would be traditionally eaten by hand — making it, along with chicken drumsticks and pizza, one of the only exceptions to her strict rules that equated cutlery use with good table manners. At first, I found the concept very unusual, considering it was a whole fish, and an oily one at that. But in the end, I loved the lunch’s eccentricity, the tang of tamarind it left on my tongue and and grease it left on my greedy fingers as I hungrily scooped it into my mouth.

To this day, part of what I love about masgouf is how it makes me feel connected to my Iraqi culture. As somebody who has lived their whole life in diaspora, I, like so many others, have often felt like I live between two worlds. I was born and raised in London by my mother, a first-generation Iraqi who came to the UK with her family after the Gulf War in the late 90s. My sister and I went through the British school system, “making” us British in a plethora of ways. But at home, there were lots of practices our mum maintained that were very Iraqi — including the food we ate and the language we spoke. My mother always tried to instill a strong sense of Arab identity in my sister and me, even if our exposure to it was uneven. Afraid of losing her culture in a country which is far from home and embraces some values she does not share, when we were growing up, she always reminded us that we are Iraqi, not English.2

Though my sister and I have never even visited Baghdad, we understand what it means to be Iraqi through encounters with masses of Iraqi women over the years, who have fed, cared for, doted on, and raised me in part. My mother and her friends taught us what meals are often served at home and which are more appropriate for azeemas (parties). It was from them that we learned how to dance, tell stories, and show kindness and love. They wanted to foster a sense of pride in a culture we could have easily dismissed by living in the UK.

The contexts through which I was exposed to “Iraqi-ness” tended to be feminine and social, leaving gaps in my cultural knowledge.3 I often feel like there is so much that I don’t understand about being Iraqi, which is perhaps why experiences like eating masgouf are important to me. They make me feel closer to the culture I’ve inherited from my parents. Because masgouf is not a dish you typically make at home, before that evening in Qatar, I’d only enjoyed it a few times after eating it that day on our kitchen table. And never had I eaten it so publicly as at that Doha restaurant.

***

When we were young, my mother consistently told us off for speaking English with her4, cooked us the meals she grew up with, and regaled us with stories about her life in Baghdad. However, when it came to table manners, she rejected Iraqi traditions more than I think she realized.

Iraqi eating culture has shifted significantly over the past hundred years. Like many other countries around the world, in Iraq, it is traditional to eat with your hands. However, by the time my mum was growing up, using cutlery had become far more commonplace (in Baghdad at least), and at my mum’s table in London, cutlery was a must. I remember her explaining that “good” manners are defined by using a fork and knife correctly to take small, elegant bites, subsequently (but not intentionally) implying that our traditional practices are improper. Although we often ate traditional Arabic dishes in the homes of friends and family, we always used cutlery. When invited to an azeema, for example, it would have been considered a grave faux pas to eat dolma with your hands. Perhaps this is because of a loss of the tradition of eating with one's hands experienced among the last generation or so of Arabs, both in the UK and in the Arab world, who collectively feel shame for not adhering to what I now realize are Western norms of dining etiquette.

In the Middle East, as well as parts of South Asia and Africa, eating from a communal plate (seyneyah) by hand is common and symbolizes a culture of hospitality. “Cultural norms and taboos do not exist in a vacuum — they are often rooted in a wider belief system,” writes Shahnaz Ahsan in “Who needs cutlery anyway?”. Indeed, in the Arab world, Islam has played an important role in shaping eating practices.

Though it is not explicitly written in the Quran, the holy book urges Muslims to live by the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH)5 example, and he is said to have eaten with his right hand as it encourages mindfulness, community, and gratitude. The Sunnah — the sayings, actions, and approvals of the Prophet (PBUH), which outline the ideal but non-obligatory way for Muslims to live — established a nuanced code of dining etiquette long before Western imperial powers exerted influence over Iraq. These rules are vividly illustrated in Al-Kitab al-Bukhala (The Book of Misers, also known as Avarice and the Avaricious), a satirical collection by the Arab polymath Al-Jahiz, born in Basra in 776 AD. In it, he humorously critiques various types of ill-mannered dinner guests: the snatcher, the sponger, the crammer, the center-hollower, the mouth-full speaker, the excessive dipper, and the finger-licker — each provoking distinct forms of disgust at the table.

The rules of eating in Iraq changed in part due to the influence of the British, which began in the 18th century. In 1789, the first British residency was established in Baghdad; soon after, a British consul opened in Basra. For the next hundred years or so, Britain’s interest in Iraq primarily related to trade and maintaining influence in the Persian Gulf region through the East India Company, but it did not involve direct colonial rule or military occupation. But at the end of World War I, Britain established a colonial regime in Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, enforcing military control, reshaping the state structure, and suppressing Iraqi resistance. The country remained under British control until 1932, when the Kingdom of Iraq was formally recognized as an independent state.6

Prior to colonization, there was a long history of appreciation for Arab craftsmanship and scientific study in the West, from textiles and tilework to geometry and medicine. However, the introduction of colonial narratives shifted attitudes about Arab cultures towards perceptions of incivility. As in all the lands brutally colonized by the British Empire, the supposed “inferiority” of local populations — measured with a yardstick that included one’s eating practices — allowed the British to wage campaigns of extraction and dispossession under the guise of teaching native populations “civility” (e.g., table manners and the English language).

In A Taste of Empire: How Britain's Obsession with Food Shaped the Modern World, Lizzie Collingham uses the case of India to demonstrate this phenomenon. She notes how, after major uprisings against British rule in 1857, expectations of how East India Company officials should present themselves changed. Gone were those who “behaved like an Indian grandee”; they were replaced by individuals embodying ideals of polite, middle-class British society. The goal was to bring India into the modern age by replacing “disturbing” Indian practices with British “moral superiority” and “prestige”. In the colonies, then, “British men and women were permanently on display to the ‘natives’”, expected to serve as models of behaviour in all aspects of life — including table manners. Collingham emphasizes that “the colonial dining room was seen as a stage where the official put on a performance of civilization.” Handbooks like The Englishwoman in India (1864) advised British women to ship their Wedgwood tableware and cutlery to the colonies so that their dining tables could serve as examples of proper British customs.7 By presenting British practices as aspirational and local customs as backward, colonial authorities further legitimized their control.

While much writing on diasporic foodways has focused on ingredients and dishes, how we eat is just as significant a connection to our ancestors. Ingredients may survive colonization, but eating practices appear more easily changed. Iraq, of course, does not share the same history as India, but the nature in which British officials approached the local culture there is suggestive of their attitude towards the entire empire, with all the damage it caused. As I get older, I’m starting to realize that the shame I felt digging into masgouf with my fingers — and my mother’s fixation on (Western) table manners, and rejection of traditional ways of eating — is driven by a fear of being seen as uncivilized, a fear fuelled by a long history of British imperialism and the racism that continues to underpin it. These systems of oppression have shaped the ways that I, my mother, and so many others like us have abandoned the set of rules that dictated proper manners and eating etiquette in Iraq long before Western imperialism.

***

Food is a pleasure and a joy, but for many of us in the diaspora, it is also a performance. Identity, in a way, is a performance too. Growing up in London and attending a majority-white school, I didn’t outright reject my culture, but I also didn’t wear it openly. The way I engaged with food, language, and music was shaped by an awareness that certain things marked me as different. I listened to 2000s Arabic pop in my mum’s car — Amr Diab, Kathim Al Sahir, Nancy Ajram, Sherine — but rarely played it outside. I grew up eating traditional Iraqi/Kurdish8 food every week at my grandmother’s house, but always with a fork and knife. At the time, I didn’t realize that these small hesitations were part of a larger, inherited experience — one shaped by colonial narratives that have long deemed certain cultural practices, like eating with your hands, as "uncivilized”.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to see things differently. The way I feel about re-embracing my culture is not unique to me — it’s something I’ve seen reflected in so many young people in the diaspora. There is a collective shift, a growing pride in our traditions that were once dismissed. Artists like Elyanna — who became the first performer to sing an entire set in Arabic at Coachella in 2023 — and Saint Levant, who performed there in 2024, are examples of this cultural reclamation. We are no longer content with diluting ourselves to fit Western expectations; instead, we are embracing our histories in their full, unapologetic form.

In a world where Arabs are vilified, dehumanized, and reduced to one-dimensional narratives, I now understand how important it is to wear my culture on my sleeve. Not just for myself, but so others might see us as we truly are — not as subjects of an orientalist gaze, but as people with rich, living traditions. One step towards this is being open to experiencing food differently. Though I grew up immersed in my parents' culture, living in diaspora means there are always gaps in my interpretation of it. Reclaiming traditional practices can feel difficult, especially when they contradict the ways we've been taught to act. Eating by hand is one example, but the effects of imperialist and colonial narratives extend into so many parts of daily life, often in ways we don’t even consciously recognize. Becoming aware of these influences and being open to re-embracing what was lost is the path to reclaiming our culture in the diaspora.

An Iraqi friend of mine still eats stews and rice by hand at home — foods that, growing up, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine eating without a spoon and fork. His mother pours the stew onto the rice and mixes it before serving, and everyone tucks in. As I begin to tap back into the practice, I’m finding eating with my hands to be a far more mindful experience than using utensils. Feeling each morsel in my fingers makes me feel so much more connected to my food, whether it’s finger food or stew. Each bite is tastier, and some people suggest that eating this way may even improve digestion. So next time I’m served masgouf, I will dig in with my fingers — without hesitation, without reservation, and with the full knowledge that in doing so, I am honouring the generations before me and those yet to come.

Lara Mohammad is a British-Iraqi History graduate based in London and the creator of ZestyZaytoon, a blog dedicated to her love for food.

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Read MILK

By Julia Norza

I was born lactose intolerant. Lactose-free milk made me sick, too, I think: it’s hard to pluck the truth out of the web of family hypochondriasis that had me, age nine, always taking homeopathic treatment for something. What I do remember is being an early adopter of soy milk. Soy milk was free from pesky animal proteins and grotesque feed residue. It was organic, which was better for you. It came in flavours like Vanilla, and Very Vanilla.

I remember the face of the Silk carton better than any box of breakfast cereal. The bottom right corner had a stamp from the Non-GMO Project, which promised that the soy was free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). There were offers of this much calcium, that much protein, and, on the left side, “A Promise From Silk”: nothing artificial, everything grown responsibly on rolling verdant fields photographed at early sunset.

The message was clear: Soy milk wasn’t just the ideal choice for my health — it was saving the planet.

In the years that followed, my mother would replace half our pantry and medicine cabinet with the sorts of products whose logos feature beech leaves in dancelike configurations, purchased from American grocery stores across the Mexicali border. I played guinea pig for an increasingly involved series of alternative health experiments, from Bach flower remedies to magnet therapy, thankfully all harmless in their inefficacy. (I consider myself lucky: I could’ve grown up in the era of horse dewormer.)

Then, in my early teens, soy milk was gone from the pantry. My mother swapped it out for almond milk as fulminantly as she had in our original move away from cow. Why? To me, almond milk tasted worse, and it was more expensive.

Well, soy milk has phytoestrogens.

As far as this particular scare was concerned, the operating word was estrogen — the hormone responsible for forming secondary female sexual characteristics in humans. It wasn’t healthy for a strong, young man like me to be putting all that girlhood in my body; that’s as much of a response as I remember getting when I asked my mother why we were experimenting with drinks I’d never even seen before, and which now dominated the fridge aisle by the pallet. All of the promises of health and ecological righteousness from soy had been projected onto almond and coconut. They were even sold by the same brand: New great taste, same no-cow, and zero risk of feminization.

At thirteen years old, I had already inherited the pop-science myth that would determine the course of the milk market for decades to come: Estrogen is bad, and testosterone is good. (And I learned it from a woman, no less — internalized misogyny runs deep.)

Evidently, my mother was too late to save me from soy. Today, I’m in my second year of taking daily estradiol valerate, an actual feminizing hormone. I often find myself thinking of that bygone soy milk era. Wouldn’t it be grand if hormone replacement therapy really was prescription-free, supermarket-accessible, and Very Vanilla?

Like so many 21st-century trans people, I've transitioned concurrently with a rising Western reactionary movement, masses of neoconservatives campaigning for a “return to tradition.” I came to accept my gender identity a little before the 2018 US election. I left the closet a year later, by which time the 45th president had encouraged cult-like, neo-fascist groups to take to the streets by the hundreds, with the express mission of stamping out people like me. As these groups gained notoriety, I was one of the few people not confused by their favourite neologism: “Soy boy”.

Conservatives Against Estrogen

As a shorthand for failed masculinity, soy boy — a pejorative with origins in imperialist, colonialist, and racist sentiment that sought to emasculate the Asian, soy-eating “other” — has several contemporary acceptations. The (relatively) less derogatory usage evokes urbanite white-collar males, stuffed full of liberalism and five-dollar dairy-free lattes. This boy’s imagined sexual orientation is of little import. The crux of the insult is soy as a proxy for the weak of body and fat of pocket, who consciously eschew animal protein and its cultural ties to manliness. (Exempli gratia: This photo of animal rights activists excited about plant-based KFC, which was rapidly meme-fied into an exploitable ‘soyjak’1.) No man in their right mind would choose this fate, of course; the description accompanying a  $19.99 “Proud Soy Boy” T-shirt on Amazon even goes as far as to suggest that endocrine disruption is to blame for men’s embrace of the “liberal agenda”.

More overt soy boy caricatures are, well, not boys at all. The true, and deeply transphobic meaning of soy boy is, simply, a transfeminine person. In a now-deleted video parodying anti-fascism, the alt-right personality James Allsup claimed that soy milk will “give you a nice, effeminate body.” Given my family’s history with alternative beverages, the idea that soy could forcibly transform you into a girl was not new to me. What did surprise me was seeing the beliefs once espoused by my mother, a nouveau-traditional housewife, being wielded by a wave of violent conservatives who, by the sounds of it, would prefer cisgender women confined to kitchens and transgender women to graves.

For alt-right conservatives, theories on the decline of masculinity are de rigeur. The Proud Boys, for example, believe masturbation is the West’s ruin — all those men taking testosterone out of their body, and not even for procreation! Variants of this thought can be found everywhere, from the best-selling rhetoric of pickup artists to the throngs of anonymous profiles with Greek sculptures for profile photos that I’ve blocked on Twitter over the last half-decade. Reactionary thought enshrines social constructs, such as gender roles, as essential qualia. When social constructs fall, it appeals to the “rules of nature” as immutable bedrock (as if these, too, are not social constructs). 

The mythology of phytoestrogens, then, is unsurprising. What’s strange is its origin and evolution. Over a decade, soy milk went from proto-superfood to the root of America’s gay evils, from holistic ambrosia to the ideological poison of Men Going Their Own Way. How did we so easily switch from reverence to villainization? 

Soy Milk and the Health and Food Industries: A Case of Whiplash

It all started with cholesterol. In 1995, the New England Journal of Medicine linked soy milk to reduced LDL and increased HDL (“bad” and “good” cholesterol, respectively). One year later, WhiteWave Inc. unveiled the first soy milk product to enter the United States market, and in 1999, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a health claim that allowed for soy milk to be marketed as a heart-healthy product. The same year, soy milk sales had skyrocketed by 600 percent. Soy milk, the industry claimed, strengthened bones; it staunched menopause symptoms, and it stopped breast cancer, prostate cancer, and heart attacks. And, of course, it made you lose weight, a point hammered home by the impressively low calorie count highlighted on the front of the box.

Health claims are the diet industry’s dominant spores. They pollinate not just food, but medicine and media, preying on the self-image these institutions collaborate to distort. And the industry preys primarily on women, among whom eating disorders are more common, and who have been historically subjected to more restrictive beauty standards. A health food that can make you lose weight? Yes, it’s true! Enter soy milk, the shiny new alternative to the full-fat cow stuff. Now go and stock up the pantry.

But the idea of soy as a food that was “good for us” died when it came to light that daidzein and genistein, the compounds responsible for soy milk’s miraculous properties, were phytoestrogens. On the chemical level, phytoestrogen molecules resemble estrogen, a pop-science fact that led to all sorts of malign implications. Suddenly soy milk didn’t prevent breast cancer, but in fact, caused it. It made us weak and listless and, worse, fat, by lowering our testosterone levels. It made men infertile, or didn’t — by their own admission, studies into the matter lack the size and quality control to draw meaningful conclusions. The same issues hold true for the quality of research done on all of these claims.

As I typed the preceding paragraph, I found myself tempted to follow up with a corollary: of course there were issues with the quality of research on the adverse effects of soy milk because the forces of Big Soy would have had an interest in stunting it. And there it is: The fear of an all-pervading economic and political system, in which information can’t be trusted, that reactionary thought takes advantage of. It’s not unjustified. Science has a history of being sponsored by interested parties, championed when its discoveries agree with market values and discredited when they don’t. In the United States, government-sponsored science has lied to the public and engaged in outright human experimentation too cruel to do justice to in this article.

Profiting Off Paranoia

Pointing out the profit incentives in science doesn’t mean that forces opposing scientific thought are acting without profit incentives.

Profit, in fact, is their singular uniting motive. Four years of podiuming a paranoid businessman as a president blessed the snake oil industry with bigger, better, and more profitable conspiracy theories than ever before. Suddenly, Alex Jones wants to sell you cures that don’t heal anything; so does the guy from the yoga studio whose sweat smells like patchouli.

Amidst this storm of conspira-noia, the myth of feminizing phytoestrogens changed hands. The health and food industries turned their backs on soy milk, which capitulated its market lead in 2013 to almond milk (which, it ought to be noted, was marketed just as aggressively as a weight loss product). In 2017, the FDA reneged on its official position that soy can reduce the risk of heart disease, saying it was now unconvinced by the quality of the studies it had once trumpeted. By 2020, oat milk, too, proved more profitable than soy. 

Along with the newfound lack of evidence for soy’s role in preventing heart disease, it’s hard to imagine that the legend of Evil Estrogen wasn’t at least somewhat to blame. Less bombastic scientific developments have been swept up and forgotten; the FDA continues to stand by its claim that soy can play a role in a healthy diet. But such scientific conclusions are too banal to clear its name. Having lost its superfood crown, the only role left for soy milk is a free non-dairy option in a Starbucks latte, and as a linguistic tool for marking those we fear as the other. 

The alt-right has weaponized the common “knowledge” that purportedly immutable “male” characteristics can be feminized with daily doses of estrogen. The idea that a mere milk alternative could change one’s gender, strangely, does nothing to defeat their bioessentialist thought. Rather, it has resulted in blaming a simple molecule for the rise of trans visibility, giving biological roots to a phenomenon that is in reality sociological. 

Misogynistic and anti-feminist groups like the Proud Boys, r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and incels (“involuntary celibates”) attraction theorists, all fall prey to the remnants of the same marketing tactics that lead women concerned for the health of their children and the planet to non-GMO superfoods: the world would work the way it’s meant to, if we could, in the words of Alex Jones, just stop “putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs gay.”

Soy milk was introduced to the right-wing in the incredulous tone of all conspiracy theories. From these origins, it spread through the charismatic leaders of alt-right radio shows and all-male hate groups, adding to their long list of beliefs about what makes men lesser. Finally, by the sheer virality that turned once-fringe conservatism into mainstream rhetoric, soy became a class of boys. Soy boys — with their alternative milks, feminal politics, and audacious gender-bending — encompass all those that have failed manhood, having been duped by soy just like the cisgender women who, a decade ago, were taken in by promises of heart health and flat bellies. 

The forces that created an amalgam of lies and bad science to market soy milk no longer have a use for the myth, but the myth remains. Pseudoscience shakes loose the shackles of its mad creators; and in the tradition of science fiction monsters, once irresponsibly created, it is impossible to contain, and preys on the alienated and the vulnerable.

Julia Norza is interested in borders: between countries, genders and minds. First-hand witnesses have described her work being featured in Blood Knife, An Injustice! Magazine, and Deconreconstruction.

Further reading

Shurtleff, W., & Aoyagi, A. (2013). History of Soymilk and Other Non-Dairy Milks (1226 to 2013). Soyinfo Center. <https://www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/166/Milk.pdf>

From our SEX issue

Paid subscribers can listen to an audio version of this piece here on our podcast.

By Katy Overstreet

We arrived at the pig farm in a rural area of western Denmark at precisely nine o’clock in the morning, just in time for kaffepause (coffee break). Having left the world of flat whites and croissants behind in Copenhagen, my colleague Inger Anneberg and I brought more traditional morning fare: bread rolls, cheese, butter, and jam. After introductions, the farmer, a middle-aged blonde-haired Dane with a friendly manner who I will call Mads, made coffee. He set it out on the kitchen table with a package of leverpostej (a widely eaten paste made from pig liver) for us to share.

Mads and his employees sat around the table, looking at us expectantly, clearly curious about why two anthropologists had come to visit their pig farm. We explained that we had come to study how Mads and his team handle female pigs during breeding, to inform our work on animal welfare. Denmark, where pork is revered as part of traditional foodways, makes for the perfect case study for this kind of work: the country prides itself on maintaining a “gold standard” of pig production based on its comparatively stringent animal welfare regulations, high productivity, widespread use of cutting-edge technologies, extensive research infrastructure, and strong public support for the industry. And the industry is booming: Denmark produces more than twenty-eight million pigs, largely for export, which is impressive for a country of under six million people.

After we’d had our fill of bread rolls and coffee, we set off for a day with Mads and his workers. We were soon invited to participate in artificially inseminating sows. As an anthropologist who has been studying industrial agriculture for more than ten years, I have participated in many different farm chores and activities. But this brief encounter with breeding sows at Mads’s farm raised new questions of ethics that I had not encountered in my previous work. Our experience that day illuminated the ways in which the boundaries between species, desire, and consent are blurred in the name of agricultural efficiency, and what this interplay can reveal about human-animal relations in industrial food systems.

***

The stalls of the breeding unit stretched from one end of the large barn to the other in rows of fifty. With four rows in this breeding unit, the barn contained around two hundred sows. Each stall was a bit wider than the large sow standing in it but not large enough for the animal to turn around. The sows all faced a pen in the middle of the unit, accessible through a series of gates. We followed behind Ana, a farm worker from Romania, who had been charged with leading us through the breeding process. Usually, on pig farms, female farm workers focus on more “nurturing” tasks, like caring for piglets, but Mads had proudly told us that Ana was willing to do it all.

As Ana prepared her breeding tools, three large, gregarious boars — distinguishable from the sows by their fur, their larger size, and their prominent testicles — were herded into the pens in the centre of the breeding unit. While scientists have done numerous experiments around sow arousal, nothing excites sows quite like the presence of live boars, so they’d been sent in to get the party started. The effect was immediate: the sows strained their noses through the bars of their pens trying to get a little closer to these potential mates, and the barn soon filled with the guttural grunts, barks, and squeals of the sows and boars calling to each other.

While the sows and boars touched noses and conversed, Ana started the breeding process. She entered the small gate behind the first sow and confirmed that the sow was in “standing heat”, meaning fertile and ready for breeding. She pushed and rubbed the back of the sow, watching as the animal locked her legs and stood rigidly. Ana then checked for other signs of heat, noting the perkiness of the sow’s ears and the swollenness of her vulva. The sow was ready.

Ana rubbed the sides of the sow, pulled at the top of her back legs, and pushed on her back. She pulled a cloth from the pocket of her coveralls and cleaned the sow’s vulva. Grasping the lower portion of the vulva, Ana pulled it down and carefully inserted a straw with a lubricated foam tip up into the sow’s vagina. She pushed until it met resistance and then pushed a little more firmly until it entered the sow’s cervix. Once the straw was inserted, Ana attached a small plastic pouch of sperm suspended in liquid to the other end of the straw. She hooked this pouch to a clip hanging from the ceiling by a string. Ana worked her way down the row of stalls, quickly connecting one sow after the other to an individual bag of sperm.

For now, the milky liquid stayed put in the bags. Ana explained to us that the sows needed to be encouraged to take in the sperm. When she had several pouches of sperm hooked up, she turned to Inger and me: “Be the boar,” she said.

Climbing onto the first sow and facing her rear, Ana explained that it was our job to imitate the weight and movement that a boar might make when mounting a sow. From her seat atop the sow’s back, Ana began rubbing the sow with her arms and legs. Her skilled imitation of a boar was quickly rewarded. The sow experienced uterine contractions that sucked the semen into her body, leaving the attached pouch empty.

Ana dismounted, removed the straw from the sow’s vagina, and opened the next stall, motioning me forward. My turn. I had never seen a boar mount a sow, but not being entirely new to sexual acts, I could imagine the scene. Nevertheless, I struggled with the idea of being the boar and found myself thrown into a moment of crisis. It was not the visceral nature of the task that put me off. As someone with extensive fieldwork experience on farms, the bodily demands of farm work and the intimacy of working with animals in these contexts were not new to me. What struck me instead at that moment was being asked to imagine myself in the position of a sexual partner and to perform a sexual act with a nonhuman animal in a system specifically designed to exploit the generativity of female bodies for profit.

***

Increasing generativity in the name of profit has been an ongoing project in Denmark for at least 150 years. Since the establishment of the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen in 1856, there has been a focus on the application of scientific techniques for agricultural optimization. Concerted efforts in breeding resulted in the creation of the Danish “bacon pigs”, famous for their extra set of ribs. Other improvements in bacon pigs were their increased litter sizes and leaner meat. These developments were heralded by breeders and farmers as a major success of Danish ingenuity in breeding. Building on this “breed wealth”, farmers continued to breed for litter size, eventually leading to what is now referred to in industry-speak as the “hyperprolific sow”.

This engineered line of pigs produces some of the largest litter sizes in the world: some birth as many as thirty piglets at once, more than double the average litter size of even a few decades ago. In these excessively large litters, piglet mortality is extremely high, both before birth and during the first few days of life. Many are born as “dolphin-pigs”, with sloping foreheads, bulging eyes, and low birth weights. This is caused by running out of space to grow in the womb. Sows have only fourteen nipples, meaning that large and very large litters outstrip their ability to nurse their young. Piglets on Danish farms, therefore, have to be regularly redistributed to other sows, either replacing offspring who have died or sent to “nurse sows” kept in lactation through continually nursing piglets from other litters.

Large litters also mean that sows must endure prolonged births and often end up with immune disease or other ailments. Once with a litter, sows are kept in pens that include metal bars to prevent them from lying on and thereby killing their piglets, designed to protect their marketable young at the expense of their freedom of movement. The hyperprolific sow is truly a haunting figure of what “improvement” has come to mean in agricultural science.

Another key development in the field of pig breeding has been artificial insemination. Experiments with artificial insemination were recorded as early as the 1600s, but it was not until the mid-20th century that dairy farmers began to use it regularly. On pig farms, artificial insemination has only become common practice in the last couple of decades, gaining popularity as a means of increasing control over genetic lines and making breeding more efficient. This is in part because artificial insemination is often faster than “natural service” by boars, who are also considered expensive to feed and dangerous to work with. The move to artificial insemination required breeders and farmers to develop a better understanding of pig courtship rituals, because, without some form of stimulation, sows fail to have uterine contractions. These deep, pulsing movements are vital for increasing the chances of conception as well as litter size.

In his extensive ethnography of mass pig production in the Midwestern United States, Alex Blanchette shows how workers’ efforts to “stimulate” sows are often standardized according to the logics of efficiency and managers’ interpretations of those logics. Stimulate is a term used in the pork industry and in textbooks on pig reproduction. Blanchette adopts it to describe how a choreography of workers, sows, and technologies standardizes the sow — distilling her into a particular pattern of instinctual responses — as well as the worker — into an efficient and reproducible employee. Stimulation, then, imagines the sow as an instinctual biomachine and the worker as her operator.

Yet, on Mads’ farm, Ana’s careful tactile communication and her mimesis of an imagined boar seemed to me to be not only about domination and standardization. Although breeding takes place in a space designed for the mass production of pig flesh, which provides pigs with only the bare minimum of what they need to live, Ana showed us that the sows in this setting are also able to make demands on the humans who care for them. In the aforementioned ethnography by Blanchette, a worker named Felipe takes his time to learn the individuality of each animal. He approaches his work with gusto, pulling hair and tweaking tails, comparing the experience to being a responsive and inventive lover with human women. Perhaps, Blanchette argues, Felipe’s improvisations were also a refusal of the standardization of labour and an attempt to find dignity through the exercise of skilled work. Similarly, Ana appeared to respond differently to individual sows. She did not touch them all in the same way. Sometimes she would remark, “Oh she likes this,” while stroking a sow’s udder or scratching another’s back.

These acts of courtship show that arousal, rather than the stimulation imagined by agricultural scientists, might be a better term to describe what is happening to the sows in these interactions. Although it might be possible to imagine animals as machines in textbooks or among managers seeking to “stimulate” efficiency and profit, the workers touching the sows and interacting with them seem to know that whatever term the textbooks use, successful breeding depends on their ability to arouse the sows. Sows demand that if they are to be bred, they must at least be given a minimal courtship experience. The moment in which the human breeder is “being the boar” then, is a moment in which a sow asserts her subjecthood, even as the industry seeks to flatten that subjecthood into the lowest common denominator.

***

Even after more than fifty years of concerted research on stimulating the sow, successful artificial insemination still depends on getting the sow “in the mood”, so to speak. And while I cannot find any scientific literature on this point, it seems possible that the goal may actually be for the sow to orgasm. The curious absence of this term could be due to the taboo in animal science of using anthropomorphic terms to describe animals. Or perhaps it is avoided because being the boar is already dangerously close to bestiality, another very strong cultural taboo in Denmark as in most Euro-American contexts.

But I am not the first observer of human-animal social relations to notice that nonhuman desire shapes human action. Based on ethnographic research with falconers who engage in elaborate courtship rituals with falcons in order to collect semen and to inseminate female birds, Sara Asu Schroer argues that “bird desire… can be understood both in terms of a sense of sexual longing and lust and in terms of having (at times quite high) demands and expectations of their partner,” be they avian or human. In other words, falcons, who are notoriously difficult to breed shape social relations beyond simply refusing or cooperating. Courtship, instead, depends on improvisation in a varied and extensive repertoire of movements, offerings, and vocalizations. So fully do the falconers participate in these courtship rituals with birds that one falconer’s wife says to Shroer that “during breeding season ‘James was all bird’”.

In her ethnography of a Danish research clinic that uses piglets as model organisms for extremely preterm human infants, anthropologist Mette N. Svendsen invokes “substitution” to describe how different actors come to stand in for those of other species. For example, the researchers who care for the piglets (and later kill and dissect them) strive to care for the young animals as they would for their own children. The researcher responsible for giving the preterm piglets their food was, perhaps somewhat in jest, referred to as the madmor, or “food mother,” referring to a historical practice whereby the wife on a large farm would cook for the servants who were also part of the household and to some extent, a kind of kin. Svendsen argues that these kinds of substitution practices “unsettle and settle boundaries between humans and nonhumans, life and death, and belonging and not belonging”.

Being the boar similarly unsettles species boundaries because it implies an act of substitution, a mimicking of a sexual partner; mimicry which means becoming a little bit more porcine, at least for a time.

***

Back in the breeding unit, Inger and I were up to bat. Inger had far more experience with artificial insemination on pig farms than I did, and upon listening to Ana’s instructions, she confidently entered a stall to sit on the back of a sow. Somewhat more tentatively, I joined a different sow in her stall and gingerly sat on her back. I was worried that my weight would be too much for her, but Ana pointed out that my full weight and some firm pressure from my hands on the sow’s back would be more “boar-like” than my tentative and partial position, which had led only to the semen remaining placid in the pouch. I watched from my perch as Ana and Inger moved from stall to stall, clearly more adept at arousing the sows than me.

Finally, I began rubbing the animal firmly with my hands and tried again to put my full weight on her back. Apparently, the sow found me-as-the-boar adequate, and suddenly she sucked the semen out from the pouch and into her body. Perhaps she had an orgasm. Perhaps it was a moment of pleasure in her grim life, which was characterized by conditions of confinement and the demands of being kept constantly pregnant or lactating for human profit. Regardless, it was not an act that I felt justified in doing and not one that I came to innocently. I certainly do not feel comforted by a discourse of human exceptionalism but I “stayed with the trouble.” And through unsettling the boundaries between species and becoming a little bit boar-like, the sow showed me that, try as humans might to turn her into a piglet-popping biomachine, they will never fully succeed.

Katy Overstreet is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Copenhagen. She conducts research on human-animal relations, food and agriculture, and landscapes.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Feminist Food Journal editors, and to Inger Anneberge, for your thought-provoking comments and feedback. And of course, thank you to “Mads” for allowing us to visit his farm and to “Ana” for sharing her work with us.

Further Readings:

Anneberg, I., Vaarst, M., & and Bubandt, N. (2013, November 20). Pigs and profits: hybrids of animals, technology and humans in Danish industrialised farming. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, (21.4: 542-559).

Blanchette, A. (2020). Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Foote, R. H. (2010, January 1). The history of artificial insemination: Selected notes and notables. Journal of Animal Science, (80: 1-10).

Franklin, S. (2007). Dolly Mixtures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oliviero, C., Junnikkala, S., & Peltoniemi, O. (2019, September). The challenge of large litters on the immune system of the sow and the piglets. Reproduction in Domestic Animals, (54: 12-21).

Schroer, S. A. (2018, September). Breeding with birds of prey: Intimate encounters. In H. A. Swanson, M. E. Lien, & G. B. Weenns (Eds, pp. 33-49). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Svendsen, M. N. (2021). Near Human: Border Zones of Species, Life, and Belonging. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Our relationship with Apoorva has bloomed since we first fell in love with her pitch in late 2021. We’re thrilled to share that this year, we’re collaborating in new and closer ways: Apoorva has been hard at work on BODY as a guest editor, focused on a piece about table manners that will be coming out soon. As a writer, Apoorva’s work is distinguished by her attention to detail, and as an editor she is equally thoughtful and meticulous — adept at honouring writers’ voices while strengthening the clarity, depth, and impact of their words. We feel so lucky to be able to learn from her. Read more about her work below and be sure to subscribe to her newsletter, shelf offering.

-ZJ & IbV

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, cook, poet, and artist from Chennai who loves to postpone her writing by cooking something colossal in the kitchen and is savagely obsessed with butter. Her newsletter shelf offering weaves essays on food and culture, as well as memory, history and politics together. She is also the co-founder of Cheese, the magazine of culture, as well as the soon-to-launch literary magazine chlorophyll.

shelf offering

Essays weaving food and culture, memory, history and politics together.

By Apoorva Sripathi

By Apoorva Sripathi

Does milk make a nation?

In many cultures across the world, dairy has been one of the building blocks of civilization. As Paul S. Kindstedt writes in Cheese and Culture, milk first became a part of the human diet as sustenance for infants and young children, who were still in possession of lactase, the transient enzyme required to digest it. For them, “milk was an invaluable food.” Evidence suggests that adult humans started drinking milk some 6,000 years ago, perhaps even before some of us became lactase persistent. Lactose malabsorption in adults was almost universal until sometime between 7000 and 6500 BC, when we started to domesticate animals and drink their milk. The discovery of pottery helped us store and transport warm milk in pots, which also gave us yogurt, cheese, and butter — products that helped ease adults into milk consumption. Or as my colleague at CHEESE, the magazine of culture, Anna Sulan Masing put it: “Cheese was the gateway drug.”

Today, milk is revered in itself, and is the beverage of choice for many children growing up. From public health mandates and school programmes to TV advertisements and the rebuking of parents, the importance of milk in the diet of a child is hammered home. There is simply no escaping milk.

Sometime in late colonial India, writes William Gould in Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, cow’s milk became associated with the purity and strength of the nation, and the concept of the “mother cow” was mirrored with that of “Mother India”; both the cow and its milk simultaneously became life-giving. If drinking milk makes children into strong adults, who in turn become symbolic of a nation’s strength and power, then perhaps milk does make a nation. But first, a nation must make milk.

***

As a commodity in Indian culture and life, milk has been present since the time of the Harappan civilization. However, the issue of milk and nation-making became an urgent necessity after Independence. The government’s plan to increase both the production and consumption of milk, especially among the poor, resulted in the great dairy development scheme of the 1970s, Operation Flood. To this day, Operation Flood, also known as the “White Revolution”, is heralded as the country’s landmark agricultural project. By making use of donations from European countries and the United States through the World Food Programme (WFP), it transformed India from a milk-deficient country to the largest producer of milk in the world. Writes Andrea S. Wiley in Cultures of Milk:

Europe’s dairy industry had been generating massive gains in milk production, which had resulted in a vast surplus at home that threatened to destabilize local milk prices. The WFP was a way of disposing of this surfeit without causing the collapse of local dairy industries in Europe and the United States, and it could do so with an ostensibly humanitarian purpose.

Initially, the WFP’s food aid, in the form of surplus milk, was supposed to help reduce the price of milk in India by increasing supply. Eventually, Dr. Verghese Kurien, chairman of the Indian National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), convinced the WFP to allow the formation of a milk producers union, known today as Amul, to reconstitute milk powder from the surplus, sell the milk, and use the profits to expand the dairy industry. Operation Flood, which sought to revolutionize milk production and marketing, eventually expanded its mandate to include improving the organized dairy sectors in India’s four metros, increasing rural incomes, expanding milk outlets, forming village co-operatives, and so on.

Although its legacy is lasting — India is now the world’s largest producer of milk — the narrative of Operation Flood as a success is somewhat dubious. Not only did the funds from the sale of milk to urban consumers go towards importing European bulls and heifers and investing in high-yielding and crossbred cattle in a kind of ecological imperialism1, but the linear narrative of progress masks the reality that while some benefited from Operation Flood, others did not. Foremost in this narrative is its “success” in empowering rural women, which has taken root in public rhetoric in recent years. Critics of Operation Flood note that despite the fact that women are responsible for taking care of cattle, collecting fodder, and milking, they’ve had limited access to new technologies due to the industry’s focus on men, and their role in the program has not been adequately recognized. In actuality, Operation Flood alienated rural women with its modernizations, destabilizing their incomes by selling butter, ghee, and other milk products through Amul. This undermined (and removed) their subsistence economy, and transformed it into a capitalist commercial enterprise, while lowering their status in society and family, writes Greta Gaard in Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.

One legacy of Operation Flood is that simply, more milk is available than before. And more people consume it. Amul, the largest dairy cooperative to come out of Operation Flood, held its own against dairy giants like Nestle and Glaxo, thanks to the (then) newfound production of skim milk powder made from the country’s abundance of buffalo milk. India’s milk production grew by 36 percent between 2014-15 and 2019-20, and today, the dairy and animal husbandry sector constitutes four percent of GDP. So, in a sense, milk did make this nation.

But what kind of nation did it make?

***

Post Independence, India’s focus was on self-sufficiency through programmes like Operation Flood and the Green Revolution (which saw the industrialization of agriculture in India). The impact of both has been fiercely controversial.

The post-independence period in India was haunted by the ghosts of insufficient agricultural productivity, land reforms made without the requisite changes in power patterns or economic disparities, and droughts leading to frequent famines. Of course, it also saw the displacement of about 20 million people as a result of Partition, which shifted borders to suit religious differences and created irreversible fault lines between the countries of India and Pakistan and their residents.

The impacts of Partition, and the large-scale communal violence, riots, and the abduction and rape of women that it entailed, continue to reverberate in India today, manifesting as in mob violence against the Other — violence that is closely tied to the consumption of bovine bodies. The “beef lynchings” of Muslims, of Dalits, Adivasis, and people of marginalized castes, are vicious expressions of hatred by those who don’t eat the cow against those who do. “Lynching is an old crime here, often committed against those of so-called lower castes and marginalized tribes, in order to reinforce brutal social hierarchies,” writes Supriya Nair in a piece on India’s beef lynchings for The Atlantic.

These “brutal social hierarchies” are what helped build, and continue to build, the framework for a nationalist India. And crucial to these social hierarchies — besides taboos on cow slaughter and meat, mob violence, and a Hindutva ideology that endorses all of the above — is also viewing the cow as the “vulnerable” mother that requires protection from so-called “predatory” beings who consume its meat.

The cow has been adored by and widely celebrated among many of the world’s religions and cultures: Ancient Egypt had a maternal cow goddess; depictions of Greek and Roman feasts show cow-head rhytons; cows appear on pottery from China’s Qing dynasty, whose reign prohibited the slaughtering cows and horses; and 19th-century ivory cow figurines (or netsuke) from Japan reflect a time before the Meiji reign when meat was not only considered to be unsafe, but the Buddhist principle of reincarnation forbade eating beef and drinking milk (it was seen as akin to drinking blood).

But none come close to the obsessiveness of India’s bovine protection squad.

Cow vigilantes, as they’re called, are self-appointed Hindu fundamentalist groups who carry out violent attacks against those — predominantly Muslims — who consume and slaughter cows, or are in possession of beef. One such act in 2015 came to define the country’s continued structural violence against the Other. A violent mob dragged Mohammad Akhlaq, 52, from his house and beat him to death after a Hindu temple in his village of Bishahra, in Dadri district in Uttar Pradesh, announced that he was in possession of and had consumed beef. A year later, in 2016, cow vigilantes flogged seven Dalits for merely carrying out their occupation of skinning dead cows. From 2012 to December 2018, there were 99 official instances of violence related to cow vigilantism.

Beef consumption — considered by Hindu upper castes as “morally problematic” “impure”, and “non-vegetarian”2 — was actually a part of Hinduism during the Vedic times; the taboo grew during the rise of Buddhism and Jainism as a way of positioning Hinduism in opposition to those religions. Today, beef consumption is prevalent in most regional cuisines and religions in India, including Hinduism in some cases, and has become a form of political resistance to state power. Meeting this resistance are forceful deterrents: a ban on cow slaughter in many Indian states, heftier punishment for those caught violating the law, and horrifying extralegal attacks by cow vigilantes, whose obsessiveness and reverence of the cow as a cosmic being and mother in Hindu thought and tradition run deep.

Like Nair writes, lynching is an old crime in India and is one of the many ways employed by caste Hindus in their attempt to claim superiority over Muslims and the lower and marginalized castes they consider “inferior”. Constantly dehumanizing the Other — for swimming in a well, for riding a horse, for sitting cross-legged, for sitting in a train after enjoying Eid festivities — creates a social hierarchy that keeps power concentrated at the top, all the while squeezing out wealth, labour, pleasure, the right to eat beef or to marry someone of one’s choosing. This is how upper-caste and Hindutva machinations work to forge a nationalist identity.

One of the key instruments of this nationalist identity lies in the control of bodies, both bovine and woman, which are sites of Hindu patriarchy and nation-making. Just like how the control of the bovine, in the form of “protection” from the Other, is in the hands of a few powerful, so is the control of women. Women have been fighting men and the patriarchy world over for control of their own bodies, for higher pay, for political representation, for religious and personal freedom. But in India, this fight is also against Hindu conservatism, centuries-old caste hierarchy that is upheld by endogamous marriage, which in turn supports the country’s “outrageous culture of son-preference…widespread reproductive control, including but not limited to illegal sex-selective abortions and female infanticide,” and its hesitation to criminalize marital rape.

***

It is no surprise then that what one eats and whom one marries are critical in the making of a homogenous Hindu nation. Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, an eight-part series featuring an elite matchmaker trying to find “suitable” matches for her wealthy clients, was a prime example of that. It gave the world a taste of India’s ‘familial values’ — code for caste, religion, and morality. Marriage in India is still governed by the holy trinity of caste-religion-class and overseen by the Indian family (both one’s immediate and the society at large), a powerful social unit that upholds oppressive structures. It is why arranged marriages are still the norm and inter-caste marriages are low, at around five percent. Caste endogamy may be viewed as a means to maintain the ‘culture’ of a group or minimize conflict that may arise from customs, rituals, and everyday rules, by upper-caste Indian families. But it is more than that.

Caste endogamy, arranged marriage, marrying within the same caste or community — whatever the name, the practice is fundamental to the structure of the caste system, and in maintaining the status quo. It is also fundamental in depriving women of their agency. Failing to comply with the rules can result in brutal violence, where sometimes people pay with their lives. In 2019, the relatives of an upper-caste woman killed her Dalit husband in Gujarat in retaliation for marrying her against their wishes. Five days earlier, a gang murdered a couple in Tamil Nadu for marrying across caste lines. In another incident from 2019, a father allegedly doused his daughter and her husband with kerosene and set them on fire because he “vehemently opposed” their union. In the last five years (not including 2021), there have been a horrific 195 cases of honour killing (the term for the murder of a woman/man who is said to have brought dishonour/shame on the family) across the nation.

“Marriage, especially between ‘dominant’ and ‘untouchable’ castes, can pose a threat to that [caste] hierarchy. That explains why people in dominant castes often carry out brutal violence against their own family members who dare to marry outside their caste, particularly if a partner is Dalit,” writes Yashica Dutt, whose memoir Coming Out As Dalit dealt with her journey of coming to terms with her identity while also taking the reader through the history of the Dalit movement. “Of course, many marriages arranged by the parents and families of the couple turn out to be perfectly sweet and happy. But many also come with a loss of agency, especially for the woman, who must be ‘flexible’ and ‘adjust’ to the norms of her husband’s family, as the show [Indian Matchmaking] points out.”

***

“Motherhood” in Hindu patriarchy, and in the construction of a homogenous Hindu nation, is an exploitation of both bovine and human. No animal comes close as to what the cow can provide — from hides for leather and dung for fertilizer and fuel, to bones for refining sugar, milk and beef for food — and its value as a resource in agrarian societies is unmatchable. Cows are seen as sacrificing mothers who give freely to their children, even if it means denying milk to their own children. The resource-giving cow is framed as a primordial mother.

This primordial mother-cow association goes back to Gandhi, an upper-caste vegetarian, and to the iconic image of Kamadhenu, a divine bovine-goddess depicted as a cow's body studded with Hindu deities, which has been printed on calendars and pamphlets since the early twentieth century. The cow in Hindu religion and patriarchy is reproduced as political and religious capital, even though materially, the animal is merely an economic asset, forced to bequeath its milk, meat, and labour. In the beef-spurning Indian nation, milk is the symbol of inherent goodness and purity; it is commodified as “divine”, and is a source of “vegetarian” protein. Milk and milk products are a part of every Hindu ritual and practice. The cow’s udder is objectified as “exhaustless and all-sustaining”; it can pour “a thousand streams” and “give milk to feed us.”

Cows are also burdened “as guardians of Hindu purity”, writes Yamini Narayanan for Hypatia. Nevermind that drinking cow’s urine is permissible as medicine or spiritual therapy but eating its meat is considered sacrilege. Longstanding taboos on cow meat go hand in hand with taboos on marrying across caste lines; it is, after all, the woman who is considered the keeper of traditions and cultures through marriage and food. It is through the maternal figure and motherhood that the sensory experience of food is transmitted. It is the mother who nurtures bodies through food (including breast milk), especially in early human life, and it is through her that the lineage continues, bearing the burden of the household’s “honour” and “shame” alike. But the labour of constructed love (for both the cow and the woman) to build a Hindu society does not take into account the labour of bodies that are involved in this economy; it actively devalues their labour, while inflicting violence upon their bodies. And it burdens them with being the cultural guardians of this nation-state.

Both bovine and female bodies are sites of exploitation and capital for the Hindu patriarchy and ethnonationalism. Not only is the bovine body worshipped as a Mother Cow or even Mother India, but “her motherhood itself is mobilized as a resource for exploitation.” Similarly, it falls to women to comply with society’s need for “good” daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers, marrying as per family rules or observing modesty in dressing, behaviour, and thought. Generally, a woman is of “value” only if she serves the purpose of labour, in giving birth and working for the house, like the bovine. Interestingly enough, it is also women who are largely responsible for the labour involved in taking care of livestock. Intertwined in this gendered oppression are notions of caste and religion which regulate intimacy, desire, and politics.

In Gender and Nation, a searing analysis on gender and the construction of a nation-state, Nira Yuval-Davis describes how women give birth to nations biologically and symbolically, referring to them as both “cultural transmitters as well as cultural signifiers” of the collective nation. Where does this leave the bovine, whose milk is ubiquitous across cultures and nations, and which offers a narrative about India’s urbanization, economics, consumer culture, and patriarchy? Milk may have built this nation, but the burden of gendered oppression and nation-making lies with the cow and the woman.

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, cook, poet, and artist from Chennai who loves to postpone her writing by cooking something colossal in the kitchen and is savagely obsessed with butter. Her newsletter shelf offering weaves essays on food and culture, as well as memory, history and politics together. She is also the co-founder of Cheese, the magazine of culture, as well as the soon-to-launch literary magazine chlorophyll.

Further readings

Gaard, G. (2013). Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies. American Quarterly 65(3), 595-618. doi:10.1353/aq.2013.0040.

Gould, W. (2004). Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wiley, A.S. (2014). Cultures of Milk: The Biology and Meaning of Dairy Products in the United States and India, 75. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England.

By Lily Wakeley | Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.

What is a body without a smell?

In Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, the character Jean-Baptiste Grenouille suffers the strange affliction of having no personal body odour to call his own. In Süskind’s created world, Grenouille’s lack of scent precludes the possibility of having an identity entirely. It’s as though he’s a ghost, barely existing at all.

When he was young, fellow children feared Grenouille, unable to “stand the nonsmell of him”. But in a cruel stroke of irony, Grenouille himself is gifted with a hyperactive sense of smell. Walking the stinking streets of Paris, he is accosted by “thousands upon thousands of odours”: of “water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw.”

As he ages, Grenouille becomes a callous, calloused, lonely man. Eventually, his sole motivation in life becomes the creation of the most delectable smell in the world, which he hopes will finally transform him into something — and even someone — lovable.

***

Süskind’s world is allegorical of our own, where smell is fundamental to our sense of identity and how we make sense of the world. Unlike our four other senses, smell bypasses the logical part of our brain. It’s processed in the frontal lobe and associated with our emotions, memory, and personality.1

Through our noses (sometimes in collaboration with our tongues), we map associations onto the world, including our relations with other people. Have you ever stood near a stranger in public so close you can smell their shampoo? It can almost feel like a transference of something, a visceral intimacy that ignites a fantasy feeling of knowing them.

These experiences of smell might seem innate or biologically determined but in reality, our tastes are just as shaped by learned behaviour and context. And the context most of us exist in is defined by heteronormative, misogynistic, capitalist systems which police our bodies — particularly gendered and racialized bodies — and make us believe that our happiness is linked to our ability to consume and to be consumed. It is this system that has taught us that smelling human — particularly as a woman — is bad and unattractive, something that needs to be covered up with perfume and deodorant and controlled through what we eat. Like Süskind’s character, we are made to believe that to be loved, we need to smell delectable.

***

For millennia, humans have experimented with borrowing from the natural world to perfume ourselves, to cover up what lies below — the smell of sweat, of breath, of intimate parts of our bodies — the scents that remind us that we are animals.

Smell influences our judgment of others and has as long been used as an instrument to control our perceptions and behaviour. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates famously regarded perfume as a dangerous threat to the ability to discern enslaved people from free men by masking what he considered to be the enslaved’s innate and distinctive “bad” smell.

Later, the 19th century saw the advent of what historian Alain Corbin terms the “era of deodorization” when the governments of richer nations embarked on large-scale hygiene projects, like slum clearances and the creation of subterranean sewers, a lot of which was done in the name of public health. Smells perceived by the elite as animalistic became a badge of the subaltern, and discourses about hygiene produced identities of inclusion and exclusion along both racial and class lines. In Victorian Australia, for example, coercive powers were granted to public health authorities to educate and control Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on the basis that their smell demonstrated poor hygiene and unfitness to reproduce.

These classed and/or racialized discourses continue in the present day: though fictional, it is telling that the 2019 film Parasite uses body odour and smell as the defining motif for the violence of social class and inequality in Korean society. As the family at the center of the story, the Kims, try to claw their way from poverty by infiltrating the affluent lives of the Parks, it is their smell that threatens to expose them.

Beyond the silver screen, intolerance to the bodily or food smells of others can be a cover for xenophobia. In 2017, one of the UK’s biggest buy-to-let landlords instructed his properties not to be rented out to “coloured people” because the “smell of curry” stuck to carpets. Research carried out by Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute suggests that there is even a psychological link between xenophobia and disgust towards body odours.

***

Beginning around the 1920s, capitalistic interests began preying more directly on our fears of not smelling as we should. Companies in the West realized that latching onto women’s anxieties about smell was a particularly effective sales tactic. It was at this time that the oral antiseptic brand Listerine coined the phrase, “Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride” as a means of describing the impact of bad breath on women as “life-destroying” in its advertisements. To this day, women continue to be taught — through social norms, perpetuated by the media — that smelling good is essential to our happiness.2

Scent artist Clara Ursitti explored the gendered dimensions of scent in her series of “scent portraits”, which kicked off in 1994 with Self-Portrait in Scent, Sketch no. 1 exhibited at The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. She synthesized the smells produced from different and specific parts of her body, such as her vagina, armpit, and scalp. Ursitii’s work sought to discombobulate audiences by inserting smells into public spaces where they don’t belong, forcing us to recognize the strangeness of our fear of smelling human. She found that men and women in the audience tended to respond very differently to the work: women tended to appreciate it, whereas many men expressed disgust with the smells.

These findings are unsurprising on a personal level: My friends and I grew up in the late nineties/early noughties at an all-girls school in the relatively sheltered English countryside. Despite the lack of proximity to the boys we pined for, we gorged ourselves on a fear-inducing diet of information that drilled into us the do’s and don'ts of smells. Rule number one: a “fishy fanny” was total social suicide. Tasting of copper was also bad.3

It may sound like adolescent folly, but the pressure on women to hide intimate odour creates health risks. Vaginal douches, sprays, gels and wipes which seek to neutralize intimate smells (a market worth over $286 million in the US, 2018), ironically wreak havoc on the vaginal biome responsible for moderating them. These so-called “feminine hygiene” products have been linked to the increased likelihood of yeast infections, UTIs, bacterial vaginosis, and even cervical cancer and pelvic inflammatory disease. The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson has paid out hundreds of millions in compensation in recent years to women who have developed ovarian cancer as a result of using their baby talcum powder as vaginal deodorant, despite the company knowing its carcinogenic risk from 1979.4 The company were found to have particularly targeted Black American women in their marketing, profiting from the longstanding stigma around the imagined “excessive black vagina” and exposing the noxious intersection of misogyny and racism.

***

Although we’re all told we need to spritz and spray our natural smells away, there are gendered parameters within which this should be done. Through years of effective marketing, determining gender by associating smells with either “manliness” or “femininity” has, for many of us, become practically intuitive.

In their aromatic installation, (De)Constructed Masculinities, shown at London’s V&A in 2018, Tasha Marks and Brian J Morrison sought to examine how smell changes our perception of shapes or bodies. The artists created sculptures of androgynous “morphic blobs” moulded from Brian’s body; Tasha scented the sculptures with perfumes she created inspired by Coco Mademoiselle and Terres d’Hermes — the leading fragrances in their gender categories at the time. The F3, the “feminine” scent, was a floral concoction of jasmine, rose, vanilla, and patchouli. M4, the “masculine” one, was spicy and earthy, scented with black pepper, nutmeg and bergamot.

Tasha and Brian watched audiences interact with their art. Interestingly, members of the public were influenced by gender norms in describing the shapes and smells. The “morphic blobs” perfumed with F3 were perceived as “voluptuous” and “curvy”, whereas the ones fragranced by M4 were seen as “rounded” or smelling of “tension”.

Part of what got Tasha interested in this idea of gender and smell in the first place was the rise she was observing in unisex fragrances. This trend was most notably embodied by CK One, which launched in 1994 alongside unforgettable black-and-white footage of beautiful androgynous bodies playfully pawing at one another. She wondered if these marketing campaigns had done anything to the public’s idea of what it meant to smell like a man or a woman. Feedback from the audience at the exhibition showed that fourteen years on from CK One’s launch, while the perfume industry had changed substantially, there was still a great number of learned, unconscious biases to unpick. Though CK One had certainly sold beauty successfully, it didn’t spark the attrition of the gender binary — even if, not insignificantly, it had made it cool to entertain the idea.

***

CK One was an era-defining perfume, not only because it played with sexuality and gender but also because it kicked off what scent designer and historian Ermano Picco has termed the “anti-perfume perfume” era. He believes that the AIDS epidemic created an insidious, Victorian-like fear of bodies and sex, which had echoes into many realms of life, including the perfume industry. Sex as an aesthetic — wood and patchouli — was out: “clean”, minimalism was in. In this context, CK One was born, combining a heady mix of hedione, dihydromyrcenol, and galaxolide compounds to create a breezy, bright “clean” impression. Galaxolide is the synthetic musk used frequently to fragrance cleaning products like body washes and detergents, which mask the odour of bodies. The clean smell was meant to assuage fears of bodies that can arouse desire, transgress and misbehave, and ultimately spread disease. It reiterated society’s response to the epidemic in re-equating ideas of morality with sexlessness.

In the new millennium, trends became more maximalist — rendering us ripe for consumption in an era defined by paparazzi buzz around young women icons. Britney was eaten alive by the press; Jessica Simpson’s 2004 edible beauty line, Dessert Beauty, promised to offer us up for dinner too. It was as if the advent of raunchy music videos splashing across our TV screens allowed us to move away from a society scrubbed of any indication of temptation and embrace the carnal desire to stuff our faces — but only with the right flavour.

Beauty critic Jessica DeFino calls the fad for turning women into “lickable, kissable and taste-able” food “cosmetic cannibalism” and “bite-me beauty”, achieved by lathering our bodies with apricot scrubs, butterscotch whips, and strawberry mists. This “food face” aesthetic is having a recent resurgence: Rhodes sells products like a “glazing milk” advertised by a photograph of the brand owner Hailey Beiber pouring a pitcher of milk over her body like she’s about to dive into a bowl of cereal. The message: skin should be as plump and dewy as a dumpling, with a sheen that would make Krispy Creme blush.

DeFino ascribes this continued trend of making ourselves consumable — achieved through wanton consumption — to a sublimated desire for connection. In an increasingly online, transactional world operated by the expediency of capitalism, a slippage has emerged between “being seen” and “being validated”. Algorithms and advertisements, that overwhelmingly target women and a specifically gendered fear of being undesirable, tell us that there is a pipeline between “buying” it, “applying it” and “becoming it”. With the right products, we can become as desirable as a commodity ourselves. As Hailey Beiber explained in an interview with The Cut: “I want someone to want to take a bite out of my skin… I want you to want to bite me because it looks so delicious that you can’t resist”.

***

Recently, a friend of mine went on a date with a man she fancied. She instantly became enamoured with his scent and asked him to spray some on her jacket when she said goodbye in the morning. She sat in my kitchen, jittery with excitement, and told me how much she coveted her scented sleeve, sniffing it often like an addict. But when she went upstairs to my bathroom, her eyes widened in disbelief: there on my brother’s shelf, was the same scent. We laughed: whilst also giving her a chance to re-spritz the now waning smell, the deeply personal connection she felt to it and to the man she fancied dissolved ever so slightly, sullied by the fragrance’s apparent ubiquity.

On the one hand, the ubiquity of these smells (trend scents or the smell of common household products like washing detergent) can create a cozy familiarity wherever we go: a conduit to something known and something shared. But they also remind us that we co-exist in a market-led realm of taste — where 95 percent of fragrances are made by just five companies — that dictates what is and isn’t permissible. Although self-identification may feel possible through scent, it's the market that guides our collective desires to smell like galaxolide and be as luminous as milk. The global perfume industry is worth an estimated $68.9 billion. Fine fragrance brands innovate new products and market them as exclusive and luxurious, whilst paradoxically pushing them as far and wide as they can.

***

Clara Ursitti, the scent artist, once told Roots and Routes magazine that scents are “like dressing up, trying to be someone else or something that you are not. They are about desire, aspirations, fantasies.” I myself have never actually had a signature perfume, but one Christmas approximately a decade and a half ago, in a flash commitment to femininity, I asked for Chanel lipstick and a bottle of perfume (any would do). I still haven’t finished either. Now and then, though, and often before a night out, I spritz myself in the ways I’ve admired others doing: I rub my wrists against one another and dab my neck, or release a mist to step into, coating my body in an invisible cloak of something more than myself.

Although I delight in this occasional performance, I always have a slight niggle that I’m cosplaying a shinier, more palatable version of myself. And to what end? Does “soft, desert wind” with notes of cardamom, iris and violet really smell better than the naked skin of a neck you kiss for the first time? The world of smells and fragrances is part of an infinite world of artistry and expression, but there are great strides we must take in disentangling them from an industry that feeds off misogyny and never-ending consumption.

***

In the Süskind novel, the character Grenouille eventually discovers the provenance of the most delectable smell in the world: young, virginal girls. The sweat of his first discovery “smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals… as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, [and] her skin as apricot blossom”. He is so intoxicated by her smell that he murders her. He feels he must possess this enragingly delectable smell so he kills her to bottle it. Grenouille soon learns, however, that his single conquest was not enough: not long after his first kill, he grows dissatisfied and begins the chase for the next.

Lily Wakeley is a writer based in London who is sometimes guilty of forgetting to wear deodorant. She likes adding to her cornucopia of half-baked projects, which include following the UK herring girl trail, dreaming up the best fish-finger sandwich, and writing about women’s appetites, some of which you can find here.

• Where Does All the Food Go? On body size and Nigerian beauty standards, a memoir on growing up thin in a culture that prioritizes thickness by Rejoice Isaac

• Esophageal Yearning, a deliciously visceral poem (with a free audio reading!) about learning to cook with body dysmorphia by Taylor Hunsberger

• Questioning Lumps: Encountering obstacles in a smoothening world, an examination of lumps — in bodies, baking, and modern life — by Clare Michaud

• Bottomless: A journey through grief, gas, and gut instincts, an exploration of mind-gut connections and queer expression by Shena Cavallo

Otherwise, we encourage you to check out our rich back catalogue of past issues: MILK, WAR, SEX, EARTH, CITY, SEA, and MEAT. Most of our work is available paywall-free, but we offer a premium subscription option which offers audio readings of most essays, behind-the-scenes newsletters, access to our community WhatsApp group, and soon — community events! (A premium subscription also makes a great holiday gift!)

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You can find our latest BODY piece below.

Our fifth BODY piece is a three-part essay on the social norms, moral pressures, and capitalistic excess exerted onto pregnant bodies by Dr. Sarah Duignan. It was originally written in May 2024 for her newsletter AnthroDish, which explores systemic and often under-discussed issues in our food systems. One reason we love the newsletter is because of how seamlessly Dr. Duignan nestles her personal experiences in the context of wider policy and corporate actions. We highly recommend subscribing if you haven’t already.

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Find AnthroDish on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out the podcast on iTunes and Spotify.

By Sarah Duignan

After 8 years, I thought I’d reached a place of peace, knowing that my experiences of motherhood are vastly different than others, and to embrace how different we all enter and experience it. I’ve only comparatively explored my own two pregnancies before, because it’s easier for me than to extrapolate more generally on millennial motherhood.

Having my daughter young profoundly shaped my life and perspectives. I would scout out curbed (and likely expired) car seats from Toronto church donation organizations or trek out to the Parry Sound dump with friends to find a couple of plastic phone toys or books in the salvage bins there. I wouldn’t point out that a cashier forgot to scan the baby formula I was trying to purchase, because it saved me $50 that I didn’t have that week. I was scrappy, and I’m at ease knowing I did the best with what I had during those early years.

When I got pregnant again this past fall, I didn’t anticipate the tidal wave of pregnancy fitness and health-related social media posts that would pour over me and challenge that confidence. I’m grateful that I wasn’t exposed to this algorithmically pushed content about babies and pregnancies the last time. I know I wouldn’t have fared well at that age and that level of isolation. And as much as this age of abundant information has the power to inform and change how people experience their pregnancies and healthcare treatments, it comes with a new wave of morality-driven content. In this, “natural” child birthing experiences (sometimes referred to as “free birthing”) are positioned explicitly against medical or social interventions in a way that I find destabilizing in a post-Roe v. Wade world.

23 and anthropological me

During my 2015 pregnancy, I was a few weeks into marathon training, and had come across the new influx of Instagram lifestyle influencers. I found a free PDF-version of Kayla Itsine’s Bikini Body Guide, much as I cringe to admit that now, which was a one-size-fits-all approach to exercise fashioned amidst “thinspiration” trends on Tumblr. By virtue of being 23, it didn’t occur to me to bend my exercise to the ways that my body was shifting and needing. I learned the hard way how difficult it is to try and do crunches at 9 weeks pregnant.

I looked up pregnancy-safe yoga, but the only classes available in Toronto were on the east end (and I in the west): a 1.5-hour streetcar ride and a $35 per class price tag I couldn’t swing with my tip money. Being an anthropology grad student, I furiously maintained that if people had been birthing babies for millennia, I surely didn’t need to read a book that spurned a horrible movie (What to Expect While You’re Expecting) to figure it all out.

This time, I’m gentler with myself and open to new ways of doing things. (And as I’ve spoken about before, I have access to more privileges than before, such as a maternity leave, a partner, and some savings). I forgot one of the main takeaways from medical anthropology classes the last time: that we as humans are naturally social creatures, which transcends into pregnancy and child-rearing cross-culturally. Even the very nature of how we give birth necessitates that we have some form of community in place to help with the delivery, based on our cranial sizes and reproductive trade-offs.

pregnancy fit-fluencers

The problem is that being “open” to new information can quickly become an icy slip-and-slide down a glacier of internet-driven maternity information. Now that millennials have been birthing children for some time, and Gen Z is starting to, social media landscapes have pivoted to capitalize our attentions and wallets from it. There are wake windows, free birthers, postpartum corsets, and affiliate links for fresh newborn baby’s favourite hospital items (hint: the baby didn’t actually pick them).

A recent New York Times (I know, I know) podcast investigated the “micro-generation” of individuals born between 1990 and 1991 (including myself) that make up the “peak of America’s population.” These so-called peak millennials try to squeeze into a system that is already too small to accommodate the largest population group all at once. The thinking goes that if I am having a baby right now, so too are many others in this micro-generation, all at the same time. (I can attest anecdotally – there are no midwives or prenatal vitamins to be found in Guelph this year).

It makes me wonder how much of the content-bombardment is situating itself within this micro-generation, knowing how many people may be having or trying to have kids for the first time. Yet globally (and within the United States), there is a slowing birth rate – which does not feel surprising given the increasingly draconian anti-abortion laws, the cost of giving birth/childcare/domestic labour, and the limits of population pressure amidst climate change. In that context, and with the lurking threat of tradwives like Estee Williams, the maternal content pushes can also feel like last-ditch aspirational efforts of uber-Christians to maintain patriarchal institutions.

@esteecwilliamsWhat it means to be a Tradwife. #fyp #tradwife #homemaking #housewife #traditional #tradwifecontroversy #womenschoice

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Where before I was left to my own devices to figure out what to bring with me to the hospital (an iPhone with pixelated seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a lucky necklace from my aunt, a fuzzy pink robe I never wore, and a toothbrush), I am now reminded each day that it’s time to pack my bag! If I just click the link in this story, I can go right to someone’s LTK or Amazon storefront to see what their maternity ward essentials are!

Some of the very real suggestions to pack for the hospital: a baby night light, silver nursing cups, nipple cream, baby nail clippers, portable sound machine, shower slippers, and three sets of classic satin pyjamas. It all reads like a twisted, apocalyptic I Spy riddle.

The hospital bag prompts give way to an endless onslaught of fitness activities and exercises to “remove your mom pooch.” The mum pooch in question is just the uterus that has spent nine months stretching out to grow a human, which is now subjected to rapidly shifting hormones. But sure, call it a pooch and shame it as quickly as you can, ideally before labour even begins and the body is still functioning as pregnant.

The exercises recommended across Instagram and TikTok focus on core rehabs, some more useful than others. There are gentle ways to stretch and re-connect to your body when it feels like it got hit by a train and will bleed out for weeks while you’re also leaking breastmilk and sweating out months of water weight and hormones. Others are more accusatory, lamenting that you didn’t train your core enough during pregnancy and so that is why it’s so hard to get back into “shape” six weeks postpartum. Or, most shockingly, that it is your fault that your c-section isn’t healing as quickly as it should, because you didn’t eat the right things or cast the right spell (it’s also your fault that you missed the full moon for that spell!).

While exhausting, it points to a niche within the individualistic discourse within Western norms around health. While there has always been pressure by society for women to “bounce back” after childbirth, the new age of the algorithm positions us all as watchful observers of each other’s bodies and abilities through body transitions and health.

Under Foucault’s understanding of the “gaze of power,” he argues that the body begins to discipline or regulate its actions based on which docile behaviours are accepted by society at the time – increasing individualism under the false sense of a communal understanding of bodies and health. The risk here, is that when we focus on the self as the primary driver of health, it fractions us off, individualizing and medicalizing the experiences of health (and illness), rather than taking an opportunity to better engage with collective and political realities of our health and wellness.

bad moms and best breasts

The most challenging element for me as a first-time parent was breastfeeding, a topic which also tends to get a lot of high coverage and moralities around it through social media feeds. (And I will note – I think it’s wonderful that breastfeeding is becoming normalized again in Western society! But it remains a privilege for those who have the time, food supply, and support to be away from work and pump. I just tend to advocate for fed is best, with no shame).

My last pregnancy, I was surrounded by anthropologists that advocated for breast is best, citing the Nestlé infant formula scandal as part of the much larger commodification of baby formula that removed us from our natural origins. Being in that world and having a PhD supervisor that specialized in breastfeeding health studies, I felt a different type of pressure to exclusively breastfeed.

I struggled immediately. I knew all the studies, all the global human growth charts, the ways that babies were naturally supposed to progress, and in that, was made to feel as though formula feeding was a moral failing.

A couple of weeks into breastfeeding, however, I had returned to work, my baby had jaundice from my lack of milk supply, and I was crying alone in my apartment. I called my mum, wailing about how I couldn’t do this one simple thing I was biologically supposed to do. She calmly reminded me that both my brother and I were formula fed, and that an aunt had gifted me some formula packs if I needed them.

I went to the cupboard and began mixing the powder with hot water, with my daughter taking no issue with the bottle. Yet I felt guilty, looking around, waiting for the great medical anthropologists to parade into my kitchen and tell me I was a bad mother. Unsurprisingly, no one gave a shit what I fed my baby.

That was, and remains, the most important lesson I’ve learned from mothering: you’re responsible for raising and educating your kids to enter the world as reasonable, and hopefully thoughtful and kind adults, and no one really, truly cares what you feed them to get there. No one cares if you engaged your core during pregnancy routines, and no one thinks you’re a better mother because you abstained from any life-saving medical interventions you needed that can accompany birth (c-sections, epidurals, morphine, etc.).

It extends further: your child is no better because they learned to walk a few weeks ahead of schedule, or because they played with beige wooden toys over cheap plastic ones you found at the dump. You are not a bad parent because you needed to turn on a TV show to entertain your toddler while you shower, write, connect back to yourself.

Had I taken to the moral panics of TV time in my early parenting, I wouldn’t have been able to finish my dissertation. Which opened doors affording me time to take her to the library to unearth old and new favourite stories, sports camps that teach her how to connect and team build, or camping trips where she learns about different snake species in Ontario. There are so many moments throughout our long days and short years to teach our children about the world, in all its beauty and horror. Nowhere in those moments does any Amazon storefront have the potential to make someone a better parent.

Our internet selves and algorithms keep pushing the most reactive content it possibly can, and in doing so, warps how we ought to think of periods of tremendous change and transition. The vulnerable periods of transition are ones where we are coerced into thinking that we need more material objects to be better versions of ourselves.

My grandmother told me recently that she was amazed at all the information I was learning from my OB-GYN, about the baby’s size and development and whether I was able to get induced earlier than my due date. She shared with me that all she had was the male family doctor who would come and do a house visit to make sure things were reasonably okay before dipping. It struck me that amidst all the noise of the internet, there was so much power in the new information I have this time around, if I’m only willing to silence the buzzing of the internet’s opinions.

Sarah Duignan is a medical anthropologist from Guelph, Canada. Through her award-winning AnthroDish podcast and biweekly newsletter, she explores relationships between food, culture, health, and environment.

By Rejoice Isaac

As a child, I did not know what particular category — slim, skinny, or thin — I fit into. Adults in my neighbourhood called me names. These depended on their mood: when they were cheery, I was Agbani Darego, after the famous model, often shortened to Agbani, because of my body size, almond-shaped eyes and mesorrhine nose. If they were feeling prickly and wanted to make fun of me, I was no longer a model but “Alika 7-Up”, a local name for Fido Dido, the lean-limbed character used to advertise the soda. Other times, they called me broom or twig. Then they would ask if I was eating at all, and if I was, where the food was going.

I did not take any of these jibes to heart, mostly because other girls my age were not so different from me: lithe, with beaded braids and flowery or patterned gowns. I was fed well, enjoying a light breakfast before school mornings, sliced bread slathered with mayonnaise and a steaming mug of milk and Milo, Ovaltine, or Bournvita. Lunch was always eba and soup, dinner ranged from fried potato and eggs, to spaghetti or macaroni, to yam prepared in a variety of ways. 

I loved the meals, but little things seemed disconcerting, and I would focus on those instead of simply eating. I hated chopped onions and tomatoes weakened by heat, and I took great pains to sift them out of the jollof rice and tomato stew before eating. My mother did not understand why I hated vegetables softened by cooking, and her arguments for why I should eat them always seemed to trump my complaints. Whenever she caught me sifting onion from rice, she would say,  “Onions are good for your eyes — eat your onions”.” 

Beyond my eyes, though, my parents were concerned about my body weight. I was not a sickly child, but I hated taking drugs in any form and hid them when no one was watching. “Eat well so you won’t fall sick,” my mother constantly reminded me. They considered a robust appetite my ticket to health.

*

Childhood flew past quickly. The girls whom I felt some sort of kinship with because we looked the same began to fill out, their chests and thighs growing at a faster rate than mine. Soon, they began to look like my aunties, and their choice of clothing, majorly handled by their mothers, took on an adult feminine turn. Their blouses and gowns accentuated these changes, which made me acutely aware of how my body lagged. My chest budded quite alright, but not just as fast as theirs, and it made me sad. I became ashamed of my body.

My first growth spurt occurred when I was 12, between intense bouts of malaria, a measles infection, chicken pox, and sporadic nose bleeds. It seemed as though my body become a magnet for ailments. However, between them, I managed to secure menarche and added a few inches to my height and hips. All of this occurred in a boarding school, where I disliked everything from the whistling pines to the food. The food. Portions were too little, and barely had any taste. 

Sunday breakfast after chapel was “tea”, coloured water really, with eight pieces of Oxford Cabin biscuits. Lunch was fried rice, cooked to fit its description, with a piece of meat no larger than a thumb. Dinner was yam porridge — cubed pieces of yam cooked with oil, crayfish, seasoning and other condiments. No student received more than two pieces of yam. 

At age thirteen, I switched schools because we moved houses. I was in a day school this time, where I went from home, but they fed us lunch in school, and we were mandated to return our plates empty. 

The food at my new school tasted better. We got moderate portions, extra if we liked, paired with a piece of fruit. A banana with spaghetti cooked in tomato sauce, an orange with bean porridge and a piece of fried fish, an orange with eba and ogbono soup. I always spied fat colourless lobes of onion in the meals they served, but my previous experiences with my mother equipped me for The Swallow. When I shoved the onions or tomatoes in my mouth, I swallowed them with water the same way pills are taken. I teared up every time I did this with my onions, but it was better than gagging after chewing them, particularly when people were watching. 

*

At fourteen, I moved again, to live with an aunt. She was warm and friendly, but this did not displace her disciplinarian arc. Her meals were relentless in presenting my dilemma — every cooked meal, except soup, had onion rings. She maintained that onions gave food life, and towered over me while I painfully swallowed them. I couldn't bring myself to chew. 

My food portions were visibly larger than what I was used to, which I was grateful for, but I couldn't seem to finish them no matter how hard I tried. 

“Nobody wastes food in my house, finish that food now-now,” was a constant thing my aunt told me. 

“Don’t you want to look like your mates, look at so-and-so, see how fine she is, she is your age mate.” 

“You want to keep looking like you're not eating good food.”

In truth, I wanted to gain weight and fill up the dresses given to me. Nigerian beauty standards place women with plump bodies, well-rounded thighs, toned calves and full breasts at the forefront. In some cases, this is because size can be conflated with affluence; the more flesh you have, the better off you must be. Rotundity is also associated with female fertility across several Nigerian tribes, including mine, the Igbo. We call this body type nma — a chubby look. Every other body shape pales in comparison; size-zero bodies are relegated to the rear.

This standard is perpetuated in pop culture. Nigerian fashion magazines feature very few slim or petite women.  In Afrobeat lyrics, the ideal woman’s breasts and bum exceed every other part of her body and leave people drooling in her wake. The chorus of Bum Bum by Nigerian singer Davido makes this explicit:

Fatty bumbum biggie bumbum / this your bumbum ibadi re gbon gbon

Partly written in Yoruba, it loosely translates to “this your waistline rotates very well”.

These standards have implications beyond aesthetics. Bigger women are considered more mature and ready for marriage, which is important in Nigeria, as their bodies are considered capable of childbearing. Young women have to present themselves as wife material, and looking the part makes it easier to marry above one’s social standing, have a grand wedding, and achieve financial security. This can put a lot of pressure on young women who don’t fit the mould. 

The mould was often laid out for me literally. Ready-made dresses sold in shops across Nigeria are designed with larger women in mind and always have to be amended to suit other body types. My aunt purchased my dresses in intentionally large sizes, especially at the upper arms, waistline and lower body region, giving me a sack-like appearance. While I tested them in dressing rooms, using the waist belts to give them some semblance of shape, the vendor would try to reassure me and my aunt that one day I would grow and be able to fill it out. My aunt would nod in agreement, making me turn this way and that. 

These incidents gave me some hope that the kilograms I needed were on their way, I just needed to will them into existence by eating more food. More food meant I would gain weight, so I ate until I felt my throat constrict, swallowing more often than I chewed. Sometimes, after going to bed, I would toss and turn uncomfortably till I threw up everything I ate. This continued for months, until I decided to stop forcing so much food into my stomach. Stuffing myself with food and throwing up afterwards defeated the whole purpose of eating. It always left me hungry, and I did not enjoy the food. 

Eventually, I discovered how to eat, eating just enough to sate my appetite without causing nausea: I began to split large portions in two. 

*

Years passed by and weight gain still eluded me. By eighteen, the snide remarks I got about my body became a multi-layered obstacle that eroded my self-esteem. Older women at home and in church pointed out that if I didn't gain weight soon, it would be hard for me to attract suitors. Some said if I attracted suitors by some miracle, my hips were not fully developed for childbirth. When I was in a group of girls and we walked past men, I knew the whistles and catcalls were not for me.

Boys my age commented that the only remarkable thing about me was my face and that my body still looked like that of a twelve-year-old. My younger siblings surpassed me in weight and height, and whenever we went out together, people thought I was the youngest of the family. 

With all of this, I fixated my grievances on my body and thought about the possible reasons why it refused to change.

I must have offended a benevolent spirit and being stuck physically is its retribution.

I should be nicer to people, so the offended spirit will release my much-needed growth spurt. 

I've been nice since forever, and I haven't received my growth spurt. 

I guess I'll have to wait for second puberty.

At nineteen, I started my first year in university. For the first time, I was truly alone and in charge of my matters, including what I ate and wore. It came with a flurry of emotions; it seemed blissful that no one monitored what I ate, the size of my food portions or what I wore. It was also overwhelming, with the constant struggle of deciding what to eat and choosing clothing that suited the environment and fit my body. 

Living in a dormitory with women from different backgrounds exposed me to new information. Across the African continent, Nigerian women place the highest importance on beauty and aesthetics; from my roommates, I learnt that there were boob-firming pills, breast enlargement pills, butt enlargement creams and more. There were even weight-gain syrups made from herbs and other ingredients that induced weight gain. The products promised visible changes within weeks, with weight gain “in the right places”. Business profiles touted before-and-after photos of slim women in ill-fitting clothing transformed into hourglass visions in dresses that clung to their form, enhancing every contour. It seemed as though everything about them changed. 

The comment sections of these pages were filled with people asking for product prices and how to take them. Apparently, these supplements spurred hunger, invoking an insatiable appetite in anyone who took them. While their primary result was weight gain, they also introduced bloating and addition in undesired places, bringing about a double chin and rolls of fat around the neck and stomach. The same businesses also sold products like slimming or detox tea to dissipate newly procured unwanted fat. Even at 19, I was wary of giving in to the urge to please the male gaze. While I wanted to gain weight, I did not want to relapse into an unrecognizable version of myself. I let the idea perish. 

*

As I get older, I  have gradually learned to shed these stereotypes from my psyche. Listening to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie has made me reinvent the way I view likability and beauty standards. Setting and achieving academic and career milestones has boosted my self-esteem. Working for my money has granted me independence on varied levels and has helped me make informed decisions. While my family members, especially my aunt, still complain about the small portions of food I eat, they have made peace with the fact that I am no longer a child, and I can make choices for myself. The subject of marriage comes up during family gatherings, and I clearly state that while I do not abhor the prospect of marriage, I would not tweak my money by force-feeding myself to gain weight and look attractive. I constantly remind myself that they, family and society in general, do not govern my body. I am free to make well-suited choices on its behalf. 

These days, I’ve replaced The Swallow with The Vanishing Act. I dice my onions finely so they aren't visible in my meals. I blend tomatoes alongside peppers. Other vegetables I don't particularly like get incorporated into meals in tiny, chopped bits. I have discovered that I like home-made meals with a generous helping of scotch bonnet peppers, especially Indigenous dishes that require ample time and effort for their preparation: Ugba, nkwobi, afang soup paired with fufu, egusi soup with the same, yam and pepper soup, plantain porridge, abacha, ukwa.

I prepare and eat these at my own pace, so I don't feel the need to throw up afterwards. I’ve been liberated from nausea and dread around dinner time. The struggle to buy clothes remains. Ready-made dresses are two sizes bigger than what would suit me; I wear M, but adult sizes come in L, XL, and XXL in most shops. So I thrift frequently, and hunt for dresses that suit my body well. I amend bigger dresses so they don't look like sacks. 

I wonder what it would be like to reimagine beauty standards in Nigeria. How many other women suffer under the weight of burdensome comments, and unpleasant eating habits? I still get queried about my imaginary suitors and what they would say about my body — if they'd like it, if they'd think it suitable for bearing their children. But my body has carried me faithfully for two decades and some. There is no need to make it morph into shapes a certain demographic of suitors would like, to my own detriment. They are just men, and men are not oxygen.

My body works for me now; it doesn't reject the food I give it, a man’s preferences or a woman’s pressure doesn't govern the choices I make for it, and I look pretty in the dresses I wear. This is a miracle in itself. 

Rejoice Anodo is a creative writer and freelance journalist. Her work explores history, culture, feminism, and women's rights.

You can also listen to Taylor read the poem using the voiceover player above.

I wanna finish your sentences
Make myself a sandwich, 
Cheese, 
lettuce, 
tomato, 
Slice you up, 
smothered in mustard, 
the spicy one, 
no horseradish, 
I don’t like that kind 
You: the one on the left piece 
Gluten free, 
Revulsion side up

Stir you in my soup 
Steaming hot, 
sweat around the bowl, 
celery crawling 
around your ankles
star pasta 
in your nostrils 
this sounds violent 
but it’s fun 
garlic wound
salty, no sodium
broth, no bones

I wanna be a balance beam breadstick
In the oven, 400 
toasting up my private parts 
I mean the liver, 
lungs, 
esophageal yearning

half hour done
we made molasses cookies
oatmeal sense of home
ghosts in your garden
I heard them walk in the door
take their shoes off 
they told me to sit down
eat my green beans
they told me to throw salt over my shoulders
slug you off
send you in the basement
cut out my tongue
stir it in soup
smother it in the sandwich
go for a picnic and tell myself I’m worth eating

Taylor Hunsberger is a food and culture writer, poet, and children’s librarian. You can find her writing at https://taylorhunsberger.wordpress.com/ and her recipes through her newsletter at https://gocrispgirl.substack.com/.

If you enjoyed this poem, check out two previous poetry pieces for our MEAT issue, Engorged by A.J. Parker and Mutually Assured by Natasha Matsaert, which examine bodies and sexuality through the lens of consumption.

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Some people just have lumpy breasts, the nurse tells me. This is easier to understand than wrapping my head around medical jargon, or trying to visualize how large 2.5 centimeters is. Maybe the word for benign solid breast lumps — fibroadenoma — will finally stick in my brain, now that I am two years into examining my own. 

I go through these examinations, and pay closer attention to these growths, because of my family medical history. My mom’s breast cancer diagnosis and treatment at age 47 fits into a tapestry of illnesses that my maternal and paternal families have contributed to: there’s brain cancer, cancer that spread through internal organs, AIDS, leukemia, the epilepsy that I outgrew as a child. 

Pastry baking’s traditional aesthetics tend toward the smooth, denoting such as the perfect, the ideal form. We push pastry cream through a fine mesh strainer to ensure there are no cornstarch lumps in the final product; whipped fats should be the same temperature when working with them so that they don’t curdle; cake batters are stirred until the ingredients are well incorporated, meaning that they are no longer distinguishable as independent variables, that they have been fully integrated into a smooth whole.

In baking, we go through these steps to create breads, cakes, and creams that are delicious, and not only that, but a pleasure to take in visually, and then to eat. Sometimes, though, I wonder, is a lump here or there really that bad?

Pastry traditions far precede the digitalization of our lives, our actions becoming a series of if-then statements powered by apps and artificial intelligence. The choices that we make in our day-to-day lives have the potential for endless predetermination, so that we can float through life with privileged ease. This seamlessness, the smooth transactions that happen via clicks, taps, and swipes is a buffer. Such frictionless interactions encase us, protecting us from the dynamism of the world around us. We experience fewer obstacles as well as less spontaneity; an aspect of lumpiness is lost, I think for the worse. 

In Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives, René Boer challenges our society’s focus on perfection being characterized by these smooth transactions and frictionless interactions, identifying the isolation and alienation that are the byproducts of predicted and prescripted interactions and experiences. In the chapter titled Smooth Disruptions, he leans into Richard Sennett’s perspective on the modernizing city: “Or, as Sennett wrote half a century ago in The Uses of Disorder, it is important people ‘grow to need the unknown, to feel incomplete without a certain anarchy in their lives, to learn (...) to love the ‘otherness’ around them.’” If we only expect to know and encounter smoothness, then how can we be prepared for anything other, for the lumps in our lives?

My family medical history is complex. By the age of 26, I came to the sober — and maybe a touch cynical — conclusion that a cancer diagnosis is a likely part of my future, if not for environmental reasons then for hereditary ones. Each narrative of illness in my family opens new questions, forces us to delve into new territory to confront new unknowns, while opening old wounds and reigniting grief from past losses. I remind myself that our past experiences can provide knowledge and strength to contend with new scenarios. After all, our lives are not lived in mechanical isolation: we always have our histories. 

Paying attention to our bodies gives us a more nuanced, embodied form of knowledge, too. The algorithmically determined choices and paths for life that play a large role in our everyday existences are at odds with these more felt and experienced ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Perhaps the knowledge that we develop through our senses, our muscles, and our joints can prepare us to face the unknowns of our lives, as it shows us how we are able to interact with our world, which in reality is hardly ever smooth. 

Clare Michaud is a writer and baker based in Madison, Wisconsin. Her writing has appeared in ‘kitchen work’. She often thinks and writes about the poignancy of our everyday lives. 

By Shena Cavallo for our BODY issue | Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.

When she saw me about to put on my underwear, she waved her hand dismissively and told me not to bother. I might as well go to the bathroom as I was, naked from the waist down. I dropped my underwear, and with them some of my dignity, and initiated my cat-walk of shame toward the bathroom.

I’m generally indifferent to nudity and undress without much thought so it wasn’t her command that bothered me. What irked me was how she acted as if she already knew me. She said it was natural I had loved my dad; fathers benefit from low expectations, whereas mothers always buckle under unrealistic standards. She had gleefully labelled me a “homosexual” as if I was, perhaps, the first real, live one she had ever seen.

The gynecologist was convinced I was hemorrhaging blood, my skin more sallow than usual, because my uterus carried the oppressive weight of generations of trauma — some of my women relatives were indifferent at best to motherhood while others truly suffered because of it, caring endlessly for families regardless of what they wanted

She seemed not to believe that I didn’t want to have a baby: the lemon-sized fibroid in my womb resembled a gestational sac, which she insinuated was an indicator of my latent desires. I felt both defensive and doubtful. I was the same person who had never given my abortion a second thought. I had stood firm in my conviction of not having children, yet, when another gynaecologist had pushed to remove my uterus the week before, I felt resistant.

That’s why I was enduring these small indignities, including her psychoanalysis of my womb. I came with the belief that this gynaecologist might take a more holistic, less invasive approach to the fibroid. But as she ineptly rammed the probe into my vagina with the finesse of a horny adolescent boy, that hope quickly fizzled. Frustrated, she told me to take it and insert it myself. “You’re all up here!” She struck her head with a degree of violence that felt rehearsed. “You’ve got no connection to your body!”

While calling me a “homosexual” and having me parade around half-naked was hardly my idea of foreplay, she probably had a point.

*

My whole life I’ve alternatively felt connected and disconnected from my body. Its expressions, its hunger, its desire, its instincts. This disconnect has often manifested in a rumbling, distraught gut that screams for help after I’ve neglected my body or my emotions for too long. Or simply when I’m not feeling at home in the world.

As a child, I would often feel nauseous in church. I thought it was the incense, but in retrospect I was repulsed by the way that the paper-thin wafer would stick stubbornly to the roof of my mouth, the stinging gulp of wine as hard to swallow as the pedantic lecture about guilt and sin.

At home, eating represented a rare moment of stillness; my family operated with the frenetic pace of working-class people for whom rest is a sunk cost. We rarely partook in “leisure” activities as a family, but we did enjoy our weekly grocery runs. Maybe the food made me feel less alone, as I navigated an out-of-place childhood that turned into a friendless adolescence. As a teenager, after school, I would inhale bowls of sugary cereal and ice cream, almost to the point that I felt sick. My appetite felt insatiable. 

My family always enjoyed telling the story of how when a full plate of fish, intended to feed our family of four, was set before me, I ate nearly all of it. Only at the end, as I laboriously chewed the final bites, and bemoaned how large my serving was, they told me that the fish had been intended to feed us all. Unlike Jesus who multiplied the fish, I demolished them.

This is my inheritance, in a way; after all, I am from a family who ate out of tiredness, ate our frustrations in the form of Texas toast, ice cream, Kit Kats. I felt a longing that wouldn't be satisfied with Little Debbie snack cakes. I was hungry to live in a place that was not a Western Pennsylvania, dollar-store, former-factory town, and I was craving connection. Pangs of sexual desire awoke early in me and would manifest in voracious masturbation sessions on my stomach with my face buried in my carpet. 

Occasionally men, almost never boys, would spark this. But more significantly, and more out of bounds, I thought of women. I remember daydreaming about a fifth-grade teacher. I squirmed self-consciously in my seat at the movie theatre watching Kate Winslet in Titanic. And I could never look away from the older blonde girl in my dance class with a husky voice and whose hips held potential that I somehow vaguely grasped at 12.

*

Growing up in the US with an Italian father, I had always felt that some part of me didn’t quite fit, maybe that incongruous part was somehow “Italian”. Once I was old enough, I decided to go to Italy and see for myself. 

But in Italy, there were no answers to be found. Never was my gut on such high alert as it was when I was living on the outskirts of Rome. There always seemed to be danger lurking, from the men in the dark streets and the subway. I’ve traveled to many countries and find assumptions about which are “safe” and which are “dangerous” , simplistic and often exaggerated or prejudiced, but nowhere did I feel as unsafe as in Rome. It didn’t help that my host brother would creep into my bedroom to stare at me while I pretended to sleep. For weeks, I peed in a plastic bottle rather than going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and risking running into him.

The food in Rome didn’t suit me either. Pasta sank like a rock in my stomach. I was constantly bloated. Nothing in Italy, including Italians, felt familiar. I was reluctantly learning that neither sexual desire nor feeling like a certain geography was “home” were as straightforward as I had hoped. 

*

I had thought Italy would feel like home, because for me, home was my father.

My father was a fire sign. A fire of passion, indignation, and resentment burned within him. It burned through his gut and esophagus, ultimately killing him.  When my father was dying,  my ravenous appetite withered for the first time. Thinking of his yellowing skin and his body taking up less and less space made my throat constrict. I struggled to swallow.

It took us a long time to get doctors to take my dad’s pain seriously. When he complained of pain, one doctor mocked him behind his back, mimicking someone throwing back a bottle while making eye contact with my mother and me. Even if my father had been a drinker, he would’ve still deserved to be treated with dignity and care. But alcohol was not his vice — rather, it was holding and swallowing his emotions, his pain, his shame.

I’ve done the same for many years. Swallowing frustrations, emotions, and desires that scare me or simply those I can’t seem to fully grasp.

I only dated men when I was younger, in part because I met very few queer women. But I also struggled to fully comprehend the rush of excitement and anxiety that marked certain interactions with women — the waves of alternating cold and hot liquid over my body — and where the line between admiration and affection blurred into desire.

It doesn’t escape me that there is something of my dad in the women who draw my attention. Sometimes I think they are like him. At other times I think he would have desired them too. They are always fire signs.

My father and I used to bond over many things. We both loved eating — tomatoes with oregano, oil and vinegar; Italian bread with sugar, melted butter, and cinnamon, pan-fried smelts. We shared a sense of humour and had compatible politics. More importantly, we trusted and understood each other. He once took me out early in the morning to teach me to drive. There was dense, foamy fog and I had never driven on the highway before, but he almost immediately fell asleep, my father who tried to control everything. And I drove with him snoring beside me. 

We never extensively talked about the fact that I was queer, not really, though he once alluded to it in our dingy basement as we worked side-by-side, refurbishing some metal and stripping wires that we would go on to sell at the flea market. I was his daughter, but I was also his son, when we both ogled the same actress on TV, when he chastised me for crying with his stern, “man-up” glance, or when he remarked to his friends that I had “balls” as I travelled and moved to new countries. I wonder, though, how my father would see me now; if desiring women would link us in a different way. 

*

For years, I used to think my queerness explained my romantic disinterest in men, but I’ve found myself equally indifferent, romantically and physically, to most women I’ve met. Other people seem to fuse into relationships in a way I rarely can. 

I suspect neurodivergence explains much of how I navigate my sexuality. Clubs and bars can make me feel overstimulated. I cringe at attempts to flirt. I’m inept at small talk. Certain sensations, sounds, long nails, clingy touching, particular smells — rudely sever any real or imagined interest I had. Much of what electrifies me — banter, the way someone moves — is not apparent over dating apps. Perhaps it’s why if I tend towards anything, it’s one-night stands because if I give someone too much time, the desire evaporates.

It’s not so surprising then that I married the only person I was ever in a relationship with. For a while, I felt anchored by a steadiness, a certainty. I decided to smoke less, drink less and eat more balanced meals. I started to exercise, but I didn’t feel healthier. I vacillated between constipation and diarrhea, my stomach perpetually distended, my joints aching. I couldn’t help but notice that I had felt better in the early days of my relationship, which were marked by midnight espressos, cigarettes, and fast food between marathons of sex.

I see now that it was never about the food, but the malestream of anxiety and chatter in my mind when I’m not fully at home in a situation. In this case, it was the realization that being in a relationship with a man, no matter how much I loved him, would always leave me wondering about something else. No amount of brute force had allowed me to meld my desire into a heterosexual shape. And the six slices of pizza or four donuts, eaten after a day of otherwise “healthy” eating, would not quench what I lacked either.

Initially, I preferred to think my unrest was due to my location, or stalled “career”, so I moved to New York City. There, the buzz of the city only worsened my anxious mind. People competed over who was busier, more important, and consequently more miserable. The food was mostly overpriced and not so different from most of my human interactions there — cold, performative, and devoid of any nutritional value. I was always checking my bank account, trying to stretch a few dollars over several days. And in the background, my relationship was drying up, slowly. Initially, I barely noticed until it was so underwhelming, it rolled under the couch and got lost. Going forward, there would be no one to witness the minutiae of my day and all my future homes would just be marked by me — my books, my habits, my disorder.

*

My father died while I lived in New York. And maybe that’s why I still hate it. It represents the time I’ll never get back. After he was gone, I was adrift. My stomach had never felt emptier and more bloated at the same time. I’d eat slowly, eat blandly, try new diets, see specialists, drink ginger tea and pop antacids, but my stomach would still burn, swell, and churn. Like with my father, the doctors assumed I had a drinking problem. It was just the indigestion of a life half-lived.

And there was always the swell of sadness, starting like a lump in my throat when I would struggle to remember him — his leathery thick red-brown neck tanned from hours of working hunched over under the sun in his beloved garden; his hesitancy to ever hug back, especially once I grew breasts; his powerful back that had helped me learn to swim. His fondness for bland saltines, sardines, and sugary coffee. I can’t even count the number of times I cried on the NYC subway, to blank faces that had long ago stopped registering human emotion.

The grief eventually started to ease up a little, but I didn’t really taste anything anymore. Everyone had insisted if I stopped smoking, my sense of smell and taste would improve. But when I quit, all I noticed was that New York smelt even more of rotting fish, stale menstrual blood, and sewage than I had originally realized. 

*

In the years since my dad’s death, I’ve gotten better at trying to find and hold something closer to pleasure, being more in touch with my body. There is no silver lining when someone you love dies. The solitude I feel and felt looms large, repetitive, endless. A gut-wrenching, sinking sensation overwhelms me when I realize I’ll always have to explain something about myself to people, even those I immediately connect with. With my father, I needed no explanation. I was seen and understood in all my stubbornness and my graceless impatience. 

But his death did push me to try to live and act on impulse, to listen to my gut. Two years ago, I had the privilege to land and start a new life in Barcelona. Christmas decorations and ‘Bon Nadal” signs were blowing limply in the wind, my suitcase was irretrievably lost, and my only set of clothing had stiffened with dried sweat — hardly an auspicious beginning. To recover, I walked to the beach in a nondescript industrial neighbourhood and watched a couple dance by the sea. The wind was so strong that the music from their small handheld radio was barely audible. My dad was the one who first taught me to swim; we both loved the water.

The waves calmed my lingering unease, and that first week, I ate happily. Very little irritated my sensitive stomach. The optimism and energy I felt in those early days were akin to a feeling I had almost forgotten — falling in love and suddenly feeling that you are capable of believing nonsense. 

Unlike New York, which heightened my frenetic tendencies, Barcelona encouraged a slower pace. I quickly settled into a new routine: commuting by bike, leisurely visiting the beach, and chatting endlessly in the evening with friends over just-caught fish, fresh bread, and rainbows of salad.

Two weeks after moving, I met someone and it felt like that day on the beach: an optimistic, safe stillness, like there was no need to rush to the next thing. I had only one goal — I really wanted to make her laugh. And with every interaction, the feeling and the certainty grew, that we had skipped the initial pantomime of desire and flirting and settled comfortably in the small wonders of a life. Unfortunately, the dynamics of our relationship were anything but simple, and in the end, she wasn’t willing to take the risk. 

In the aftermath I thought I would sink for a while, then re-emerge unscathed. I’d be able to outrun the disappointment. I’ve always been like that — some people tout it as resilience, but I know it’s really an addiction to dopamine, to distraction. In any case, I had only known her for a few months. But somehow the way she entered a room and tilted her head would have made me feel at home anywhere in the world. 

The fall proved endless. I would wake with a terrible sensation like I was drowning or my heart was too big for my chest. But even in the depths of my sadness, I could occasionally glimpse the surface, the horizon past the choppy waves. Maybe it was the conviction, the relief that someone existed capable of jolting me out of the numbness of a life hollowed out in the middle, in the space of my father’s broad shoulders and sturdy, bowed legs. 

*

When the tears dried up, I began to bleed. Sitting with a friend in a restaurant, despite wearing so many layers of pads that it felt like a diaper, I soaked through my pants, bled on the chair. The blood dripped down to the carpet and followed me home as I furiously biked up the hill to my house.  

The same doctors who had dismissed me, saying I was simply going through perimenopause at 38 and chastising me for not having frozen my eggs while I still had the chance, now realized there was, in fact, a growth in my uterus that was rapidly expanding. The doctors couldn’t believe I was still standing despite so much blood loss. I guess our bodies get used to deteriorated states, in the same way our hearts and guts get used to repressed feelings. It took me almost 40 years, but I realized I needed to listen to my body’s screams. Unfortunately, by then, surgery was the only cure.

Almost nine months after the last time I saw the woman who cracked open my heart, I delivered, so to speak. The doctors removed a lemon-sized fibroid, and my stomach immediately became flatter, less swollen.  

I wanted to see the fibroid for myself. I don’t know what I thought I would find in it. Maybe the smell of the dirt of my father’s garden, or the seaweed-infused air from that first day in Barcelona. Would it have felt like the skin on her upper arm or between her nose and lips? In any case, I would have liked to have taken it with me, because I think it could have told me something about the shape of my grief, my sadness, and my longing that continues to elude me. When I woke up, however, they told me they had promptly disposed of it. 

*

While the doctors made one last-ditch effort to operate on my father, we stayed in outpatient housing in a small apartment near the hospital. Never a family to go hungry, we brought various snacks. My father couldn’t eat much, but when we laid out our spread, I imagined an alternate reality, one where we were the kind of family that travelled together, who still had many adventures ahead of them. But it was our last “fun” moment. We didn’t laugh together again after that. 

The holistic gynaecologist who diagnosed my fibroid as unrealized maternity was wrong; I don’t have any lingering desire to be a parent. But I am always hungry. I am always searching for a home. 

In the woman who felt like one, I have to wonder, what did I see? What kind of world did I briefly witness or imagine that led me to unravel and fall so deeply? Maybe it was the missing piece that would complete my clumsy efforts to assemble the set, the props, and the characters to feel like I am home again, sitting with my family over a meal. A happier, queerer version of that family, who I’ve been searching for ever since. 

Sometimes, I grasp the feeling briefly. The taste of flavourful tomato, an evening swim in the sea, the jolt of an unexpected connection with another person —the moments may not last, but they are no less significant. I’ll keep looking for them wherever I can. 

And now, at least, I rarely crave sugar. I’m learning to better nourish myself.

Shena Cavallo resides in Barcelona with their canine companion, Mr PJ, and occasionally tweets at @ShenaCavallo and documents their travels on Instagram at @shenaletizia. Astrologically, they are driven by earthly pursuits and fiery endeavours, guided by Saturn. This is their first piece, and they hope to further explore grief, home and the ways we experience connections and disconnections with others.