So this is what it means to really eat

Lunch today may have been the most satisfying meal that I have ever eaten.

That is a big statement to make, but it is hard to feel completely satisfied with food when you have a history of overeating, as I do -- when you are one of those people who always wants more, more, MORE! It still takes some effort for me to stop at the end of a meal and not feel saddened by its demise. So lunch today was notable because, as I ate, I could only think about how good, how absolutely satisfactory, satiating, and satisfying the food was. And I left it at that. I enjoyed the fifty or so bites that were my allotment, and I moved on.

What was this lunch? you may ask.

Beef stew and biscuits. Plane Jane American food (or Irish or French, if you look a little deeper). Leftovers, to boot, from a party last night. The beef stew wasn't my own making, but precious leftovers that were foisted upon us by the host. She used the best short ribs that she could find, and the depth of the meat's flavor transformed the simple potatoes and carrots that accompanied it into the best stew that I have ever eaten, bar none. I rarely get so excited at leftovers, but if you can believe it, I think that the stew was actually better today than it was last night; overnight, the flavors melded together and the flavor became meatier, the tendons softer, the vegetables heartier. And this is what I made my lunch with today!

The biscuits were my own making, and they were everything that biscuits should be: light, flaky, butter, and herbacious to boot. I adapted a Gourmet recipe for sage biscuits by substituting dried Herbs de Provence for the sage, and they were quite extraordinary. I don't usually think of biscuits as interesting in their own right -- too often they serve as backdrop for more interesting stews and gravies -- but these biscuits could hold their own and then some. A slab of home-made butter was the finishing touch. It has been too long since I have eaten biscuits with butter. Too long since I ate with my fingers. Too long since I loved food so much -- or have I ever loved food so much as I do today? I am finally freed from its obsessions and free to take it for what it is: the most essential substance of our lives, the source of flavor and joy and communion and satisfaction. Food.

What more can I say about lunch today? I ate it slowly like the simple meal it was, now using my spoon and now my fingers, alternating between beef and biscuit, juice and crumb, bowl and plate. This meal was more mine than any meal that I have ever eaten. I ate it in complete awareness of every bite, of every flavor. I ate it in gratitude for the mere fact of food, and in gratitude to the animal who fed me. I ate it alone but happy in this complete meal, a bowl and spoon and plate and nothing else.

Squash at home

When cold weather strikes, I find that I crave carbohydrates, and that, for me, is the time to stock up on root vegetables and other fruits of the earth, like squash. I am of the opinion that wanting to eat carbs isn't a bad thing, and so on Sunday I went to the small farmer's market near our apartment, and came home loaded down with four different kinds of squash. We had, from lower left and moving clockwise, buttercup squash, delicata squash, acorn squash, and sweet dumpling squash.

Eating pumpkin or squash in the fall reminds me of living in South America, especially Chile, where large slices of zapallo are often added to simple chicken broths to make a hearty lunch. Zapallo makes our jack-o-lanterns look miniscule; it is a truly enormous squash.

In Chile, when you buy zapallo at outdoor markets, the seller comes armed with a machete, ready to chop it into the size of your choosing. Here in New York I often seen such squashes for sale at Dominican bodegas, cut into large, seran-wrapped slices for easy purchase.

Another reason why squash reminds me of South America is because of the universal bewilderment of Argentines and Chileans towards the idea of pumpkin pie. For them, pumpkin and squash are savory foods, more often consumed with heavy meats than baked with sugar and cinnamon. Twice I made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving in South America, and both times my pie languished in the refrigerator for lack of an appreciative audience.

I doubt that Chileans or Argentines, however, could resist what I did with my multicolor squash this weekend. Once peeled, cored, and chopped, two small squash joined two cups of fresh apple cider, two tablespoons of butter, and one tablespoon of curry powder, salt and pepper in my cast iron skillet. After simmering for half an hour, the squash took on a sweet, complex, earthy flavor, and was the perfect complement to hearty mixed greens and pan-fried cod.

And that's how I have my carbs, thank you very much!

Why I no longer restrict my diet -- or do I? (Part 3)

I have been restricting my food intake ever since I was ten years old, when I became tired of teachers and uncles always harping on me to eat meat. As long as I could remember, the taste of meat and seafood was abhorrent to me, hot-dogs and chicken nuggets aside. I have horrible memories of my kindergarten teacher begging me -- nay, forcing me, almost -- to eat a fried fish stick for lunch one day. I gulped it down in two bites, hating her for making me eat something so repellent to my taste buds. (In retrospect, I think that the problem may have been a lack of exposure to good quality meats and fresh seafood, living in the Midwest, and less an inherent dislike of animal products.)

In order to gain control over what I put in my mouth, I decided to become vegetarian and persisted at it, despite my parents' consternation and the criticism of other adults, for nearly eight years. At seventeen, I became an exchange student to Chile and, along with a desire to embrace a new culture and all things that came with it, I decided to start eating meat again. My first meal was, ironically enough, fried fish -- but nothing could be less like the fish sticks of my childhood. Chile has been blessed with one of the world's longest and most fertile coastlines, and their seafood is extraordinary. The fish I ate was a white-fleshed merluza, battered in eggs and flour and parsley, fried on the grill (a la plancha), and served with a wedge of lemon.

Fresh fried fish can make a convert of any vegetarian, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Since then, I have often felt beguiled by the prospect of restriction. For a period, I avoided anything with sugar or processed sugar, spurred on by the book Sugar Blues. In college, as I stumbled into my eating disorder, the categories encompassing restricted foods became larger and larger: first no whole milk, then no dessert, then no caloric beverages, then only veggies and yogurt for dinner. At the height of my restriction I tipped into bulimia, and have spent the years since emerging from that particular compulsion. In the meanwhile, my digestive system tied itself in knots, and I emerged completely unable to digest wheat and other glutenous grains until this fall.

So now is the first time that I have not restricted my food for nearly 15 years. And I am facing the prospect of yet another restriction, one which I am ambivalent towards: taking caffeine out of my diet.

At the worst point of my restrictive eating, I used caffeine to give me the energy that I was not willing to get from calories. I frequently drank caffeinated beverages before meals in order to stave off my desire to eat and postpone the meal itself. In recovery, I relied on caffeine as a sugar substitute: that is, when my body wanted to binge on sweets, I drank coffee instead, or bottles and bottles full of diet soda, willing my body to stop wanting sugar. It may have worked at the time, but it left me with a potent caffeine addiction that I have had a difficult time weaning my way out of.

The reason that I am considering doing so now is that my breasts have felt tender and rather lumpy lately. I had everything checked out through the proper channels this week; my symptoms are benign so I'm not going to make a will any time soon. But the bad news, if it can called bad, is that this discomfort may be due to my high caffeine intake. And here we go again: to restrict or not to restrict. No coffee? No black tea? No chocolate? (I suspect that the last one is going a bit far -- how much caffeine can there possibly be in an ounce of chocolate?)

I have a few thoughts about this. The first is "Oh, yay, now I can finally have a good reason to end my energy dependence on foreign fuel." Caffeine makes me jumpy and irritable, interrupts my concentration, and turn me into an insomniac. I'm not sure what the upside is to it. But my second thought is "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiitttttt a second. W-w-w-what? No caffeine? Ever? Again? How am I going to get through graduate school?" That is my instinctive fear: that I will have to end something, to let something go that I am not ready to say good-bye to. Addictions are never easy to relinquish, but to make matters worse, I live in a city with a Starbucks on every other block.

And my third thought?: "My breasts are definitely worth it."

I'll take it slow, go cold turkey for now, and then see how a cup (no more) of joe affects me from time to time. But there will be no drastic end to the chocolate: the caffeine in chocolate is miniscule in comparison with coffee and tea, and I'm sure that a chocolate cookie from time to time would be just what the doctor ordered...



Note: None of my own images this time around. Click on them and you will be re-directed to their Flickr pages.

Part 2: Why I no longer restrict my diet

Written on October 26, 2008

What does restricting food mean to you?

Does it mean eating less of something you really like?

Avoiding it altogether?

Or does "restriction" mean eliminating whole categories of food from your diet (e.g. dairy products, meat, white flour, sugar, caffeine) without ever hoping to eat them again, whether for health or other reasons?

As I think about this, I am amazed by the sheer number of ways that we have to restrict what we put in our mouths. Indeed, the more choice exists out there, the more choices we have about what to eat and, consequently, about what not to eat.

Try it: instead of saying what you will eat today, say what you won't.

For example: Today I won't eat Twizzlers. Today I won't eat beef Wellington, or strawberry ice cream, or pork potstickers. Today I won't drink orange juice or champagne, I won't nibble on plantain chips or peanuts, and I certainly won't consume baked Alaska.

The list could go on and on because, to tell the truth, on any given day I eat far fewer foods than those which are actually available to me; every meal is a lesson in choosing what and how to eat; every meal an opportunity to say "no" more than "yes".

So what am I saying "yes" to today, and what does this have to do with restriction?

• Breakfast this morning was a couple of sweet potatoes, baked yesterday afternoon and let to mellow, with a slice of Cowgirl Creamery cheese and a mug of milky coffee.

• Lunch will probably be a bean sprout salad with dried figs and pumpkin seeds, followed by a bowl of yellow split pea soup, if I can manage to pull this all together by noon.
  

• I am meeting a friend at the Hungarian Pastry Shop to study this afternoon, and I'm planning to eat a piece of their apple cake, and try to figure out what it consists of so that I can make it myself with all of the fresh apples that abound in the farmer's markets these days.

• Dinner? A bowl of fresh cheese ravioli that I brought home from the Bronx's own Little Italy, Arther Avenue, accompanied by sauteed kale.

Of course, any and all of this may change. I am planning to go to the farmers' market later this morning, and depending on what treats they can offer me, I'll change any and all of this menu.
But my point is this: I can only eat so much in a single day, so there is necessarily some limitation to what I am eating today. The variety comes in the breadth of what I eat: my day's menu includes milk, red meat, cheese, white flour, and dessert -- as well as plenty of vegetables, fruit, and nuts. Over time, too, there will be variety, as tomorrow's menu will surely be different from today's. Breakfast will be yogurt, not sweet potatoes; lunch may be rice and beans, not soup; and so on and so forth. Every day I restrict in some ways, because I cannot eat everything that I would like at once (bye-bye, bulimia!), but every day is somewhat different from the day before, and I feel that it all rounds out in the end. Some days may have more desserts than others, some more vegetables, others more milk and popcorn.

To not restrict my diet is to also not beat up on myself when I eat more of a certain food on any day than I normally would like to. Not restricting means acknowledging that there will be those days when I eat more, and others when I will eat less. I have learned to trust that the "more" days will be balanced out by the "less" days, but of their own accord, without my having to do much to push them in one way or another. And though this sounds complicated and calculating, it works for me!

Have you experienced anything similar recently? How do you feel about the restrictions that you may have put in place for yourself? How do you respond to other people's restrictions (a topic for a future post)?

With love,
Ai Lu

Why I can't resist another cauliflower

Can you?
(You can look more closely at this picture by clicking on the image.)

This one was a romanesco variety that I picked up at the farmers' market on Sunday, a beautiful specimen right for the following recipe:

Cauliflower Fantasia, after the The Silver Spoon's "Broccoli Fantasia"

Wash one head cauliflower, discarding the hard steam and cutting the head into individual florets. Boil (or steam) until soft and tender. Butter a soufflé dish or other ceramic baking dish, and line the bottom with 2 tablespoons hard, flavorful cheese (Piave, Idiatzabal, Gruyère, Parmeggiano Romano, etc.). Place the cauliflower in the dish, add salt and pepper to taste. Pour 1/2 cup heavy cream or half and half over the mix, then follow with 1/2 c. grated sharp cheese (feel free to mix cheeses or use anything that is left over in the door of your refrigerator). Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately 15 minutes, until the cheese has melted and the cream has been absorbed by the cauliflower.

Romanesco cauliflower turned out to be an especially creamy, delicate vegetable all on its lonesone, but the addition of cream and cheese made this into a miracle of side dishes.

And you still need an excuse to eat your vegetables?

Part 1: Why I no longer restrict my diet

A series of comments back and forth with Emily Jolie have had me thinking about restriction, structure, and boundaries in our diets. I think most people who have struggled with an eating disorder can agree that food restriction plays an important, if not central, role in maintaining disordered eating patterns. These problems can be compounded if, like Emily and me, you have developed certain food sensitivities, or allergies, in the course of your travels.

Soon after I stopped binging and purging in 2004, I came down with a severe case of mononucleosis, and at the same time my digestive system went haywire. Apart from my daily exhaustion, I was also bloated, gassy, and miserable, and I spent my evenings doubled up with intestinal cramps, wondering what had gone wrong (and suspecting that I was somehow to blame). In consultation with doctors, acupuncturists, and chiropractors, I identified certain foods as being related to these symptoms -- primarily wheat and other gluten-containing foods -- and so I stopped eating them.

This restriction, at any other point in my eating disorder, might have acted as a trigger, but I had several things working in my favor. First, I was working with an amazing team of therapists, both official and unofficial (i.e. guardian angels). Second, I really, really wanted to get well; coming down with mono in the midst of training for a marathon was a true wake-up call for me to start treating my body right. That autumn, I replaced long-distance running with yoga; I gave myself permission to take naps in all matter of places on campus; and I re-evaluated my eating patterns. Honestly, I don't know if I could have pulled myself out of bulimia without having had mono first: being so sick as to almost be dysfunctional left me no time for my eating disorder. Instead, I had to concentrate on the things that were truly important to me, like graduating from college, spending time with my boyfriend (now my husband) and planning for life after school.

Instead of seeing my digestive problems as reason to stop eating altogether, I took them as a sign that I needed to re-evaluate my diet, among other things. During my active eating disorder, I rarely ate carbohydrates apart from binges -- I reasoned that I was getting enough of them anyway in my binges, so why add fuel to the fire? When I stopped eating wheat, not only did I rule out many of my former "binge" foods -- a fortunate side-effect -- but I began to notice, over time, that I felt better if I had some kind of whole grain every day. Living in China and Brazil after graduating from college, I started to perform nutritional experiments on my own body, packing my purse with soy milk and sweet potatoes, then apples and fresh cheese, as I explored these new countries and settled back into the rhythms of my own body.

Like Emily Jolie, my body has, at times, reacted strongly to certain foods, in a way that seems outside of my control. Living within the bounds of these restrictions was liberating in the sense that I had to be creative with my diet, looking beyond the obvious food choices. In China, I discovered fresh soybeans (mao dou), mutton skewers, egg pancakes, and any number of strange and marvelous vegetables. In Brazil, I ate cheesy bread, mangos aplenty, dried bananas, fresh fruit juices -- and I learned to make beans, oh delightful beans! The year after college, I took full responsibility for my diet, and began to cook for myself. I consider my eating disorder to have ended at this point, a year after I stopped binging and purging, because it took that long to learn how to eat again.

Now I will eat nearly everything. My digestive problems cleared up considerably under a no-gluten diet, but even so, this summer I decided to embark upon another experiment: eating wheat again. It has gone swimmingly, so much so that I can now say that I no longer restrict any part of my diet. Was this a goal of mine? No, not specifically: my goal was to find a way of eating that sustained my health, with or without gluten. It is a happy circumstance that now I can eat gluten, but I hope that I would feel just as free and just as flexible towards food if some of those restrictions were still in place, as they are for many people with food sensitivities and allergies. As Emily Jolie says, there can be freedom within boundaries. In my case, my old boundaries prepared me for the freedom I currently face, a freedom that would have been overwhelming if I had not taken the time to sound out the limits of what my body could take.

May all of you find some joy in food today, and some freedom within whatever limits you find yourself facing.

~Ai Lu

Cauliflower dreams

When I see a vegetable like this, a flamboyant cauliflower, I am reminded that there is so much that I do not know about food.

For example: where do these colors come from? Why do some vegetables do double-duty in the design department, appearing now green, now orange, now purple? It is humbling to know so little about a vegetable, and yet to like it so much.

Of course, it's an antioxidant, anthocyanin, which is responsible. If there weren't already so much talk about antioxidants in the nutritional news, I might be excited by the prospect of eating a colored vegetable with health benefits. But I don't need to know that this vegetable is good for me to know that it tastes delicious and is nourishing in other ways.

This is what I do with cauliflower when I can get my hands on the freshest sort:

Fragrant Purple Cauliflower -- Ai Lu's recipe

Take one head of purple cauliflower, or yellow or white cauliflower, or broccoli even (they're almost the same -- did you know?). Wash, trim, and discard most of the thick stalk. Cut the florets into managable, Chinese-stirfry-sized pieces. Blanche in salted, boiling water for about 5-8 minutes, until soft but not mushy. Drain in a colander. In the same pot, melt 2 tablespoons butter and 1 teaspoon spicy paprika, then add 1 tablespoon pinenuts or other fragrant nut, and stir for another minute. Add the drained cauliflower, and stir to coat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve as a side to hearty stews, medium-rare beef, and fettuccine alfredo.

This was the cauliflower that we couldn't stop eating in the last few days, the one that has me happy about the arrival of cold weather in New York, and the harvest that I'll see at the Morningside Heights farmers' market tomorrow morning, granted I get there in time.

What else are you looking forward to this fall, as the nights get longer and the days get colder? What dreams of cauliflowers and kings do you harbor?

Pasta, a second time

Start with a tupperware full of day-old (spinach) pasta, stuck together in an impossible maze.















In a separate bowl, mix four eggs, 3/4 cup whole milk, 1/2 cup grated sharp cheese, 1 teaspoon spicy paprika, and salt and pepper to taste.













Break off chunks of the pasta with a knife, and scatter over the bottom of a buttered soufflé dish. Pour the egg mixture on top, and continue to alternate pasta with egg until both are used up. Sprinkle the top with an additional half cup of grated cheese.








In an oven set to 350 degrees, place the soufflé dish and cook until the top is puffed and slightly browned, about 20 minutes.












Serve in wedges, accompanied by a salad or seasonal vegetables.













Could there be an easier lunch, or a better way to use up the old, raggedy pasta that you can't stand to throw away?

Waste not, want not.

Cooking to support health

At a party the other night, I met a woman who is attending a school in New York called the Natural Gourmet Institute, whose mission is to train chefs in "health-supportive culinary arts." The idea, she told me, was to learn to cook whole foods for individuals who may need to make dietary changes because of illness, such as beginning a low-salt, low-meat, or high-fiber diet.

This is an intriguing premise, but I had to ask her: "How would you cook for individuals who have had eating disorders, and may have problems with restrictive eating to begin with?" She didn't have an answer right away -- she had only just begun the program this fall -- but she promised to get back to me about it.

Our exchange got me thinking again about food trends like the raw foods diet, the whole foods diet, vegan diets, and others that promote some form of restrictive eating in the name of health. I am usually uncomfortable around true adherents of these diets, or at least around those who are in a proselytizing mood, because I generally believe in the equation restriction --> binge. In certain yoga studios and other New Age gathering spots these kinds of diets are quite common, especially in combination with other self-purifying practices, and my tolerance for such drivel is really quite low these days. (Self-disclaimer: I practice yoga, too.)

That's not to say that I don't think that whole foods are important. But what does "whole foods" really mean? I am reminded of that classic anthropological text, The Raw and the Cooked -- haven't we humans been modifying our food for quite a long time? How whole is whole enough? Which food arts are too artificial? How can we support our health with whole foods without going crazy about the meaning of "whole"?

In my personal experience, bringing back whole foods into my diet was an important part of recovery, as the more whole grains, legumes, and leafy greens I consumed, the fewer cravings I had for sweet, high-fat foods. These foods, besides being filling and delicious, are also quite easy to prepare, and these days they fill the bulk of my diet. But I also enjoy things like white bread and cookies from time to time, and I've learned to believe that how you act towards food is more important than what you put in your mouth. That is, rather than worry so much about what I am eating, I would prefer to direct my energy towards how I eat.

For example: instead of chastising myself for eating white pasta (oh, horror!) for lunch yesterday, I find it more useful to celebrate the fact that my husband and I enjoyed the one free weekday we both share, and took off an hour in the middle of the day to make lunch together. He prepared the zucchini and cream sauce for the pasta, while I made a red lentil curry so spicy that it cleared out our sinuses completely.

This was not a "perfect meal" in the whole foods sense, but it was such a happy meal, such a complete dedication to each other and to the communion of good food, that I cannot consider it bad. And that, fundamentally, is the issue that I take with certain health-promoting diets that seem not to consider the meaning of our food, above and beyond its health benefits. This meal brought back our summer in Italy, with its zucchini and pasta, and ushered in fall with a hearty stew, all in one fell swoop. It joined my husband and me together in the bright hours of midday, and reminded us of the importance of doing things for ourselves, with our own hands, at a time when there are so many demands on our brains from all sides. This meal, if any, supported our health -- and I am glad to eat this way.

Baking, bounty, and other blessings

Last night I made muffins. Pear and ginger muffins -- oh glee!

I adapted a pear gingerbread cake recipe to muffin form, which is not at all hard to do because a recipe for a soda bread or loaf cake is often the equivalent, in batter volume, to a dozen muffins. In this instance, the recipe called for large pear slices to line the bottom of the cake pan, which just wouldn't do in the small muffin molds, so I threw in a pear and a half, finely chopped. The muffins that resulted were moist and fragrant, smelling of molasses and ginger and sweet pear. They were last night's dessert and doubled, this morning, as breakfast.

Sometimes I like the heft of sweet nutty breads, but other times their proportions are overwhelming, and I find that I often prefer such concoctions in miniature, in muffin form. For what are muffins but little cakes? -- And yet they twice as nice, with all of the fruit and spice and nuts that you can think to throw in. I even add a little freshly ground black pepper, for that extra picante note.

I only recently purchased my first muffin tin -- I previously led a gluten-free life, but now that those sensitivities seem to have cleared up somewhat, I am free to try all of the baking recipes that I please. Although I am mostly just baking for my husband and for myself, it is interesting to see how baking for him differs from baking for me or baking for us.

First, I love baking for myself, mainly because I haven't been able to eat wheat for these last few years, but also because, even before then, I was so afraid of baked goods in general, and my cravings for them, that I gave them as wide a berth as possible. Not so now -- and how I am enjoying this liberty to eat wheat and bring baked goods to parties. Last week, we invited a group of friends over to watch the second of the presidential debates, and I made an amazing pumpkin loaf from October's Gourmet (strangely absent from epicurious or Gourmet online) that was promptly gobbled up by nine willing accomplices. It is satisfying to cook for myself, and know that other people will also delight in my bounty.

The principal other in my life is my husband, who shares a similar fascination, if not familiarity, with baked goods. My husband comes from a Chinese family where almost nothing was ever baked, and the idea of us actually being able to produce a cake or muffins in our own oven is very novel to him. Ingredients that have never before been seen in our pantry, like yeast and vanilla extract, baking powder and molasses, have made their appearance in recent weeks, surprising my husband, who has never had need of such things before. To really astound him, I love saying "Let's make bread," or "Let's make oatmeal cookies." He'll reply, "Can we really do that?" Of course we can! We can make anything at all we want, as long as the two of us are hungry for it.

That's where baking for us comes in. He is my mate, this man, and together we form a small household. Baking for us reminds me that we are in this together, this business of life and love and sorrow and redemption. We are here for each other, to make bread and break bread together, to tell each other of our cares, and to count our many blessings. A warm oven and the smell of bread consecrate our lives together, within these narrow walls, in borrowed space, in the heart of the city that never sleeps.

Am I promoting food porn? Please weigh in.

I am giving you the most luscious images that I can pull out of my camera today, because I want to ask you a question: am I promoting food porn on my small corner of the interweb?

What is food porn? you may well ask. Please see the following wikipedia article on the topic for more detail: food porn 101. In brief: food porn is the use or distribution of salacious images of food, often used in advertisements, that suggest the consumption of food as a substitute for sex, or the consumption of food porn as a substitute for food.

To quote wiki: "In much the same way that pornography can be a vicarious substitute for actual sexual relations, 'food porn' is seen as a substitute for actually cooking and eating the food in question."


Hence the problem. Am I unwittingly encouraging you to substitute food photos for actual food?

I post nice images of the food that I make here on my site about food and eating disorders, and some of you may be wondering: what is she doing? Is this a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" endeavor? Am I trying to tempt myself or tempt others? What is going on?


If you haven't been here from the beginning, let me reassure you that my intention is not to enable food restriction among my readers. Quite the contrary. I make good food because I eat it; I share it with you not to sell a product or allow you to vicariously experience my dinner, but because I want to share my love of food with the kinds of people who may need that love the most: people who suffer from disordered eating, in one form or another.


I made this food by hand, laboriously and carefully, for myself and for the people I love. I share it with you, my readers, because I want to encourage you to do the same. I hope that, if you are afraid of some aspect of food, you can feel emboldened by my images and my stories, and begin to cook again for yourself. I want to help you to expand your notion of what food is, because I believe that restricted notions of what food is may also contribute to eating disorders. This is why I post these photos, and why I take such care in documenting the food that I eat -- because it is really quite ordinary, and yet marvelous, to be able to care about food in this fashion.

What do you think of "food porn"? Have you come across this term before? Are you a "consumer"? Where does the line get drawn between food images that help you in maintaining a healthy attitude towards food, and those that don't?

~Ai Lu

Antojitos

What drives our food cravings?

I am not talking about hunger, but rather a craving, a deep desire, for a particular kind of food, the kind of cravings that pregnant women get. What makes us yearn for tangerines or beet soup or raisins?

There is a delightfully descriptive word for these kinds of cravings in Spanish: antojo. An antojo, according to the Real Academia Española, is a “sudden and passing desire for something,” usually food. However, I rarely experience such fleeting passions: mine tend to stick around for a while, like the yen for authentic Asian food that has driven my cooking as of late. I think that it is important to listen to such cravings, because they often point to a deeper yearning.

For example, when I was just coming out of my eating disorder, I craved dark, leafy greens – not salads, per se, but chard and kale and collards and beet greens. I couldn’t seem to eat enough of them, and the health benefits were the last thing on my mind. I wanted green. In Beijing, it was practically a standing order for me at the restaurant: at every meal, I would ask my husband to get liu cai (green vegetables), and I would content myself with whatever else he ordered as a main. I ate copious amounts of bok choy that way, as well as spinach, watercress, Chinese broccoli, mustard greens, and other rare species.

Lately I have felt a similar antojo, towards vegetables and whole grains. I want to discover vegetarian mains again, and renew my love of beans as the weather get colder and the nights longer. There is nothing heartier or more heart-warming than a bowl of piping hot beans after a long day running up and down the island of Manhattan. A few nights ago I made my first authentic-tasting Indian dal, according to Chuan, and we have been eating the spicy leftovers ever since.

For me, vegetarian food is grounding, especially beans and whole grains and root vegetables -- exactly the kinds of the things that are right for this season. So tonight, when I go out to dinner with friends, I'll be looking for eggplant pasta and broccoli au gratin, borlotti purée and turnip cakes. I am not sure what this means: am I trying to share in the bounty of the fall harvest? Am I looking to set down roots even as my life is changing in drastic and surprising ways? Am I reminding myself of my agrarian heritage, even as I become more and and more of an urbanite? Or is this antojo biological, running through my blood and coursing out in my hormones?

So much for long-term passions: this one is brief -- I am hungry, and my husband is almost out the door!

Break/fast

Is breakfast a difficult meal for you?

Is it the one that you rarely think about, the one that you linger over the least? I was never one to skip breakfast, but I still find it a hard meal to wrap my head around. I rarely get to lavish the attention on breakfast that I pay to lunch and dinner: hunger, and the morning rush, conspire to make my breakfast as simple as possible. But "simple," I find, is often pre-made and repetitive: store-bought yogurt and granola; toast with peanut butter and banana slices; fruit and cottage cheese. Those are my staples, the ingredients that I always have on hand to make my morning meal in a pinch. I rarely give them a second thought. So what's wrong with that?

Part of the problem with these kinds of foods is that they are sugary and flighty, often leaving me hungry later in the day. And they get boring, day after day, the same combination of dairy and grain and sweetness. There is only so much granola and yogurt that I can take before going batty. Yet I have never been one to yearn for bacon and eggs in the morning -- so what to do?

I have found part of the solution to what-to-eat-for-breakfast in the insight afforded by Asian cuisine which, it should be pointed out, does not draw clear distinctions between "breakfast food" and all the rest. Breakfast, at least in China, may be sweet, or it may be savory; it may have fruits, or eggs, or soup, or rice, or all of these things. Breakfast is like lunch or dinner, only smaller. Just think of all the things you can have for breakfast if you follow this approach! Not just eggs -- pork! Beef stew! Tofu! Vegetables! Are you someone who can't stand another day of bagels with cream cheese and frozen orange juice? Don't you agree that breakfast is the most wasted culinary opportunity of the day?

I'm trying my best to change things around here, and I am taking my cues from Asian cuisine. My breakfast may be a bowl of rice with coconut milk and fruit, as in my first photo, or a sticky rice bao filled with sweet pork, shitake mushrooms, peanuts, and dried shrimp (picked up in Chinatown); black imperial rice with coconut and bananas; mung bean porridge with tangerines; or any other strange and wonderful concoction I happen to dream up or stumble upon. This is what I am eating, more often than not. And I can't think of a better way to start my day with a breakfast that is just a little beyond the ordinary -- even if all porridges look the same.

Hot pot! (火鍋)

Tonight we went to Chinatown in lower Manhattan to eat huo guo (火鍋)-- Sichuan hotpot -- with some of my husband's classmates. Hotpot is something like fondue, except that instead of oil or cheese, you get a large pot of spicy, steaming broth (and small gas burner) to cook your ingredients right there on the table. Hotpot is one of my favorite Chinese foods; we ate it often in Beijing in late-night dinners that we shared with friends, and Chuan and I even traveled to Sichuan during our time there, before the devastating earthquake. I love the variety of ingredients, the two different ma and la flavors (one makes your lips tingle; the other clears your sinuses), and the communal feel of huo guo.

The one problem with hotpot, for me, is that there are no portions, no courses, and no end to the meal. Even now, when I eat hotpot in New York, I have to remind myself to take my time. And even then I keep telling myself to slow down, to look around, to engage in conversation, to focus on the company, all throughout the course of the meal. Tonight was difficult in that respect, because I didn't know my company very well, and I felt more like a wifely appendage than a dinner companion in her own right. But focus I did, and I got through the meal, occupied more by reminiscences of China than by the conversation.

Coincidentally, the weather today in New York City reminded me of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, which is known for its humid, foggy weather, its beautiful women, and its spicy foods. Lower Manhattan was covered in fog and mist this evening; we could have been eating hotpot in any Chengdu eatery, and no one would have known the difference by stepping outside onto the city streets.

All of Sichuan, in my memory, appears wet and flowing, its rivers and fragrant broths confounded. In Chinese, "sì chuān" means "four rivers," and the province is indeed criss-crossed by waterways. Sichuan, even inland, is a land of water. (My husband's name, Chuan, comes from the same word: 川 in Chinese.)

We ate wonderful mushroom hotpot in Chengdu's restaurants, and visited poetic shrines and ancient battlegrounds, but we both agreed that the most interesting part of Sichuan was further north, closer to the border with Tibet, where yak's milk replaces tea as the most common drink.

These photos are from Jiu Zai Gou ("Nine Villages"), a scenic area in the mountains of Sichuan. Most of the people who live there speak a language that is closer to Tibetan than to Mandarin, and many are practicing Buddhists. We visited in autumn, right before the trees changed colors, and spent several days living with one of these families in the foothills of the Himalayas. I remember waking up early in the morning, seeing my breath hover above the comforter, and hearing the faint sounds of gongs -- monks in prayer.

In China, we visited Buddhist shrines and paid our respects to the ancestors (Chuan's ancestors) wherever we went. I remember standing side by side with the man who would become my husband, burning incense and lighting candles as offerings. I knew that it was right that we were there together, a man born in China showing a woman from Minnesota how to approach the shrine. And then I told him something, about what the Buddhist images meant -- the wheel, the lotus, the knot-- and how Tibet and China fit together (or didn't) in Buddhist history.

These things were going through my head tonight as I watched the last pieces of mutton go into the hotpot; as I debated whether to eat more or to stop; and as I paid polite attention to the conversation around me. All of these things made up my meal, in Buddhist fashion, the past coming to greet the present, the present looking towards the future. And if that isn't a good meal, a pleasant communion, I don't know what else is.

-- 艾鹭 (Aì Lù)

Finding food

(This is in response to a few comments on my last entry.)

Food and emotions. Do you have a hard time separating the two?

I used to. I still do, sometimes. But I'm learning to tell the difference, which is actually a pretty cool skill to have. I know plenty of non-eating disorder folks who haven't gotten the memo on it yet, either.

There is a big difference, I think, between using food to stand for your emotions and having emotions about food. The first can be problematic, but I think that the latter -- recognizing and expanding our emotions towards food -- is part of healing itself.

I know this is not clear yet, so let me give you a few examples, starting with all of the meanings that food have (an anthropological perspective). Food may mean fuel to you, or warmth, or love, nourishment, pleasure, guilt, reward, sin, happiness, delight, punishment, satiety, sensuality, taboo, connection, home, embodiment, blessing, or burden.

Any more? Please do share.

I think that part of what happens with eating disorders is that the meanings that food can have are severely reduced, just as the actual food consumed may be restricted or limited in variety (hell, we always binge on the same old things -- don't we?). For example, to someone with an eating disorder, food rarely means pleasure or nourishment. In fact, food is more often a burden or a sin to them. But even people who don't have eating disorders may have difficulty connecting with the delights and blessings of food, so trapped are we in a culture that equates denial with virtue.

One reason that I have turned to food magazines and other food media is that they have helped me to expand (diversify!) my attitudes towards food. Food is not uni-dimensional: quite the contrary. Food has so many meanings, not only here in the United States, where I write, but in the thousands of cultures that exist across the world. Food should be diverse, as anyone who has ever consulted a nutritionist knows. We are made to eat many things, at many times, in many moods. It is not bad to have emotions about food. What can be harmful is when food replaces emotions, or when we have too few emotions about food.

People who are in recovery from eating disorders are often told "Don't focus on the food!" I was, and I have had plenty of time to think it over. In conclusion, I don't quite buy it. I think that part of recovery is learning to cultivate a new relationship with food, not to exclude it from one's thoughts altogether, nor to eat like an automaton. When we are having a problem with someone we love, we usually don't solve the problem by exiling that person from our lives; and yet, recovery from an eating disorder is often painted as a sort of exile from food, or from food-as-emotion, without realizing that there are so many different emotions that can surround food, and not all of them are harmful.

This is what I have learned to do in recovery, and here is my challenge to you: find a new meaning for food in your life. Add it to the ones you already have. Right now. Pick one that I listed above, or add a new one of your own. Maybe you lean the other way: you already enjoy food, but you don't think of it as physical fuel or nourishment, or you are disconnected from the sources of your food. In any case, look at food from a new angle. Visit epicurious or culinate or the slow food blog. Pick a recipe or an ingredient, a cuisine or a cause, a farm or a feedlot. Learn something new that you didn't know about food. And then think about where you are, and how that knowledge is changing how you feel about the food that you eat every day.

And let me know how things are going, OK?

~Ai Lu

P.S. GRM, Tiptoe, Emily Jolie: I had so much to say to your comments these last few days! Thank you for giving me so much to think about.

Second ode to bread

I haven't left my apartment all day -- oh, what a marvelous Sunday! In between bouts of neuroscience studying, I made Chinese sweet buns (bao zi):

Now that I am eating wheat again, I can return to baking. My husband used to joke that the fact that we used our oven exclusively for storage meant that we were just like the typical Asian immigrant household. Most Asian food is cooked exclusively over the stovetop, so many Asian immigrants in the U.S., like my mother-in-law, devise other uses for the oven space. For a long time, when I was staying away from wheat, I didn't use my oven, either.

Dough rising

All of this lead up to say that I wish that I had baked something wonderful in our oven today, but the buns that I made were steamed -- a perfect example of how ovens are completely expendable in Chinese cuisine. Nevertheless, they gave me the satisfaction, at least, of letting me pretend that I was baking, as I kneaded and coddled the dough for a couple of hours before filling and steaming the buns.

Steaming the buns

I made two sweet pastes to fill the buns: red azuki bean paste and black sesame seed paste. This recipe, from The Essentials of Asian Cooking, provided me with the excuse to use the red azuki beans that we got in Flushing last weekend and to try the freshly-milled flours from Wild Hive Farm, courtesy of the Union Square Farmer's Market on Friday. And I can never pass up an opportunity to eat sesame:

Filling the buns

I haven't kneaded bread since I was a high school exchange student in Chile and a friend's father taught me to make pan amasado. Chile has been on my mind a lot recently. September 18 is the Chilean Independence Day, a time when Chileans get together with friends and family to fly kites and eat barbecue; I was reminded again of this on Friday, when we had a Chilean couple over to wine and cheese. I spoke Spanish the whole night long. It is always a great joy and relief to me to be able to return to Spanish and find it as much unchanged as when I last left off. And Chilean Spanish I may understand best of all, for it was in Chile that I learned to speak Spanish, and I still sometimes betray a bit of their accent despite all of my time in Argentina later on.

I also found out, just yesterday, that my Chilean host father is terminally ill, so he was on my mind, too, as I went about my tasks today. As I kneaded the bread I thought of my host family, and their lives, and my family, and our lives, and all that has happened since I came back to the U.S. for the first time, seven years ago.

I wanted to write more here about China, and Chinese breads, and what I did for lunch (which you can see above), but it seems better to leave off now with a few verses from the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and call it a night:

Ode to Bread

Bread,
you rise
from flour,
water
and fire.
Dense or light,
flattened or round,
you duplicate
the mother's
rounded womb,
and earth's
twice-yearly
swelling.
How simple
you are, bread,
and how profound!
You line up
on the baker's
powdered trays
like silverware or plates
or pieces of paper
and suddenly
life washes
over you,
there's the joining of seed
and fire,
and you're growing, growing
all at once
like
hips, mouths, breasts,
mounds of earth,
or people's lives.
The temperature rises, you're overwhelmed
by fullness, the roar
of fertility,
and suddenly
your golden color is fixed.
And when your little wombs
were seeded,
a brown scar
laid its burn the length
of your two halves'
toasted
juncture.
Now,
whole,
you are
mankind's energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.

News gets around

My thanks to the anonymous reader who sent this link my way -- Tara Parker-Pope, for The New York Times, on "Eating Less or Eating Better." Her article reports on a sea change in the diet wars, as long-time dieters who are tired of the yo-yo effect are turning to simpler, more pleasurable ways to enjoy their food. 

This "new" philosophy is very much the one that I have embraced in my recovery from an eating disorder, though no mention was made of eating disorders per se in the article. Although I don't necessarily use weight as an indicator of health, I was interested to learn that the more time that people spend preparing and cleaning up their food, the more likely they are to be at a middle weight, as opposed to "underweight" or "overweight." In my own experience, preparing my own food has been absolutely central to recovery from my eating disorder -- but I had no evidence for this other than my own experience, until reading this article.

The truth is, I don't read a lot of research regarding nutrition or eating disorders, but this article has me asking myself if maybe it is time for me to pay a little more attention. 

Although I don't write about it much here, in my other life I am a doctoral student in clinical psychology; I spend most of my time reading scientific publications about mental disorders and their treatments. It is certainly within the realm of possibility for me to spend a few hours researching the most current news on eating disorders. But, until now, most of what I have stumbled across in the way of eating disorders -- both in the journal articles and in the persons of the researchers themselves -- has been less than appetizing. 

A few years ago, I worked briefly as an intern in an obesity research clinic whose main project was to enroll participants in a liquid diet and monitor their weight loss while providing "supportive" counseling. Their secondary project was to give group therapy to patients considering bariatric surgery. Fortunately, I did not have to work there long, because I had a lot of misgivings about liquid diets, bariatric surgery, and the attitudes of the researchers towards the patients ("People are obese because they overeat. Period.").

Before that, I had applied for a job as a research assistant at a prestigious center that studied eating disorders. In my application for the job, I was forthright in revealing my past history -- having an eating disorder had made me very interested in eating disorders, after all, and very motivated to work in that field. I ended up in one of the most uncomfortable interviews in my life when a psychiatrist on the team asked me, while looking me up and down, if I had been "a normal-weight bulimic." The nerve! I withdrew my job application immediately and wrote a terse email to the study director, who had gone to my same alma mater, telling her that I had considered her colleague's behavior in an interview absolutely inappropriate.

And that was the end of my great career as an eating disorder researcher.

I got another job, in public health, and haven't looked back. Within psychology, I love studying health psychology -- understanding the connections between mental and physical health -- and I'm not likely to give it up to pursue eating disorder research at this stage of the game. What I write on these pages is personal, not scientific. I form a sample size of 1, hardly a reliable study design. My words are the stuff of clinical anecdote; at best, I am a case study. 

And yet, and yet -- I have the tools at my disposal to find and understand the research that is coming out. I may disagree with much of it, especial with nutrition science, but that's no reason for me not to look it in the eye and evaluate it for what it is, flaws and all. One thing that I love about the scientific method is its willingness to test out its hypotheses, even if they might be wrong. Although I am trained in this method, which is designed to examine external phenomena, my body has always been my first site of investigation -- as it is for all of us. 

These last three or four years have been an exercise in getting to know my body better, in empirically testing what works for me. If you have been reading, you know what I have found: eating whole foods that I cook has been the best form of therapy that I could imagine. Do I have the evidence to back it up? Not now, but I'll look into it.

Until then, will you accept the following? A breakfast of mung-bean and coconut porridge and tangerines, taken around 7:00 am this morning:

 

The proof is in the pudding, as they say.

~Ai Lu