Unveiling the Hidden Forces Shaping Our Relationship with Food: A Provocative Review of Amber Husain’s "Tell Me How You Eat"
But what does the same food/power equation mean on a one-to-one scale? Particularly when the person withholds food from herself — and is female? Why does my brain go to Karen Carpenter and Princess Diana, to models and ballet dancers and gymnasts and their respective sheens of tainted privilege and glamor? Why the insistence that eating disorders are all about outside pressure from the world mixed with internalized pressure from personal demons?
What if, instead of tabloidizing a refusal to eat, we saw it as a clear and deeply present statement that the personal and the political are indeed the same thing, that something is messed up and needs to be changed and that that something isn’t the person who, for whatever reason, can’t make herself eat?
