Poison & Superfood
I need to find red raspberry leaf tea. Red raspberry is “an herb made in heaven” according to my doula. It prevents tearing of the cervix and hemorrhaging, and reduces false labor. It “cleanses and prepares breasts for a pure milk supply for the nursing infant by cleansing and purifying the blood.” Though there are scant large-scale studies about red raspberry, what there is looks promising. My midwife recommended the tea as well. So, as I said, I really need to find it. I go to a health food store and they have raspberry tea but I have no idea if that’s what I’m looking for because I don’t know what’s so special about the leaves. For that matter, I wonder, why can’t I just eat raspberries? They’re not in season so I wouldn’t normally buy them, but maybe in this case…
When I finally find the raspberry leaf tea, it’s plastered in health claims with more of the same language from my doula. Words like “pure,” “cleanse,” and “temple” infect every article, product, and advertisement that surrounds pregnancy. I’m familiar with these words since, like most American women, they’ve been buzzing around my head since I was twelve. All the time that Coca Cola and McDonalds invested billions in making sure I knew that their products would make me happy, there has been an equally loud and maybe equally unhealthy campaign by the weight-loss and wellness industry to convince me that true happiness will be found when I purge all toxins from my body and replace them with clean and magical superfood. The word “superfood” was actually banned on product labels in the EU in 2007, but in the US its popularity has steadily grown in the last decade. I bought into it. There was a period in my early twenties when I was eating almost exclusively kale and quinoa and any indulgence in bread or cookies sent me into a tailspin of remorse. I only ate carbs or cheese when I was drunk, and then too much, and the guilt the next morning got mixed in with the hangover and other varieties of guilt.
In college, I wrote an essay called “Metaphor as Illness” — a play on Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor.” I argued that while it is natural to understand the body by way of metaphor, the metaphors themselves can be pernicious and contagious, infecting those exposed to them with harmful ways of viewing their bodies. Thinking of the body as a temple implies a morality about what you put into it. It’s meant to make you feel guilty for introducing a toxin to something that is otherwise pure. Guilt, in any amount, is never a sustainable basis for eating well. It gets you obsessing about food or makes you want to flip off your virtuous self and indulge. Once you’ve already desecrated the temple, you might as well make a party of it.
Most of the dominant metaphors about the body leave no room for nuance or degree. In reality, no food is completely good or completely bad. Even cyanide is not poison, if “poison” means a substance that kills when it breaches your body’s boundaries. It’s in apple seeds and almonds. But the warlike language around eating cannot help but label foods as enemies or allies. Maybe this starts on the battlefield of the toddler’s high chair, where treats are promised if the kid will eat “just one bite” of broccoli. I haven’t fought that particular battle yet so come back to me when I’ve found a non-dualistic way of keeping a two-year-old from eating peanut butter cups for every meal. But I’d like to believe that we can break the chore vs. reward model of food, or at least not beat ourselves up for eating something we want.
This all gets complicated because, as someone concerned with health, I obviously think some foods are better than others. Whole, fresh, less-processed food is healthier and also, I think, physically satisfying in a way that processed food isn’t. But I also know that people’s tastes have complicated emotional histories and aren’t solely based on our physiological reactions to foods. The guest poster Gan Chin Lin on Andrew Janjigian’s excellent Wordloaf wrote about Asian enriched bread, which to her (and to me) will always conjure a specific childhood-rooted joy that sturdy whole grain breads do not. Lin references a toxic-sounding thread of trolls who piled on to castigate milk bread as “not real bread.” The “real bread” that they were championing was probably healthier and likely has a longer cultural history, but their attack on others’ preferences was abhorrent.
Disgust is a powerful tool of control. Express disgust at someone’s food choices, because they’re unhealthy or unusual (to you), and if they’re able to keep eating it in your presence, they probably won’t enjoy it as much. From vegetarians wrinkling their nose at meat to kids in a lunch room making fun of one kid’s weird-smelling food, disgust tends to trigger a lot of emotions that can sometimes result in avoiding the disgusting food but introduces cognitive dissonance between what you like and what is okay to eat. Disgust is the vicious undercurrent of most wellness messaging and can show up in subtle ways even when the best-intentioned person tries to offer advice about what is good to eat. It can be hard to avoid, but being sensitive to its power might help us all help each other.
Despite occasional freakouts like, If my labor is difficult it’s because I didn’t drink raspberry leaf tea, I’ve been pretty good at resisting the aggressive health messaging targeting me during pregnancy. It helps that my midwives haven’t been on my case about my nutrition or weight and that I haven’t experienced any cravings at all (even though sometimes I want to; there’s no more socially condoned indulgence than pregnancy cravings). What I want and what is good for me matches up pretty well most of the time. It’s been a long battle to get to a place where I don’t feel like I have to fight.
What I’m cooking
Everything syrniki
Some syrniki recipes call for a lot of sugar and a much higher proportion of flour to farmers cheese, but Anthony’s family prefers them less sweet and slightly tangy. I couldn’t help imagining last time we ate them how nice an even more savory version would be, and my thoughts went to my favorite bagel and to the satisfying texture of sesame seeds baked like a crust on shao bing. You can make an excellent version of syrniki without the seasoning, just by following steps 3-6 but coating the dough in a little flour before frying, and you can eat them with sour cream or some fruit preserves. But the everything seasoning is extremely fun texturally and quite pretty as well.
Recipe in last Friday’s newsletter, for paid subscribers: