A life update + a (new) Food Politics 101 lecture

From my birthday lecture at the National University of Singapore

Well, it’s been a while.

I haven’t posted since May because I allowed myself to step back from maintaining a public-ish presence. I admitted to myself that healing is a full-time job, and I didn’t have the capacity to write a newsletter on top of doing my (actual) job and completing my book proposal (which is currently making its rounds on publisher desks). I hope you understand — I missed you all, but I had to put me first.

While fighting to heal wasn’t exactly my plan for 2024, something about moving across the world gave me the courage to finally recognize the extent of my past traumas and do something about it. Some parts of the journey I’ve been able to process publicly, like removing a tattoo I hated as a reclamation of my body or writing openly about that one creepy work incident as a small act of defiance against a mega-corporation. But for most of it, I haven’t yet found all the words.

In July, I restarted fencing after a 15-year hiatus to somatically digest the violence and pain of my teenage years, but I have struggled to explain to my (loving and supportive but worried) partner and friends why, by all accounts, I am so committed to torturing myself three times a week via a competitive sport primarily filled with teenagers.

“Is there any other way you can work through this?” one friend asks me gently after I recount going to my first fencing class, then having a panic attack while walking to the bus and taking my first private lesson, then crying uncontrollably afterward for two hours.

“No,” I respond, with zero explanation. I wasn’t withholding — I didn’t have one. All I knew was that I walked by a fencing salle in March and heard a voice deep inside: “Aren’t you tired of pretending to be okay? If you want to actually heal, you have to fence.”

Baby me fencing at the 2007 Junior Olympics in Denver, CO

I didn’t understand cPTSD then. I was unprepared for the depth or the breadth of my triggers, that any small thing in the present could bring back a cascade from the past. The smell of nylon, anti-bacterial cleaner, and sweat inside the fencing mask; the persistent, mid-tone beep of the scoring machine when a fencer is not plugged into the strip; the feeling of my foil as its tip strikes the leather of a coach’s jacket. I felt betrayed by how quickly these feelings I’d pushed down for nearly two decades suddenly resurfaced, all clamoring for my attention at once. I initially refused to admit it, but my everyday cognitive functioning was overwhelmed. It wasn’t until I paused nearly all my extracurricular activities and dedicated that time to learning about trauma and healing I began to make progress. (A major thank you to the many people who pointed me to What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo.)

The work of healing has not been rosy. Much of it has been hidden away indoors, mostly in bed. Days and weeks and months of journaling, therapy, sound baths, meditation, sobbing, screaming. In random intervals, I transformed into an absolute monster of the past, unable to sleep or find a path back home. I was fifteen, seventeen, nineteen again, hearing nothing but shame whispering to me: it is your fault, and you deserve to suffer.

But there have also been moments of pure wonder in between. For the first time, I was able to consider the possibility that I could live in a way where not everything felt like a looming threat. I learned vocabulary like gifted trauma, emotional contagion, and role-self, opening my eyes to collective experiences I’d long discounted as my problems manufactured by my inherent badness. I grappled with the unpleasant reality that I was replicating the violence and emotional immaturity displayed by my parents in my current relationship. I practiced — and failed, and tried again — the nervous system regulation, self-soothing, and behavioral change espoused by each book*. Slowly, achingly, I changed — because this was the start of the rest of my life.

So that is what I’ve been up to, and where I’m still headed into. Thank you for staying patient with me as I create at the rate that I am able. Being able to share all this here is a gift.

*One book I found particularly powerful was Courage to Be Disliked, which is rooted in Adlerian psychology. Others I would recommend to those interested in trauma/healing are Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Unlearning Shame, No Bad Parts, Taming Your Outer Child (with reservations), What It Takes to Heal, and All About Love.

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The Politics of Food

On my birthday (November 8), I lectured on food politics at the National University of Singapore. It could be considered the extended (roughly 30-minute) version of my 8-minute mini-lecture at Harvard last year. I’ve included some excerpts below, and you can watch the entire thing at the link below. (Password: +J2@Y*JU)

“The real meat – pun intended – of my work is examining how the politics of food constructs our individual, social, and political identities, and how that goes on to impact our relationships and ultimately, our lives.

So how does food do this, exactly?

Number one. Food has long been a weapon to create “in” versus “out” groups.

Some of the most avid laws created by colonizers in the Americas were on what white settlers could or could not eat. Just consider this common saying in colonial Venezuela: “Cassava isn’t bread, and Indians aren’t people.” Food was no trite matter but an extension of one’s humanity.

For the Spanish in particular, they observed the Indigenous men as not having beards and subsequently it was believed that eating native foods would cause their men to also lose their beards, which were an important sign of masculinity and tied to one’s social standing. That’s why, to Christopher Columbus, ensuring a steady import of Spanish foods to the Americas was not just an issue of dietary preferences but of moral significance. In letters back to the Spanish crown, he promised that settlers would stop dying off in the New World once their food supply was stabilized. And when certain European foodstuffs like wheat and coffee were found to grow well in Hispaniola, this was interpreted as a divine sign that colonialism was approved of by the Gods.

These examples illustrate how food anchors the ways we make meaning of the world. When new settlers did not understand forces larger than themselves, the narratives they constructed to explain these problems away were decidedly hostile against those perceived as outside of their community.

Two, controlling the food supply is the ultimate mechanism for controlling people because food offers direct access to power.

In the Great Plains of the U.S., the American military and hired hunters were encouraged to kill every buffalo they could because “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Over just 20 years, they managed to nearly exterminate the North American bison population – from 8 million to fewer than 500.

As a keystone species, bison played a significant role in the broader ecosystem, and their sudden disappearance is referred to by scientists as an ecological catastrophe. This did indeed result in forcing Native populations to submit to settler rule, and many nations in the Plains were relocated to new reservations thousands of miles away. Instead of growing and hunting familiar foods of their homeland, rations of highly processed foods like flour, sugar, and coffee became the default staples. To this day, they cause adverse health outcomes in Indigenous communities.

When fostering dependency is a critical part of controlling the food supply, those who fall outside its network are also subject to backlash. In the case of Malaysia and Singapore, sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas has showcased how the “myth of the lazy native” was used to characterize Indigenous Malays as slow and backward in justification of colonial exploitation, forced servitude, and mistreatment. Whereas Chinese immigrants were often portrayed as entrepreneurial and productive due to their presence as merchants, intermediaries, and servants who interfaced with, and therefore were dependent on, the colonial government, Indigenous Malays had socioeconomic structures that allowed them to exist outside of colonial rule. Thus, it was necessary to construct an identity for them as people who were inherently unwilling to work and morally suspect.

Much of these narratives both here and around the world hinged upon food – in addition to demonizing the local diet, which we’ve seen in other examples, the Indigenous approach to agriculture based on subsistence rather than accumulating surplus was portrayed as lacking in ambition. The presence of social hierarchy, then, becomes an admirable way for those in charge to see themselves as higher-order beings using their power to improve society.

Three. Our relationship with food structures our approach to social and economic problems – so much so that it can fundamentally change what we believe the problem to be.

The uncomfortable truth is that for years now, we have been producing more than enough food to feed the entire world 1.5 times over. Yet we still have millions of hungry people because of deep infrastructural inequalities resulting from centuries of colonialism, military domination, and financial imperialism. This proves a tricky problem for world leaders who claim they want to fight global hunger, but their own countries benefit from existing power imbalances. Thus, it’s necessary to wholesale reframe the problem into something much more straightforward – that’s why we have the Calorie deficit.

A quick history and science lesson. The concept of a Calorie was coined by chemist Wilbur Atwater in the 1890s as standardized units of energy found in all foods. On the left is a photo of one of his test subjects in a respiratory calorimeter, which measures calories. While the Calorie was an important step for nutritional science, its creation turned a wide variety of foods into interchangeable widgets. As a result, hunger became a simple equation of supplying enough Calories through whatever foods necessary to Calorie deficient people.

For countries who had taken on the noble task of solving hunger, food relief through Caloric fulfillment could now take the form of any high-calorie foods they mandated as aid. Now, why was this particular food chosen as international aid? Well, it just so happens that the U.S. produces a massive glut of corn and soy. Under the guise of charity, the US Department of Agriculture has been able to create new markets for American agribusinesses in countries with little ability to say no. And once the free hunger relief had put local food growers out of business, lo and behold, another country now depended on imported foods.

You may think all this agricultural dumping would have at least eased global hunger, but that has not at all been the case for decades. So, in the face of questionable numbers, the Calorie is also an endlessly flexible unit of measure that can be adjusted to create success overnight. By simply reducing the amount of required Calories per person, a dramatic number of people can be officially calculated as no longer hungry.

Now that we’ve established how food imparts meaning to our worldview, how do we also impart meaning to food?

Remember when I gave the example of Spanish colonizers being afraid to eat native foods because they believed their masculine beards would fall off? Within this narrative is a fundamental worry that masculinity is not inherent to a person but something that must be maintained through external means. Losing aspects of one’s masculinity is accepted without question to be harmful because it would move a man closer to the lesser status of being feminine. So, for someone who benefits enormously from being perceived as masculine in such a society, the idea of potential beard loss from eating Native foods triggers a fear that is far more catastrophic than for someone without this socialized claim to begin with. As was witnessed in the robust response to bringing Spanish food to the Americas, the dynamics of influence is a two-way street.

Put plainly, how we identify plays a significant role in how we respond to the use of power. This is particularly overt when deciding how to “take care” of those in need. In the U.S., we have a program called SNAP – or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – that offers food aid for low-income families but requires extensive means-testing and verification, including employer or landlord confirmation of financial need. Even when it is approved, the resulting benefits contain limitations. Since the 1970s, recipients have been barred from buying hot (or prepared) food, like a rotisserie chicken or a warm soup, because it supposedly gave them too much of a leg up against other poor, but SNAP-ineligible, families.

This level of preoccupation with assigning deservingness between some of the lowest-earning families in the country rather than expanding the social safety net belies more than just economic prudency – especially given how expensive means-testing is. At the core of such paternalistic policies is a distrust of the poor in regulating their participation fairly and knowing how best to make decisions concerning their well-being. When being in a precarious situation is presumed to be indicative of a deeper moral failing, it’s easily justifiable to have an external being or institution take control over making decisions altogether.

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Memes from…Recently

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Personal Stuff from This Week

Listening: Been on a major Cardi B kick recently!

Watching: Lots of fencing! Currently making my way through all the piste videos from Basel 2024

Reading: Relax and Be Aware by Doug McGill and Sayadaw U Tejaniya

Eating: In Los Angeles this week, and oh my god I have missed the food. We started the trip with unbelievably good sandwiches from Tre Mani and not-to-be-missed blood sausage soup from Eighth Street Soondae, had a jaw-droppingly good meal at Birdie G’s, and polished off Thanksgiving with a pie from my friend Chef Mallory Cayon.

On the list before we leave are a mix of old favorites and new places: Damian, Good Clean Fun, Lodge Bread, Mother Wolf, Villa’s Tacos, Quarter Sheets, Stanley Wet Goods, Goldburger, Hama Sushi, Meals by Ghenet, Tacos La Guera (the one at York & Figueroa — arguably best street tacos I’ve had in LA), Yuchun.

Drinking: A selection of wines from Vinovore

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I chose my own peace of mind instead of overextending myself in social situations