Fuck the Food Police

Today’s post comes from an interesting experience I had with a coworker the other day. I was standing in the kitchen chatting with one coworker (we’ll call her A) when another coworker (B) came in. It was around lunch time, so I was heating up my lunch while we chatted. B came in to grab a snack, then all of a sudden she started telling A and me about why she was getting a snack at that time and why she was getting that particular snack (trail mix). This was a totally unprompted justification of her food choices, and it got me thinking about food policing.

I have always had a complicated relationship with food, as I think most people who’ve grown up in a fat body do. I think I was 12 when my mother put me on my first diet. In fact, I’m pretty sure we were co-dieting (which is a topic for a whole other post). Anyway, around the age of 12 (or perhaps earlier) I learned the lesson that food had to be earned with sacrifice or deprivation.

That was all it took for my internalized food police force to form. That voice inside me that says I haven’t “earned” that piece of chocolate or slice of pizza or whatever “bad” food I’m having. Eating in public while fat means that I constantly feel like I’m being observed and judged for what I’m putting in my mouth. Shutting out those voices is a serious act of will.

I’m one of the lucky ones, too. I rarely had the experience of having an external police force, too. I hardly ever had to face the raised eyebrow when I went for seconds at the dinner table or the more overt “don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

Back to my coworker, B. She’s a straight-sized person, and yet still felt like she had to justify her food choices to two fat women. Which I think is just more evidence of how pervasive diet culture really is.

I posed the question to my personal Facebook, asking about a time my friends policed their own food or had their food policed by others. The responses I got varied, but what stood out were the ones where the responder has an allergy or some other food limitation and other people inserted themselves into their food decision making. For instance, one friend commented that she makes choices based on her allergies but had one coworker “who decided that I had to give up eating certain things because she knew better than me what I should be eating.”

Another friend had an encounter with a woman in the grocery store based on what foods she had chosen for her toddler to eat. She and her toddler are vegan and “Our cart was filled with fruits, veggies, hummus, cashew/almond milk, gluten free/vegan ‘Oreo’ cookies for me and some other misc items.” This apparently so offended the other woman, who thought my friend’s son should be eating “chicken nuggets, pizza, ice cream, cows milk, peanut butter & jelly, chips, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Fruit Loops,” that the woman went off in a huff, proclaiming that she would call Child Protective Services.

Overall, I took a couple of key things away from these discussions and experiences. One, everyone needs to do a much better job of minding their own business. Two, we all need to be much gentler with ourselves when it comes to food. The only way I’ve been able to shut my own food police down is to give myself permission to eat the food I enjoy whenever I want. Any kind of food restriction is a danger area for me.

My new philosophy is that life is short, so eat the foods. And tell those food police to fuck off.