"It's Never Just About the Food" (Part 1)

Understanding our relationship with food and feeding the hungry in our midst

I reached out to

Annelise Roberts

and

Dixie Dillon Lane

a few weeks ago, inviting them to participate in a guest post on the topic of food and family. I was thrilled when they both said “yes” so I sent some preliminary questions their way—and then our first draft was fourteen pages long. All that to say, I will be splitting our conversation into two parts (today and next Monday) to ensure that you have time to really savor it.

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

Sara Dietz

(SD): Ladies! I am so excited for this conversation. Before we dive into the meat (pun intended!) of our topic, I’d love if you could each give a short little introduction!

Dixie Dillon Lane

(DDL): Hi everyone! I’m Dixie—historian of education, writer, editor at Hearth & Field, and mom of four. I homeschool my kids and daily get lost in thought while staring out my window at the white sycamore trees towering against the sky. And yes, while I am lost in thought, my children do exactly what your children would do: get into mischief and/or wreck the house. Oh, well.

I write about family, education, history, tech resistance, and sometimes random things like chickens. I live on the edge of a small town in Virginia and post essays (and links to my writing elsewhere) at The Hollow. I don’t like fights but I love conversations, and I’m really excited to be talking today with Sara and Annelise, who are some of my favorite thinkers on Substack!

Annelise Roberts

(AR): Hello! Annelise here—mother of five, writer, educator of many small people, and CEO of household affairs. I like to write about the thing behind the thing—whether that is trauma, parenting, food, or sifting through the mundane for evidence of God’s goodness. 

I write about whatever is on my mind over at Writing While Washing, thus named because the vast majority of my drafts are worked out in my head while attending to a household task. More recently I’ve begun a new venture at The Everything Free Life, which focuses on providing helpful resources for those who, for any reason, have found themselves dealing with a limited diet due to health issues. 

I live in Colorado… for now. 

SD: So our topic today is food and family: how do the two intersect, and how can we go about pursuing a food culture for ourselves and our family that is healthy and holy? To start us off, can you share a little bit about your own relationship with food?

DDL: I am an omnivore these days, but I have had many different stages in my relationship with food over the course of my life. When I was a teenager, I struggled to prepare food for myself, especially school lunches; I remember packing just a graham cracker and a pickle for lunch more than once—I was obviously not in a great “place” at the time in terms of self-care and food! I think I was hoping that I could somehow just not need food. Some of this was related to childhood trauma, but some of it was also just a result of American food and body culture.

When I went away to college in Vermont, things got better. My college experience was partly outdoor-oriented, and so even though I did gain weight in college, I also gained an appreciation of food as fuel for a fun and healthy life, and so I didn’t struggle as much as before with feeding myself or with enjoying food.

Soon after college, I developed a gluten intolerance as a result of digestive wear and tear from a longterm medication. So I ate gluten-free (and often diary-free) for a nearly a decade. My best relationship with food in that period was while I was breastfeeding, as I stopped thinking about eating perfectly and just focused on meeting the immense caloric demands of nursing! But I still avoided gluten and dairy very carefully.

After eight years, my gut was finally healed, and I began to reintroduce gluten. That was when I realized that my gluten avoidance, though necessary, had also become a temptation to control. I was terrified to eat wheat, which I now realized I thought of as poison. I had to work very hard to get myself to return to a healthy eating pattern that included gluten.

It’s been about five years since then, and though I think I now have a pretty healthy relationship with food, there are always ups and downs and twists and turns (including a long detour on the low-carb bandwagon).

AR: My first thought is, “That’s a loaded question!” Like many people, my relationship with food has been a battleground at times. While my experience was of course, unique, I relate to Dixie’s experience of trauma upending things. I had several very difficult events that converged right as I entered adolescence. Food can easily become a means of numbing emotions, and punishing or otherwise manipulating a body which feels like your enemy because of the experience you’ve had in it. It was a gym class assignment to count calories that inadvertently introduced this as a coping mechanism. I latched on and held on for dear life. This tortured relationship with food and my body continued throughout high school and college. I did a lot of work during college to seek accountability and try to get a handle on things, but didn’t really deal with the overwhelming emotions themselves. When I became pregnant there was a lot of healing in seeing what my body could do—how incredible it was. Taking care of another human being motivated me to take care of myself, and it was much easier to feed myself well for someone else’s sake. Sadly, my autoimmune issues started rearing their head after my first was born, and worsened after my second was born, leaving me desperate for a reason I felt so awful. It felt like a cruel joke, that after having had the most balanced and enjoyable relationship I’d ever had with food, now it was a potential source of danger again. 

The thing about using “food as healing” is that any therapeutic diet should come with a disclaimer. I can see from nine years down the line, that I was just wanting to feel better, was relying on a smattering of resources that were not telling the full story, and was doing the best I could. The short version of the story is that I tried many pieces of different approaches: Whole30, GAPS, SCD, AIP… all the acronyms for the “healthy” diets. In hindsight it’s very difficult to say how much they helped, or how much the other work I ended up doing—namely very targeted work with a naturopath and counseling—ended up moving the needle towards remission. As I came to find out, it’s actually not uncommon to develop a loss of oral tolerance after overly restricting one’s diet, which is why I say that these sorts of therapeutic interventions should come with a disclaimer. It sometimes feels like I’ve painted myself into a corner with food, and I’m still working my way back out of that. Food brings up a lot of grief, and the impact of the social isolation that a limited diet creates, even if you have understanding friends, is hard. I’ve questioned so much of my approach, wondering if what I’m doing was wrong, or right. The limited diet I eat allows me to feel well and function in a full capacity as a mother and wife, but it’s not without its own heavy set of burdens. I wish I had some way of knowing if it was actually necessary, or if there might have been a different way to achieve stable health.  In the end I’ve had to have a lot of compassion for myself, for how hard I was and am trying, and for all the things I didn’t know. 

The common thread throughout these struggles is that my relationship with food has often been about control, more than food. It’s a tenuous thing, because the intersection of body-based traumas, chronic illness, societal messages about food and bodies, the glut of information, and the lack of good nutrition education in the medical world, creates this “wild west”. We throw people to the wolves, and tell them to hope for the best. That’s definitely been my experience. I have felt that trying to navigate a truce in between the lines of two opposing ideologies—intuitive eating and food as healing—is very difficult.  Intuitive eating gets so much right—you can be healthy at any size, you can trust your body’s cues, there is no bad food. However, there’s no room within this for wondering if certain foods might actually be making you sick. There might not be bad food, but there’s a real possibility that some food does not work for you. On the other hand, the food-as-healing world can often set an unattainable standard and instill a fear of everything as toxic. Trying to exist in the gray area, where you take both of these approaches and allow them to hold hands, is hard. Online spaces also tend towards extremes, and I have been shamed in more than one Facebook group for not doing a diet “the right way,” which is just horrible, and also assumes that if you did it “the right way” it would actually fix you! 

SD: I didn’t feel the calorie needs in breastfeeding so much with my first—I was working part-time and was probably not as active during her infancy, and she was much smaller than my second. But this time around, it really is just a free for all scramble to get anything in my body. I’m starting to see some anxiety pop up around food now, which I think just comes on the heels of being pregnant and/or nursing for the last three years. We took a Bradley course when we were pregnant in 2021, and while I absolutely enjoyed it and am so grateful for it, there’s a heavy nutrition component that gave me a lot of metrics to strive for. It was probably the first time in my life that I felt a need to pay close attention to my food intake, and while the metrics were probably a net positive, they didn’t come with a ton of education on the actual nutrition component. Since this second baby has been born, I’ve had intense sugar cravings, as well as some signs of deficiency in key nutrients (Annelise, I think you and I have talked about this before!), and I’ve definitely had a difficult time “losing the baby weight” this time around. I wish I didn’t care about that, and I’m trying to tell myself that it’s okay to just wait and take care of meeting my needs now while I’m nursing, and worrying about the rest after the baby weans. So that’s what we’re focusing on for now, and trying to avoid the shame and the negative self-talk that comes with, for example, skipping lunch regularly or eating too much food that comes in plastic wrappers. 

SD: I guess my experience the last few years has taught me that it’s so important for us to be aware of the emotional significance of the food we eat: whether because of our personal history or family of origin, because of experiences we’ve had with friends or classmates, with doctors, etc. There are so many things we think we “should” do--or we genuinely want to do--that add this pressure to “perform” or to achieve perfection in our culinary endeavors. In your experience, how does one go about understanding (and, when necessary, untangling) the emotional dynamics around food? It feels overwhelming--where do you even start?

AR: I began to touch on this with my answer to the last question, but yes. It’s so difficult. The competing noise of food messages is close to deafening. I think you could fall into any single “camp” and find someone whose message directly opposes yours. To be honest, this need to definitively find the right way of eating has stolen a lot of joy from me. At some point within the last few years I had to put my blinders on and stop researching everything. I started praying for the wisdom to apply all the information I had, and for God to help me to know when I needed to try something different. We’ve had some tricky issues with kids where they've had a hard time introducing solid foods (don’t even get me started on the mom guilt about how my potentially limited diet could have caused some of this). I have a large toolbox of natural remedies, but even with all of that it’s easy to feel like you’re doing everything wrong. Sometimes, even if something works, it takes time and patience to see that it’s working. I lean on my husband’s advice and perception when I’m not sure about decisions, for myself, or for our kids. He’s traversed this whole path with me, but doesn’t carry the same baggage, so his wisdom is invaluable. 

I also think that it can be helpful to have some biological benchmarks to look at. For me these are things like, am I gaining weight adequately during pregnancy? Is my milk supply staying up? Am I cranky and crashing all day long? Am I irritable and snappy? Is my menstrual cycle regular? You’ll notice that aside from pregnancy, none of these checkpoints have to do with weight. Especially as someone with chronic illness, the connection of weight and health is not a 1-1 correlation, and can actually be completely random and out of my control. There are far too many factors for this to be a useful metric, especially when you add hormonal fluctuations, inflammation, stress etc… into the mix. I have found that it’s hard to adequately feed myself as a mother. When you’re constantly attending to small children’s needs, and nursing around the clock, it takes so much intentional effort to not undereat, and sometimes it’s the lack of nourishment that’s the problem. I try to focus on treating myself well, regardless of weight, and then adding things I know move me in the right direction, like a protein heavy breakfast. 

Counseling has been, indirectly, one of the best things I’ve done for my relationship with food. For a long time—most of my adolescence and maybe into my early twenties—I thought “feeling fat” was an emotion. It turns out that fat is a very neutral thing. It’s just fat. But I was using that phrase as a catch-all for any emotion that felt overwhelming. Once I started to do the work to deal with the trauma, and become more able to name and metabolize emotions, it was amazing how much my body-related anxieties calmed down. Learning to treat my body as if it were a part of me, instead of some separate thing I could punish as needed, was really important. 

DDL: I’m struck by Annelise’s observation that food can feel dangerous. Sometimes it IS dangerous, as when you have an allergy, and that can only make it harder to figure out! But usually, it is not. 

Yet many of us have been taught by our culture to see food not as nourishment but as a guilty pleasure. Name any food, and you can find someone out there on the internet who will tell you that it is dangerous and wrong (or, alternatively, that it is a magic bullet to heal all your woes!).

I have always tried to focus on food as nourishment rather than danger or reward, but I’ve often been overwhelmed by the seeming incompatibility of nourishing yourself and meeting certain ideals of body size and shape. Sometimes I have let my common sense go by the wayside in favor of losing weight. Other times I’ve seen my body change without any intention on my part, whether I’m happy with that change or not. And when you’re a high achiever who expects to be able to influence everything through self-control, it is easy to take credit for “good” changes and blame yourself for “bad” ones.

In the past few years, however, I have come to realize that the size, shape, health, and experience of the human body is not naturally static. It is perhaps more static for men (although their bodies also change over time!) than for women, who experience monthly physical cycles of change as well as, for most, long seasons of pregnancy and breastfeeding. Clothing companies compound the problem with their focus on a single, maidenly, and static body type in their designs, leaving no room for even the smallest of physical shifts. Such ill-fitting clothes reproach the wearer relentlessly with their binding, slipping, and squashing: “YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem” they seem to say.

This all has emotional relevance in our approach to food because it is disordered to focus so much on the physical body’s shape and size. Body size is not everything, and it is not entirely controllable. In fact, a food or body obsession can be much more damaging than a moderately (and perhaps even significantly) overweight body.

In a small example, I’ll share that while I mostly drink water (and in the morning, some coffee!), once or twice a week I enjoy a Diet Coke. Of course, Diet Coke is not “good” for the body. 

But you know what’s worse? Obsessing over never, ever drinking a Diet Coke, and feeling like a total failure if you ever do – or, alternatively, feeling like a failure if you never drink a Diet Coke and yet you still do not lose weight: “YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem…” 

It is obsession that is the real danger, not the Coke. We need to free ourselves from obsessions about food. We have to let go.

SD: Dixie! Your observation that women’s bodies are cyclical is so timely--I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately with regards to chores. It’s so difficult and so encouraging for us to change our thinking about our bodies to be more conscious of those changes and give ourselves some grace when we aren’t perfectly consistent or steady or static. 

SD: And then on top of the emotional piece, there’s often also a sensory piece. As an adult who has a hard time with certain textures and with new tastes, I often struggle to know how to introduce new foods into my diet, even when I know I need the wider variety of nutrients. I see this conversation happening a lot in the parenting world, with regard to sensory-sensitive children, so I suppose there are some good resources we can lean on from that sphere. 

DDL: Sensory problems with food are certainly real. I’ve been fortunate not to experience many myself, but I do understand what you mean, Sara, about struggling to implement a change in your eating, such as adding new foods, even though you know the change would be to your benefit.

When I read this question, I actually immediately thought of another kind of anxiety, that which I experienced during a long bout of insomnia once. It was a really scary experience, and I would start to panic every night as bedtime approached. Then a friend introduced me to a technique that made a big difference in the fear and anxiety part of the sleep experience. I think it’s applicable to trying to open oneself up to changing one’s eating experience, too.

The technique is called “Considerations,” and it is a sort of rethinking of the concept of affirmations. You know, repeating to yourself “I am an adventurous eater!” or whatever. The Considerations technique suggests that instead of saying something to yourself that you instinctively, even if not intellectually, believe to be untrue (because, for example, you know you actually are not an adventurous eater), you merely ask yourself to consider the question: “But what if I were?”

So, you just sort of daydream to yourself a little bit, and ask: “But what if I were an adventurous eater? What would that feel like?” And then you just consider it. Just dream a little about it. “Oh, wow, that would feel amazing! I wouldn’t be afraid of any textures and I would know for sure I would never gag on a new food. I would be so calm and cheerful about eating.” Then you ask, “What would it feel like physically?” And you’d say, “I’d be so relaxed when going over to someone’s house to eat. My shoulders would be soft, and my breathing would be deep and slow, and I’d laugh, and I’d feel super comfortable in my stomach after eating.” And then you’d say, “What would I notice around me?” And then you’d talk to yourself about how you’d notice that the food wasn’t really that bad, and that spongyness or whatever is actually kind of interesting, if not exactly pleasant. Finally, you would ask yourself, “What would I do?” And then you’d say, “I’d eat everything without even thinking about it. I wouldn’t worry about trying raspberries, sheesh. It would be fine! Food wouldn’t have any power over me. I’d act freely.”

And pretty soon, if you’re doing this every day (it helps to write it down) you really start to be able to imagine that maybe you actually are that way. Your shoulders do get soft, and you start to be able to consider the possibility that you might have been wrong about yourself, that you might in fact be able to change—that you might eat the spongy thing and actually be fine. And that can be really freeing when you are trying to make a change.

AR: I love this idea of “Considerations” that you bring up, Dixie! Imagination is so powerful. 

For me, the sensory component of food is not a huge issue, but at this point I have some real anxiety around bad food reactions. I’m continuing to work through that, and I think the best advice I have is that you just have to start, and then keep going. Perhaps that looks like starting with something that feels relatively attainable or non-threatening, and then giving yourself a break. And then maybe you return to that same thing over again – titration of small exposures over time. 

From a kid's perspective, they say that it takes most children 10-12 exposures to get used to a new food, and it’s interesting to note that “exposure” doesn’t necessarily mean they’re even eating it! I also was listening to a podcast episode the other day where they talked about picky eating being hereditary, which I found interesting. We’re very quick to beat ourselves up for using food for comfort, only liking certain things, eating somewhat repetitively, or any other number of supposed transgressions, but perhaps some of that is less in our control than we think. I think about cultures in the broader world, and the fact that we’re so spoiled by the experience of novelty here in the US. For most of history, most people have eaten a pretty repetitive diet of a few staple ingredients. And perhaps that isn’t something to strive for, but I think we need a bit of a reality check. There’s really nothing wrong with eating beans and rice multiple times a week! Maybe this expectation of novelty is because we are so spoiled by our access to food. I wonder if trying to approach new foods from a seasonal perspective might also be helpful? Or incorporating your kids into choosing new things to try? I find that my children almost always want to eat what’s on my plate—which is both annoying and a handy tool in getting them to try new things. It’s even worked for liver pate, which they don’t know is supposed to be gross. One last thought is that, relative to kids' picky eating, mineral deficiencies, zinc in particular, can have a connection to increased sensory sensitivity. So it could be worth looking into that to see if it improves anything. This podcast explains a bit more. 

SD: “Food wouldn’t have any power over me. I’d act freely.” Gosh, isn’t that the dream? The “Considerations” reminds me a lot of the play therapy principles I wrote about a few weeks back—that we don’t want to accept statements about ourselves that we feel are false, but if we can call attention to the ways in which we’re already trying to practice virtue (even if they’re small things!) then we can shift the way we see ourselves and shift our behavior.

I also love what you said, Annelise, about our diverse diets being something of a modern invention and luxury. It’s helpful to remember that people survived for centuries without HEB and the rainbow of exotic produce we take for granted. 

And on the topic of children eating off our plates, I’d love to hear how you each are trying to build up a culture around food in your own families, but we’ll save that conversation for next week!

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The rest of our conversation will hit your inbox next Monday at 7:00am CST. We’ll be moving from some of the more emotion-related topics to some very practical ones: family food culture and grocery shopping. You don’t want to miss it!