Discovering Ourselves Through Food

I write often that I live in New York City. It is usually peripheral, as a footnote of skyscrapers and lights over the Hudson, buried deep in whatever else I’m writing about. But before New York City was the backdrop of my writing, I came from a mixed culture family that had been living overseas for generations. Deep in Africa, I grew up always changing language and persona like a chameleon changes colours. In the summers we visited the rest of the family, who we forgot about for the other eight months of the year. I was a tanned creature on my father’s island, always sandy and salty. In the green countryside, I ate peaches and picked fresh basil. I was many girls over those summers; all different, overlapping only at the edges. The matryoshka doll of identity is that each can be subdivided indefinitely, that every layer of who I was could be pulled back only to reveal another.

That fact is the spawning point for many other thoughts, because I now live in a city that is also a million cities. Where you can be a million people and wear a million faces. Who you really are, then, who this city draws out of you, reveals itself not in one lightning strike of a moment, but through the tiny choices made every day. The coffee you drink, when every option is available. The grey space of what you choose to eat for lunch, versus what you don’t choose.

If we are what we draw comfort from, then I am a person who reaches for orange cake, dripping with spices and syrup, after a long day of crying. As I learned over weeks, not days, I am a person who likes coffee made in a pot over the stove like my parents do. The smell of olive oil and garlic, lemon and chillies. A glass of red wine as I cook. Who I am is much clearer against the backdrop of everyone else I could not be.

It seems the process of growing into oneself has been deeply distorted in the silver age of social media. Social media content has evolved to be structured largely around hidden advertisements, delivered by influencers selling both a product and the lifestyle that accompanies it. The properties of real life have been warped in pursuit of cultivating online personas to sell consumer products. Instead of looking back to family and our communities, the idols that shape the lives of so many young people are the tiny figures on the screen. The trusted advisors for which lipstick to use, the best workout routine, and of course, which diet to follow. The new go to for recipes, complete with calorie information and disclaimers that they definitely aren’t starving themselves. This aspirational gaze to the people on our screens has wiped so much specificity from the consumer, replacing it with a blank slate for endless trends to be projected on.

For so many people, eating and living in a way that our parents and families did is largely incompatible with remaining on trend, because social media trends are also very white. The content creators, now the idols we worship, are obsessed with homogeneity. Whether through clothes, co opted from other cultures and relabelled as “Scandinavian fashion” and the like, through lifestyle advice, or through food. Too many cultural foods from across the globe have been demonised in online health spaces and mislabelled as unhealthy for a myriad of reasons. It is a colonial impulse, of sorts, to label ethnic foods as disgusting or fattening, and to replace them with kale and celery juice in the name of smaller waistlines. For many people, it can also attach shame in choosing to eat what is comfortable and familiar. Even influencers who share cultural recipes are often not immune to the pressure of the trend cycle and its colonial underpinnings. High protein, low carb options of cultural staples are circulated as a compromise between eating what you want and remaining on trend i.e white and homogenous. The social pressure to be trendy extends to food, naturally, but also to the aesthetic value of food. It’s not enough to eat salad, but you need to seem like a person who eats salad. And so the homogenous impulse reproduces itself through contorting oneself to follow all the trends, and being validated by the internet for doing so, leaving no space to choose anything different.

But I would go so far as to say that the way the internet eats isn’t sustainable, or normal, and so it can’t be emulated by anyone who aspires to have that relationship with food. Normal recipes — the kind that have been passed down through generations and across continents handwritten in books, not spawned on TikTok — are not figures of how many grams of protein can be crammed into a plate, or means of calculating and cutting macronutrients. We choose them for what they offer us that isn’t just tangible. Especially since the foods demonised versus praised on the internet change so quickly, the pursuit of flaccid homogeneity is also an ouroboros. And so we eat what we want, and are maybe a bit shamed for it when it doesn’t seem like the instagram worthy lifestyle, or maybe we don’t eat what we want and then always wish we would. Choosing to eat what our parents did, and infusing it with the new knowledge and flavors we accumulate through new friends and new families requires a kind of decolonizing of the mind from the whitewashed diet culture so prevalent everywhere.

Standing on the precipice of this decolonizing of the mind is where I was truly forced to reckon with the remnants of my distorted relationship with food that I had long been in denial about. Before moving to New York, I understood myself as the kind of person who would eat salads every day, seems like I eat salads every day, pilates and gym every other, so on and so forth. And maybe that vision would never have to come to fruition anyway, but it was the picture in my mind for so long of who I would be, pulled straight from God’s internet. Whitewashed, and ever changing. I did not imagine the frequency that I would crave chewy sweets, roses and spices, the smell of cigarettes from home. No, the choices I gravitated towards as the months passed were not what I had once envisioned for myself.

In true disordered eating fashion, I resisted myself at first. Only one sweet, and only after dinner. Cheese pie for lunch, but only that one time, for comfort. I reassured myself that the next meal would be salad, and there would definitely be no dessert after. It was deeply anxiety inducing, trying to keep track of protein and carbs, like how seemingly everyone else did - effortlessly. But moving here forces the truth: if I want to comfortably exist in my body, douse my food in olive oil and follow my bitter coffees with syrupy sweets like so many beautiful women who came before me, I have to forfeit the whitewashed and thin version of myself who could have been. The cultural obsession all of the perfect looking people here have with protein in every meal, calorie counting, and thin bodies is not the lifestyle I want to hold on to. The choice is between one or the other.

For so many, food is one of the most intimate means of connecting with the long history that we continue. It is how we show care to those we can’t bring ourselves to say the words to. A sliced plate of fruit to repair a line overstepped, to soften things that shouldn’t have been said. There is peace in letting go of what the internet says you need to be and look like, and instead orient yourselves toward the long history of beauty and culture that you continue. Eating like who we truly are is to reveal who we are.