This book is so informative, so good. I've been thinking a lot about food, our culture and what we teach our kids. This book explores that in a myriad of ways, through research and individual stories. I highly recommend, especially if you also read What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon. I think all parents should read this!

Health food. Junk food. Comfort food. Fast food. Whole food.

America today is steeped in food culture, and eating has become a national obsession. Each of us possesses a particular set of eating habits that stem from a combination of nature and nurture. But for many folks, eating is a difficult and emotionally fraught necessity. You may be vegan, paleo, fast-food addicted, or a conflicted clean-eater. Yet, regardless of the factors that inform your food choices, have you ever stopped to ask yourself, “How did I learn to eat?” Virginia Sole-Smith’s book “The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America” takes a fascinating deep dive into how Americans eat and the myriad of ways that modern life and culture impact our ability to simply nourish our bodies with food.

Sole-Smith dedicates each chapter to a different eating behavior including extremely “picky” eaters, folks who have chosen weight loss surgery or those who are obsessed with eating only healthy, clean foods. Sole-Smith treats her interview subjects with compassion and respect. She is careful to not favor one way of eating over another and instead presents her interview findings in relation to a review of the current scientific literature. Most importantly, Sole-Smith asks important and revealing questions about where we are, how we got here and where we might go from here. What if we could approach eating differently?

“Without judgement. Without guilt. Without ranking picky eaters as somehow less that adventurous eaters, corner stores as less than farmers markets, meat eaters as less than vegetarians, fat as less than thin?” p.238

But how do we learn honor our hunger? To eat to nourish our bodies instead of for a myriad of other reasons? Sole-Smith makes it clear that the answer is highly individual, and is tied to a complex array of issues that we must examine and consider for ourselves.

“Recognizing ourselves as capable eaters means identifying the factors that caused us to lose that identity in the first place– the particular mix of biology, psychology, socioeconomic positioning, and life experience that is different for everyone.” p. 239

I recommend this read for anyone who has ever had a challenging relationship with food, not as another set of recommendations for how to behave but as a tool for deeper understanding of why we struggle so much with food in the first place. Overall, it seems that the key to a better relationship with food may be a kinder, more gentle relationship to ourselves.

You can read a longer review on my blog:
https://sarastasiwrites.home.blog/2019/07/25/food-ritual-a-book-review-of-the-eating-instinct-by-virginia-sole-smith/

The author, began to re-evaluate her ideas about food when her baby daughter suffered a medical trauma that made her stop eating for two years due to oral aversion. The work of getting her child to feel safe and happy with food again, and her own responses to that process, led her to research US food culture, particularly the disordered diet and wellness cultures that rely on restrictive external rules for eating, rather than internal cues related to pleasure, comfort, and satiety. She finds that nutrition and wellness experts are often just as conflicted about food as anyone else, and some are struggling with eating disorders of their own. Her arguments are a little vague in spots, but this is a book I'd recommend to most people!

Agree on the reviews that point out this story is not a “blanket” commentary on society/USA’s food or diet culture… these stories are personal and specific. Still really enjoyable, imo, and I think even these personalized stories can lead to interesting conversations surrounding these broader topics.

There's some really fascinating stuff in here about how people eat and why, and about how fraught with judgment all of it is. The only part I dislike is the end, where the author tries too hard to wrap everything up in a tidy way. She advocates for a move beyond judgment, which is great when you're talking about not viewing larger bodies as worth less than smaller ones. But she wants (or feels like she needs to, to make a tidy ending?) to also conclude that food from the convenience store isn't necessarily worth less than food from the farmer's market, which seems patronizing in its wrongness. There are negative consequences -to your health and the environment - to eating a Ho-Ho from 7-11 that aren't there if you eat a piece of locally-grown fruit. Most of the book recognizes that it's more complicated than that, that it's okay to eat some of the 'less good' stuff, and that some of us have vastly disproportionate access to the less good stuff. It's only in the end that she wants to throw that complexity out the window.

The new trend of mixing non-fiction with memoir is just not for me.

The illness narrative sections about her baby daughter were so affecting but the rest...

" ... the ideal woman's body went from merely thin, to thin and impossibly toned, capable of running marathons, pretzeling into complex yoga positions, and breast-feeding a baby all at the same time."

"We are now so certain that every aspect of our health can be improved through diet, we can only blame ourselves when those diets fail. When cutting out gluten doesn't work, we move on to dairy, then soy. When we still don't feel better, we start reading about the evils of nightshade vegetables or peanuts. Still feel bloated, or tired, or lacking in energy--all impossible-to-quantify symptoms that may just reflect the unavoidable state of being mortal and not part superhero? Probably it's because you weren't careful enough about that gluten. Nutrition has become a permanently unsolvable Rubik's Cube."

"There's also no effort to screen dietetic students for eating problems, in the way that, say, psychology students are encouraged to be in therapy themselves. Yet several studies suggest that nutrition students have a higher prevalence of eating disorders than college students with other majors."

"And that leads to a certain hypocrisy: trying to treat a disease that's rooted in an obsession with body size by ... tracking body size."

"Food and love are inextricably linked in most families, but so are food and power."

"A study from the University of Washington found that junk food can cost an average of $1.76 per 1,000 calories, while more nutritious foods add up to $18.16 for the same amount."

" ... the ideal woman's body went from merely thin, to thin and impossibly toned, capable of running marathons, pretzeling into complex yoga positions, and breast-feeding a baby all at the same time."

"We are now so certain that every aspect of our health can be improved through diet, we can only blame ourselves when those diets fail. When cutting out gluten doesn't work, we move on to dairy, then soy. When we still don't feel better, we start reading about the evils of nightshade vegetables or peanuts. Still feel bloated, or tired, or lacking in energy--all impossible-to-quantify symptoms that may just reflect the unavoidable state of being mortal and not part superhero? Probably it's because you weren't careful enough about that gluten. Nutrition has become a permanently unsolvable Rubik's Cube."

"There's also no effort to screen dietetic students for eating problems, in the way that, say, psychology students are encouraged to be in therapy themselves. Yet several studies suggest that nutrition students have a higher prevalence of eating disorders than college students with other majors."

"And that leads to a certain hypocrisy: trying to treat a disease that's rooted in an obsession with body size by ... tracking body size."

"Food and love are inextricably linked in most families, but so are food and power."

"A study from the University of Washington found that junk food can cost an average of $1.76 per 1,000 calories, while more nutritious foods add up to $18.16 for the same amount."